Batman: Arkham City

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Batman: Arkham City is a worthy followup to 2009's Batman: Arhkam Asylum, but not quite the perfect supergame I was hoping for. This is mostly because the controls are overbuilt. I'll get to that in a second.

So! In the wake of the events of the first game, Arkham Asylum has closed, and former Arkham warden Quincy Sharp has been elected mayor of Gotham City. He's built a new super-prison by simply buying up and walling off a huge portion of Gotham's slums. Prisoners are dumped in Arkham for life with no chance of parole and left to fend for themselves. Batman does not approve and ventures in to investigate what the hell is going on there and what Arkham City's administrator, Hugo Strange, is doing. From there it's pretty much Arkham Asylum as an open world game. There's a main quest line, in which Batman works to counter the efforts of Hugo Strange and the Joker, and side-quests, in which he moves against the various other supervillains and their own plots.

Do not play this game without having played Asylum first. Major portions of the story won't make sense. Also, the gameplay tutorials are nonexistent and this game has some of the most complex controls in recent history. They just took the controls from the end of Asylum, with the fully-kitted-out Batman, and started adding new things to do, mostly by having you hold a button and press another button, or hold two buttons down, or press a button and then tap another button rapidly. It's insane, and not in a good way. When the press release talked about starting you out with a fully-geared Batman and progressing from there, I thought "I'm really curious how they'll streamline the controls from Asylum so we have something approximating Batman from the end of the first game without the sort of complexity you can only deliver by introducing new tools one at a time for ten hours."

Yeah.

These overbuilt controls extend even into the menus. There's a gallery where you can look at 3D models of the game's various characters. You enter the model viewer by selecting a character and hitting A. How do you exit the model viewer? It's not by hitting B. No, hitting B brings up a prompt that says "Hit B to exit." You exit the model viewer by double-tapping B. Because the design team wanted to protect you from, I dunno, accidentally quitting the model viewer because your thumb slipped? It's ridiculous.

Anyway, that shouldn't keep you away from this one because Asylum is still great and if you haven't played it yet, it won't play worse for being two years old. Go, pursue that one, then come back. This review will still be here, barring server crashes. I'll wait.

Done? OK.

The overbuilt control scheme is basically my only complaint.

The story and its delivery through voice acting are perfect, as you'd expect, with Paul "Batman: The Animated Series" Dini writing, Batman voiced by Kevin Conroy, Joker voiced by Mark Hamill doing the creepiest Joker he's ever done (wait until you get to the ending credits), and Nolan North of all people doing the meanest and scariest Penguin ever done. Not all of the B:TAS alumni reappear. But you wouldn't know by just playing. Tara Strong does a decent Arleen Sorkin impression for Harley Quinn and Maurice LaMarche sounds like Michal Ansara doing Victor Fries—the electronic reverb is a big part of the latter. As someone who grew up watching B:TAS, these games continue to be some of the best presentation of one of my favorite media properties, and I maintain that the Joker as he appears in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City is the most true-to-the-comics presentation of the character in any non-comic medium ever. (Yes, yes, The Dark Knight was great, I loved Heath Ledger's performance as much as anyone, but Nolan's Joker is not comics Joker. Comics Joker is too vain and self-absorbed to be interested in letting Batman kill him to make an ideological point.)

Those who buy the game new will get a code to download the playable Catwoman content, which… is OK. The game has four playable Catwoman missions spaced throughout the campaign, all of which are pretty dull—traverse the city for a bit, then go into a room and beat up thugs. It's well-assembled and even probably worth the cost of a separate download code, but missing it wouldn't be terrible.

One final thought: The story feels backwards. I mean, Hugo Strange is a mad scientist and a gothic horror villain. He's the sort of opponent Batman fought in the 1940s. The Joker, though he debuted the same year as Strange, has been used much more often, and has become the iconic super villain—the sort of opponent Batman fought after he stopped fighting gothic horror villains. Here, Batman's been fighting Joker for years and never met Strange before, so it almost feels like he's regressing backwards through time. It's novel and I kinda love it. If they do a third game they should totally throw Batman against more gothic horror and film noire villains and move the modern super villains offstage.

Basically Arkham City gets my unambiguous approval. Just don't go in without doing your homework first.

This review is based on an Xbox 360 copy of Batman: Arkham City, purchased at a retail outlet.

Previously - Gears of War 3