Wednesday, November 02, 2011

Batman: Arkham City

Above: Batman struggles with the new Google Reader interface.

My review of Batman: Arkham City is up at thephoenix.com. I think that some reviewers have gone a little overboard with their praise (even though this review score was hilarious), but it's still a great game, and one of the better ones I have played this year.

For as much as people are still griping about the sins of past Bat-games, I think that if this were a new IP, we'd be more measured in our praise. Arkham City can tip too far into fan service, and sacrifice narrative cohesion in favor of Jeph Loeb-style stunt casting. Even though I like Rocksteady's interpretation of lesser villains like Clayface and Solomon Grundy, they also serve the same function in this game as the moles do in Whack-a-Mole. The same was true of Arkham Asylum, but less so. City is the better game; Asylum was the better yarn.

Now that we're in the thick of things, I feel even more behind than usual. I've got a Battlefield 3 review in the pipeline (which marks  my long-awaited return to Paste!), and Uncharted 3 on deck for the Phoenix. Somewhere in there, I've also got Lord of the Rings: War in the North to play. First world problems, indeed.


2 comments:

Daniel said...

I felt the same way about the relationship between Asylum and City. The open world aspects diluted the tension and urgency in the story. There's a moment in there where you want to go save Talia, but Alfred/Oracle force you to complete objectives...except you can just go and fuck around for 20 hours looking for trophies if you want at that point. You could do that in Asylum too, I suppose, but the tighter spaces didn't encourage it

Chrono & Skyller said...

For me this is the best Batman, even the best Super-hero game ever made. the only thing that is missing is the Batmobile, taking that off I think it's a great action Game.