Batman Arkham City

OK so here is another post salvaged from my other blog and this is another one I will update and expand which is on the video game Batman Arkham City, which was a critical and commercial success on its release so I thought it warrants a place on this blog.  So let's give it a looksee....

So the plot focuses on Bruce Wayne (voiced by Kevin Conroy, who previously did Arkham Asylum) at the start of the game being captured by the villanous Hugo Strange (Corey Burton), and left at the mercy of the prison population of Arkham City.  Arkham City itself is a section of Gotham City that has been closed off and populated by the low life, criminals and other villains that inhabit or inhabited Gotham.  Wayne is left to the limited mercy of the Penguin (Nolan North), but he manages to escape and climbs to the rooftops where he contacts his butler Alfred, who sends him a package with his batman suit.  Wayne puts on his Batman outfit and then scouts Arkham City to try and locate Catwoman (Grey DeLisle) who has been captured by Harvey "Two-Face" Dent (Troy Baker).  Batman soon finds Catwoman and rescues her from Two Face who he ties up over a pit of acid and leaves him there, but at this point a bullet is fired at Catwoman, which misses.  Batman then scans and analyses the trajectory of the bullet to where it came from, and soon finds out that the Joker was behind the assassination.  Batman on tracking down the Joker finds out that his arch-villain has been infected with a compound known as Titan that is slowly killing him, and Joker captures Batman and straps him to a chair, wired up to a drip which Joker has injected his blood into Batman.  Joker then kicks Batman through a window, who now has to try and find a cure, as he too will die if he doesn't.  Batman then tries to locate Freeze, who he believes may have the cure for the Titan virus, but after a battle between the two, Freeze tells him there is no known cure, but there is one hope that if he can mix a compound which he created with an old foe of Batman's, Ra's Al Ghul, then he might have a chance to survive.  In the meantime Hugo Strange is planning on using his Titan compound to wipe out the population of Arkham City, which he calls Protocol 10.  So Batman has to both try and find the cure for the Titan formulae and stop Protocol 10 from happening.

Batman Arkham City is a terrific follow up to the excellent Batman Arkham Asylum, and it features a great cast of villains and colourful characters.  The voice acting here is top notch, with Kevin Conroy giving a fine performance as Batman, and he always voices the dark knight with such great confidence, although at times he does make Batman sounds quite arrogant.  Mark Hamill also makes a great return as the demented and villainous Joker, and plays the character with usual amount of insane glee and viciousness.  It also highlights what a good actor Mark Hamill really is, and how underrated he is as a performer, whether he is on screen or behind it.  The other voice actors are also very good, such as Nolan North as The Penguin, David Kaye as James Gordon and Corey Burton as Hugo Strange.  The plot throughout is also really compelling and it keeps you interested in what is going on, and it helps with the voice acting being of such a high calibre. 

Gameplay wise, Arkham City is superb, as the controls are very easy to use and the combat system is great as the Batman's combos in hand to hand combat have been enhanced and like in Asylm he gains experience points which allows him to upgrade his attacks, stealth skills as well as upgrade other things like his armour and equipment.  Batman also faces some stern tests combat wise in the game as well as there are several game bosses and the enemies also get tougher as you go on as some of them heavily are armoured, some also have knives, stun batons and even shields.  And in these instances Batman has to either deploy a powerful series of combo attacks to take them down or attack them from behind in order to disarm the foes.  Batman also can make good use of his stealth skills throughout the game as he can sneak up on baddies and incapacitate them by employing a chokehold or simply knocking them out from behind, or even diving on them from above or in some instance Batman can pull them through wooden walls to perform a takedown.

