Holy Bunch of Side Quests, Batman!

What, you no like the boobs?

So as this stellar Q4 draws to the close, I'm desperately trying to play through all the AAA games sitting on my shelf. The last 4 weeks or so have been dedicated to Batman: Arkam City, the sequel to the pleasantly awesome Batman: Arkam Asylum. It does what every good sequel does, which is take what the first did and make it better. But does that make it the superior title in my mind? That, I'm not so sure.

With some time passing between the two games, Arkam City opens up with billionaire badass Bruce Wayne speaking against the creation of Arkam City, a city sized prison that somehow Hugo Strange got put in charge of. Dozens of leading baddies have taken up residence and using his cunning (random group of armed goons), Strange gets Bruce tossed in as well and the countdown to the mysterious protocol 10 commences. The opening sequence of freeing yourself and putting on your Batgear is a great intro to the game, and once you slip on the mask, you know it's go time.

Here comes the pain!

While a dying Joker acts as your main villain to topple, Rocksteady threw the kitchen sink at this one, with Penguin, the Riddler, Two Face, Mr. Freeze, and a bunch of others all coming into play. This kitchen sink approach both hurt and helped the game in my opinion. What I thought was cool about the first game was how it felt like a big deal when you came across one of these super villains with the asylum gone wild. They all had a purpose for being there and it felt like a big deal going toe to toe with them. With Arkam City, I just didn't get how they all came into play. The Arkam City felt more, well, like a city and all these dudes just happened to be there rather than being in prison. If all of these bad guys are so awesome, how did they end up there anyways? And with so many big names to share the spot light, it kind of diminished the wow factor facing them the first had.

On the flip side, the writing is so strong that all these characters really helped make the experience enjoyable. A lot of the interactions with the villains comes around the side quests in the game (which there are a lot of) and they all felt so unique and engaging that I found myself ignoring the main quest to complete them. It's a prime example of how to extend gameplay without compromising the integrity of the experience...which they then fucked up with those Riddler trophies, but I'll get to that later.

Arkam City is far more open than the asylum was and, despite the big no fly zone in the middle, getting around is super easy, especially once you get the grapple boost from doing all the AR missions (which suck balls). You don't have to find all the gadgets you had from the first one, so right away you feel like Batman, ready to mess noobs up the way Batman does. Through non-lethal methods, woohoo!

I got more punch than a 6th grade dance, brodda!

 The combat and predator aspects of the game have basically remained the same, which is a great thing. Chaining together moves while trying to avoid any sort of slowdown is still easy to learn but hard to master, and things start really get tricky when you're dealing with armored or shielded foes who you just can't pound. The predator segments \still require patience and a bit of strategy, and you can tackle both outside of the main game in the challenge rooms outside of the main quest, pushing you to rack up a certain amount of points or take out guys in a certain way to earn medals. In Arkam Asylum, I thought the combat challenges where the tougher of the two, but things seemed to a flipped in Arkam City. Some of the predator challenges are down right frustrating, and sometimes it takes just as much luck as skill since it feels like, while seemingly scripted, the enemy AI doesn't always react in the same ways to some traps you might set up.

And if these challenges aren't enough for ya, there are now campaigns that tie three of the challenges together and allow you attempt to get through them all with only 3 retries and "modifiers" which make them even harder, like "Hey, there are mines everywhere," and "I'm timing your ass, hurry!" Especially in the later ones, the modifiers really throw a wrench in the strategies you utilized earlier, forcing you to rethink things. These truly are a test of skill and I found these definitely way harder than completing the actual game.

And after tackling all these challanges and the main quest and side quests in the normal and new game plus mode, you're left with the Riddler to take down. Fucking Riddler...

Have some free time? Good, 'cause I'm gonna waste it.

The challenge maps and campaigns are now attributed to the Riddler, so when you die, you're rewarded with him telling you how you suck. Which will happen alot. And if you didn't hate him enough by this point, there's also all those pesky trophies he's left on the map to find. Over 400 to be specific. A lot of them require a certain gadget to get so you might have to simply tag it and go for it later when you have the right tool or in new game plus. Instead of finding maps which reveal their locations like in the first game, certain thugs will glow green indicating they're one of the Riddler's informants and if you knock out everyone around them, you can beat the crap out of them and make them squeal. This makes finding them a lot easier and the number of puzzles that forces you to align those stupid green question marks is far less than the first, which is nice. But I still think there are tooooo many trophies! 400+? C'mon! And even when you have the right gadget to get one, the method isn't always obvious, and it takes a lot of trial and error sometimes to get it right. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to hit a bunch of pressure points while not touching the ground for 10 minutes trying to get 1 trophy only to realize there are 300 more to go after that.

When you get enough, the Riddler will try to wave his metaphorical penis at you with a riddle and, when you solve it, you'll get the location of one of doctor's he's holding hostage, having to solve how to get to him/her through a series of traps the green prick has set up. These are challenging but thankfully fairly entertaining, requiring you to think outside the box sometimes.

In the end, I like the ideas behind the Riddler crap. Alot of the puzzles and riddles are clever and, if wasn't for the fact that there's 10000000 of them, I would be more into it. But, after all these hours played and still having 100+ trophies to get, I feel cheated. The Riddler breaks one of the fundamental rules of video games which is DON'T EXTEND A GAME WITH MEANINGLESS TASKS. Moving a steel ball through a maze with the REC gun was fun, but not after 15 times.

FUCASNDF;OWHNDFIOSHD.GKJBHWLGHV!!!!

 Overall, Arkam City is a AAA title to the core that, while having a ton of meaningless BS to get through (which won't be an issue if you're not a completionist) makes a strong case for Game of the Year. Like Dead Space 2, it does what the first did, but better. But, also like Dead Space 2 in my humble opinion, I preferred the original simply for the newness factor. But Arkam City still makes you feel like Batman. Batman, I say! Good enough. Let's go throw some smoke and stare at Catwoman's chest!

Two captions centered around boobs? Must be an off day.