Batman: Arkham City Review

Writing a videogame review is rarely a straightforward process: scoring is usually a decision that we’ve come to over the protracted course of playing the game, then cementing our opinion on paper, and even then, committing to it can take some deliberation.

That’s the easy part of reviewing Batman: Arkham City, such was our consistently clear-cut experience of playing… this will be the point where you read the page and check the verdict box in the bottom-right corner. Was that what you expected it to get? Good.

In this case the tough bit is taking you on this journey of justification across our pages without spoiling anything. It’s not that there isn’t enough to talk about with its 50-plus hours of play (including side missions), but it’s all absolutely crammed with character and characters that never cease to pop up and surprise us.

We don’t want to ruin that for anyone, so we’ll tiptoe around the juicier facts and try to give you the bigger picture of the most Hollywood-epic videogame of 2011.

The world of Arkham City is a much more complicated place than Arkham Asylum was. Back then it was Batman versus his old arch-enemy, the Joker, and if it wore make-up, prison blues or was inhumanly proportioned, then it was out to hurt us.

Things are more ambiguous in the prison city. At around a third of the way into it, Dr Victor ‘Freeze’ Fries, tells us that, ‘We are not friends’: not such an obvious statement given that we’ve just rescued Mr Freeze from the clutches of the Penguin, that the wolves bundled into this prison pen have been allowed to tear each other apart and that Batman himself is now one of them.

Yes, as Bruce Wayne, we’re framed, arrested and thrown into the prison city by Hugo Strange, then afforded the same rights as all the rest of the felons.

That is, the right to survive if you’re fit enough. The outlook is bleak for the political prisoners that have been thrown in alongside Batman, but for the billionaire-cum-vigilante, it’s an environment he’s very comfortable with. 

Having been roughed-up by Penguin’s thugs, looking to stick the boot into the rich guy’s fall from high society, Wayne makes an emergency call to Alfred, who arranges for an immediate drop onto the roof of the abandoned Ace Chemicals factory, where we get everything: the remote batarang, smoke pellets, explosive gel and almost all the wonderful toys we collected over days of play time in Arkham Asylum, all at our disposal within five minutes of play.

We’re zipped into the bat-suit within seconds and from the vantage point on the top of the tower, we’re able to survey the world that has suddenly become our oyster.

It’s hard to judge Arkham City’s scale when a relatively small open-world game, in terms of a single plane of real estate has such a massive total surface area.

A forest of muti-tiered condominiums, factories, shops and skyscrapers are carved up into blocks by a maze of intricately detailed streets and dark alleyways.

Below that is the subway and sewer system, below that is the mostly abandoned remains of Old Gotham, a sunken city that forms the foundations of its metropolitan progeny. And below Old Gotham… you can find that out for yourself. 

There are thousands of potential hiding places for collectables and side missions, Riddler trophies, unexploded barrels of Titan and Hugo Strange’s silent watchers: the CCTV cameras of Arkham City.

It takes a few minutes to cross the width of the city using our cape to glide and bat claw to pull ourselves directly to the next ledge, but it would have been hours if we were to explore every facet of each building and clear every street along the way.

There's more to Arkham City than the sprawling, dilapidated buildings.

Dr Strange hasn’t claimed a huge piece of Gotham for his prison city but within it, there is an enormous volume of things to do and places to spend time exploring outside of the main mission. Most of them are completely optional but some ambush us with their demands, like those supplied by the Cold Call Killer, Victor Zsasz. 

We’re minding Penguin’s dirty business outside Arkham’s abandoned cop-shop when a nearby public telephone starts ringing, punching an alert up on our HUD.

Curious, we glide down from the tower and answer it: it’s Zsasz, somehow he knows he’s speaking to Batman and he wants to play a game. ‘Screw you Zsasz,’ we think as we slam the receiver down.

We’ve already got a game to complete ourselves and we’re pretty sure Batman hasn’t the time to entertain the serial killer when there’s an arch-criminal to take down and a dark mystery to unravel.

Fast forward a few hours and with a mind to come back to see what Zsasz wants at our own convenience, a nearby phone starts ringing just as we’re scoping-out four-armed Joker henchmen, suspiciously guarding an entrance to the sewer.

Like a disgruntled recipient of a nuisance caller, we answer it just to see what Zsasz has to say. This time he means business, and if we don’t embark on a Die Hard With A Vengeance-style race across the city to the next ringing telephone, he’s going to slice whoever answers it up with his straight razor.

As this is Arkham City, the chances are that whoever that is could hardly be considered innocent, but murder is a crime whomever it’s perpetuated against as far as Batman is concerned.

So a timer appears and regardless of what we’re doing and the time sensitivity of our current mission, we have three minutes to find the next phone or we fail the game and return to our last checkpoint.

All of Batman's classic gadgetry from Arkham Asylum returns here.

Harsh, considering we wouldn’t have answered the phone in the first place if we’d realised it would divert us from our current course. But at the same time, we enjoy the canonical authenticity of it, the idea that we’re sharing in Batman’s pain as he struggles to contain the nefarious forces that are individually conspiring against him.

Those forces are an axis of evil that has carved Arkham City up between them: Batman’s arch-enemy, the Joker, bi-polar maniac Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent and that notorious sadist, Penguin.

Amid the power struggle between these three factions and under constant surveillance by Hugo Strange, who remains a curiously objective observer, we make our way across the rooftops and into the bowels of the prison city in an effort to uncover what ‘Protocol 10’ is and what its implications are for Gotham. 

It’s hard to imagine much improvement over Arkham Asylum but somehow Rocksteady has squeezed Arkham City for every drop of epicness. The rhythm-action-like combat is as simple yet skilled as before, but battles are often several times bigger with an enhanced sense of Batman’s strength and ability.

The story is an absolute thrill, a gradually unravelling mystery jammed tight with twists that manifest themselves in superb boss battles and wall-to-wall criminal characters.

Vocals are topped by yet another scintillating performance by Mark Hamill, whose Joker still steals the show even with acting chops in the form of Christopher Lee’s warden Hugo Strange on the scene.

And there’s the city itself, backlit by an enormous cloud-shrouded moon, bat signal in the distance and a distinct skyline silhouetted by spires, smoking chimneys and enticing rooftops beckoning us to investigate and explore.

Arkham City is an adventure polished to shimmering perfection, a Batman experience of jaw-dropping magnitude and depth right from its opening scene to the end. Shame on us for even having a glimmer of doubt, this is one of the best open-world action-adventure games of this generation.