Batman: Arkham City, my thoughts.

 

Picked up Arkham City last week. I thoroughly enjoyed the first title and as a fan of the animated series, it was great to see most of the cast brought back together. It had a great story, the fighting system was fluid and addictive and it was just the great Batman game we all deserved. Ofcourse with the success of the first a sequel was announced.

The changes to this sequel are huge, with the sand box style game play being a big selling point. It has also kept alot of the cool things from the first game. Although i’m thinking that if I was new to the game I would be lost for an hour or two, the game doesn’t do a good job of explaining some of features brought back from the previous title.

Going back to the sand-box style of the game. I feel that this is the games biggest weakness. For example when you start a new game of GTA, the game eases you into everything you can do in the city, its upto the player to eather follows these pursuits or not. What Arkham City does is literately throw everything you in the first few minutes. Your bombarded with sidequests, challenges, thugs to beat up and so much more. Maybe I’m just too indecisive but I had such information overload and was stuck (and still am) with what I should actually do. When you turn on the Bat Detective mode the city just lights up with everything you can do and I just wish some of these things were only accessible after certain parts of the game.

But apart from that fairly minor gripe the game plays great, as expected. Haven’t played much of it so far but the story and characters are already compelling. Fingers crossed the twitter-verse won’t ruin certain parts of the story for me though .

As a huge Batman nerd its great to see characters like Mr.Freeze and Penguin jumping on on the sequel. Some people are complaining that there are too many characters in this game, but I prefer it this way and it keeps the game fresh with loads of people’s asses to kick.

However I think once Uncharted3 hits, this game will struggle to be played. Just ONE MORE WEEK