This review contains spoilers
I actually played the Wii U version of this one when it came out, so maybe it's the nostalgia speaking, but damn this improved on Asylum in almost every way. Little things like improved animations and being able to counter out of a ground takedown made the combat feel even better, and you have way more tools to work with both in and out of battle. Things like the smoke bombs, freeze grenades, disarm takedown, and disruptor let you move in and out of stealth way more than in Asylum, which means that an encounter with armed thugs doesn't have to be approached with pure stealth. The bosses were also greatly improved from those in Asylum. None of them were all that great, but you had stealth-based bosses like the Freeze fight, ones like the Joker fight before Protocol 10 is enacted, the R'as fight, or the final fight with Clayface that throw hordes of enemies at you alongside a boss, and more mixed bosses like the whole Penguin/Grundy/Penguin sequence that made much better use of the game's mechanics than any of Asylum's did.
The larger environment of Arkham City allows for a lot more freedom when it comes to approaching enemies, and it also let Rocksteady give Batman a really satisfying glide/grapple system. Using the grapple boost or whatever it's called to soar from one end of the map to the other is really fun, and since I'm a sucker for open world games with interesting movement (Sunset Overdrive), I had a lot of fun doing the optional stuff. Compared to other open world games. Arkham City itself is kind of small, but it's really dense. You can't go more than a few feet without stumbling across a group of thugs, a riddler trophy, or part of a side quest. Everything has its place, and it's refreshing to play a game that feels large, but not particularly bloated.
I had forgotten most of the story other than "Clayface is Joker, Hugo Strange is in it, and you get a sword at the end", which made rediscovering the absolute fever dream that is Arkham City's plot even more fun. I wouldn't hesitate to call it a worse plot than Arkham Asylum's since it's kind of all over the place, but man it went off the rails really early on and never stopped going. I don't want to write a deep plot analysis about the symbolism of Batman basically taking on Joker's role from the beginning of Arkham Asylum and using an arrest to infiltrate a prison complex or anything like that. I just want to leave you with some of the absolute bullshit I came across.
1. Hugo Strange used mind control to convince the people of Gotham that a city-sized megaprison was a good idea, and it actually worked.
2. Said city-sized megaprison was actually the prototype for supercriminal concentration camps that Strange wanted to set up across the world as a part of a wider criminal genocide.
3. Strange's super secret master plan of Protocol 10 is just to get government approval to bomb his own megaprison, effectively turning it from a criminal genocide into a government-approved criminal genocide.
4. Joker's plan was to bait Batman into finding a cure for his TITAN overdose by infecting him, and the citizens of Gotham, with his own tainted blood that was anonymously donated to hospitals throughout the city. He basically went around donating his AIDS blood because he wanted to mess with Batman.
The larger environment of Arkham City allows for a lot more freedom when it comes to approaching enemies, and it also let Rocksteady give Batman a really satisfying glide/grapple system. Using the grapple boost or whatever it's called to soar from one end of the map to the other is really fun, and since I'm a sucker for open world games with interesting movement (Sunset Overdrive), I had a lot of fun doing the optional stuff. Compared to other open world games. Arkham City itself is kind of small, but it's really dense. You can't go more than a few feet without stumbling across a group of thugs, a riddler trophy, or part of a side quest. Everything has its place, and it's refreshing to play a game that feels large, but not particularly bloated.
I had forgotten most of the story other than "Clayface is Joker, Hugo Strange is in it, and you get a sword at the end", which made rediscovering the absolute fever dream that is Arkham City's plot even more fun. I wouldn't hesitate to call it a worse plot than Arkham Asylum's since it's kind of all over the place, but man it went off the rails really early on and never stopped going. I don't want to write a deep plot analysis about the symbolism of Batman basically taking on Joker's role from the beginning of Arkham Asylum and using an arrest to infiltrate a prison complex or anything like that. I just want to leave you with some of the absolute bullshit I came across.
1. Hugo Strange used mind control to convince the people of Gotham that a city-sized megaprison was a good idea, and it actually worked.
2. Said city-sized megaprison was actually the prototype for supercriminal concentration camps that Strange wanted to set up across the world as a part of a wider criminal genocide.
3. Strange's super secret master plan of Protocol 10 is just to get government approval to bomb his own megaprison, effectively turning it from a criminal genocide into a government-approved criminal genocide.
4. Joker's plan was to bait Batman into finding a cure for his TITAN overdose by infecting him, and the citizens of Gotham, with his own tainted blood that was anonymously donated to hospitals throughout the city. He basically went around donating his AIDS blood because he wanted to mess with Batman.