Arkham City Review: The Hype is Real

 (Written October 2011)

When future generations look back on the last couple of years, they may disagree about politics, court rulings and economic policies, but there will be at least one indisputable fact that no man, woman, or child will contest. This was one incredible decade to be a fan of the bat. While I am in no way shape or form, a batman “fan” I know a great game when I play it.

Arkham City is the sequel to 2009’s Arkham asylum. A game famous for being based on a licensed property (movie, comic book, or what have you) and was actually fun. It was more than just fun. It was one of the best games of the year, and in the annuls of video game history (all thirty years of it) that was wholly unique.

Unique, but not great. That may sound like I was disappointed, not at all, there were a few chinks in the game’s armor, but they were few and far between. Asylum captured what made batman such an iconic character and let him exist believably in an interactive world. Plenty of time and effort went into his gadgets and free form martial arts fisticuffs, but just as much dedication went into how the writing set up all the best villains from his immortal rogue gallery for the game’s story in interesting ways. It was a fevered and deliberate labor of love, the kind that never gets the right funding to get off the ground...almost never.

Everything that Asylum got right was flawlessly carried over into Arkham city and then pushed just a little bit further. This was no small feat, because I couldn’t have pictured them making a sequel that had all the same exhilarating parts as the first, but felt like a completely new experience. The folks at Rocksteady studios are modern masters of the interactive arts and they know it.

They hit the ground running two years ago and knew exactly what game they needed to make.

1. It needed to be more open ended than Asylum’s isolated island prison: Check.

2. They needed Mark Hamill (AKA: the greatest living joker) back under contract: Check.

3. They needed a dynamite premise that didn’t rip off the original’s “lunatics take over the asylum “gag, but made it seem like the introduction to the main event. CHECK.

I don’t want to give too much of the beginning away, but here goes. Through a strange political agenda running through Gotham’s prison system, the slums become walled off and turned into a laissez faire detention camp; Giving Mr. Wayne a hell of a job shutting it down from the inside, and the player the ultimate batman playground.

This game will melt days off your life. Between a battle of wits with the prison’s warden, a race to save the Joker’s life, and hundreds upon hundreds of secret puzzles and challenges (there are literally over four hundred of them.) you’re gonna need to glue your eyes to your watch if you want to keep your GPA above water. Good luck with that.

This is not a game you rent. This is the kind of game you own, the kind you come back to years from now with a grin on your face. I don’t know if it’s the greatest action/puzzle/stealth game ever made, but I honestly couldn’t tell you how to make it any better than this.

Can't stop staring at this for some reason...