The game also features some new gadgets as well for Batman such as smoke bombs which allows Batman to take cover when he is under fire from enemies, a remote electric charge (REC) gun which Batman uses to charge up motors temporarily as well as stun enemies.  Gadgets from the previous game are also enhanced with more upgrades such as the cryptographic sequencer which is used to unlock security coded doors can now be used montior shortwave radio channels.  The line launcher can now also be used as as a tightrope to allow Batman to move to other areas e.g. rooftops and Batman can even use it to change direction during flight.  Batman can also movement wise also use his cape to glide around the city and the game features a new move, the dive bomb where Batman can use his body and his cape to dive down to gather more speed to move faster around the city.  Batman also as usual can utilise his detective vision mode in which he can see through walls and look for clues to crimes as well as monitor the reaction status of his enemies.  You also get to play as Catwoman, which is no bad thing in itself as she is a rather sexily rendered character (move a fine bottom, pervy I know sorry!) and she too also has her own combos for hand to hand combat as well as gadgets for self defence and her whip.  Catwoman's playable campaign is somewhat smaller though than Batman's is but it still presents enough interest to give it a go. 

Graphics wise the game also looks stunning and the environments are vast and quite varied as well as you can literally spend hours and hours running and moving around the city from the rooftops inside buildings as well going underground into the sewers.  The characters models are also very impressive with Batman cutting a muscly and imposing figure and in a similar vein to Arkham Asylym, Batman's suit sustains more wear and tear as well as a few scars for the dark knight as the game progresses due to his many fights with the thugs of in Arkham.  The other character models are also very good and the game's cutscenes are also very impressive and again the game makes use of the bullet time effect when Batman finishes off his last opponent when he takes on multiple enemies at once.

And another one of the game's strengths is its music score which is superb and was composed by Ron Fish and Nick Arundel and it features many dramatic passages which perfectly suit the tone of the game and it also has a terrific main theme for the game as well.  The score does closely mirror Hans Zimmer's scores for the Christopher Nolan Batman films in places but it also provides its own style as well and it ranks easily as one of the best video game music scores you will hear. 
  
As for the game's flaws.... well Arkham city get's so much right its hard to quibble too much but there are still one or two frustrations here and there.  The first one that springs to mind is the dive bomb move is a pain in the arse to get right and you have to try and perfect it to get it right as you will really need it for the fantasy sequence where Batman enters the dreamworld created by Ra's Al Ghul, where Batman has to dive bomb following the visual outline of a path and if you do it wrong you will die over and over and will have to start it again.  So it remains one of the biggest annoyances of the game in trying to get that move right although once you do its not too bad but for me personally it took ages to get right!  Another thing is whilst the game's environments are huge and very impressive they are almost too big and you can literally spend about half an hour after Batman has finished a mission or fighting a game boss that you need to spend forever getting to your next location.  As an example one mission has Batman do some fighting underground in the subways of Arkham and afterwards he has to spend forever running to reach ground level again and then to find his next destination!  Arkham origins actually went by some way to fix this issue by allowing Batman to perform certain drop offs using his Bat plane (or is it the Bat as it was called in The Dark Knight Rises??) on auto pilot but this only for specific drop off points however.

And lastly some of the boss battles do present a decent challenge but the most difficult one is Solomon Grundy, the monsterous oversized villain who is chained up and used by the Penguin to try and kill Batman.  And in the battle at one point Batman has to try and use his explosive gel gun to disable the floor points where the electrical charges are being generated that allow Grundy to use his ball and chain to launch a devastating electrical shockwave to knock Batman off his feet.  And the pain in the ass here is that Batman has only a limited time to use his explosive gel and detonate it before he get's hit by one of the shockwaves which damages his health bar and he will die of course if he is hit enough!  And the action of using the explosive gel just takes way too long to allow for Batman to get up in time before he can dive out of the wave of the shockwaves, which is HUGE pain in the posterior and one of the bits of the game that had me nearly tearing my hair out!

But that all aside Batman Arkham City is a terrific game and with its very lengthy and high quality single player campaign (which lasts at least 25 hours or so) its well worth giving it a go if you haven't already as there is much to enjoy here especially if you are liked Arkham Asylum.

And so with that I shall call it a night.

Night!