On Your Marks, Get Set, Batman!

One of the things I learnt during my confusingly longer than three weeks stint at ThreeWeeks was that if you want to write for a living, you have to actually write stuff.  It doesn't matter what (well, obviously it does, but not as much as you might think) or where, just write, damn it.  So that's what this blog is: a disjointed mess of personal thoughts, complaints, musings on video games, pictures of Alex and anything else that comes to hand and/or mind.  Not all of it will appeal to everyone - hell, I'd be a touch surprised if any of it appealed to anyone - but let's just see how it goes.  And I promise to actually keep it up this time.  (Said the vicar to the nun.)  With that said, let's dive straight in with a bit of video game criticism.

Batmam: Arkham City

Multi-million selling (4.6 million units in its first week) sequel to 2009's hit Batman: Arkham Asylum (can you see what they did there?) was, for me, a disappointing affair.  The odd thing is, it's almost exactly the same game as AA was, but with more content and better boss fights.  It wasn't bad, it just wasn't good either.  It was, to coin a phrase, meh.  So what went wrong?  Why did a game I'd been eagerly awaiting fall so damn flat?  Let's take a look, shall we?

Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More?

Arkham Asylum had three basic play modes: exploration, melee combat and stealth combat.  All three modes were fun.  All three modes felt like being Batman.  And all three modes were, by the end, getting just a little bit samey.  There are only so many times you can punch a thug in the nuts then batarang his chum in the face before it gets old.  Admittedly it's a very large number of times, but still, the point stands.  Then along comes Arkham City and, oh look!  We've got exploration, melee combat and stealth combat!  Hello again, old friends.  What a surprise to see you here!

Now, obviously, it's a sequel.  It would be stupid to abandon the basic playstyle that made AA such a hit and it would be grossly unfair to criticise the game for including these aspects.  What isn't unfair is criticising it for not making them better.  Sure, there are new gadgets, but they mainly serve to complicate an already complex control structure.  They don't really add anything new to the gameplay.  It doesn't matter if I stun a thug with a batarang or a tazer shot, the end result, both mechanically and in gameplay feel, is the same.  Stealth combat has an additional problem, in that the penalties for error are so high that once you've found a working solution for taking out the bad guys there is no incentive to try new stuff.  Even if you did, there is the added problem that waiting for five minutes to get just the right alignment of bad guys, weak walls, fire extinguishers and ventilation shafts just isn't much fun.  Especially when you've done it all before on Arkham Asylum.

Please, Sir, Can I Have Some Less?

Then we've got the exploration aspect.  For various, unclear and unconvincing reasons part of Gotham City has been turned into a super-asylum for super criminals.  (We'll get to that later.)  Quite a big area, in fact.  Yet, somehow, it conspires to feel small and oddly empty.  Don't expect a city the size of GTA IV's Liberty city, for example, or even Assassin's Creed II's Florence.  Arkham City feels pokey.  You get the sense you couldn't swing a Catwoman without hitting a major supervillian hideout.  There's Joker's lair and just next door is Bane's hidey-hole!  (Seriously.  These two are separated by about ten seconds in game travel time.)  At some point in development, someone clearly noticed this small size and figured they'd better do something about it.  Sadly, what they did was fence off a massive block bang in the middle and mark it a no go zone for visiting superheroes, converting a smallish square of play area into an even smaller, but infinitely more tedious to navigate U shaped play area.  Thanks, dev team!

Grey, dark grey, grey green and slightly lighter grey.

Each super-villain's lair houses a large, well designed series of maps and challenges and are, in all fairness, pretty damn good.  Thematically varied and visually interesting, they are fun places to be.  Sadly, the open world play area isn't.  It's dark, grimey and populated by uninteresting gangs of respawning thugs who may as well be replaced by buttons marked "Hit me to exchange time for XP!"  They serve little purpose other than to add a sense of population to the city and they fail at even that.  They get in your way while you travel to more interesting places.  They mutter repetitive dialogue and stand around outside in the middle of the night, despite there being plenty of empty buildings in which to sleep.  Finally, because of the open world nature of the environment, they aren't even placed in interesting or challenging positions.  In Arkham Asylum, you got the sense that each combat encounter had been designed with a specific goal in mind.  These guys, not so much.

Where'd You Go, Scarecrow?

Undoubtedly one of the highlights of Arkham Asylum were the Scarecrow sections.  Inventive and clever, they played with the player's expectations and understandings of the game.  While you couldn't simple repeat this trick in the sequel, I had been hoping for something analogous.  Something inventive.  Something new.  Mix it up, challenge me.  Innovate.  Arkham Asylum felt fresh and new when it burst on the scene, Arkham City doesn't.  As I said before, there's nothing new here.  No clever tricks or neat twirls.  No "Press the centre stick to dodge bullet".  Just a sequel, re-treading the easy bits of the first game.

Wait, They Did What To The City?

And so to the plot.  Or rather, the setting.  Disgraced Former Arkham Asylum Warden Quincy Sharpe has returned and, with the help of a shadowy backer, gotten himself elected mayor of Gotham because... everyone has the memory of a goldfish, I guess?  Then, somehow, managed to finagle it so that a large portion of downtown Gotham is sealed off and turned into a massive, chuck-them-in-and-forget-about-them super-max prison come mental asylum.  And this is legal because... in the DC universe no-one has heard of civil rights, I guess?  Or Wiki-leaks?  Or basic logic?  Then we get some Joker stuff, which is interesting and coherent and feels right and I won't spoil for you.  Then we're back in batshit crazy land, stopping the mass murder of the entire criminal population of Gotham which is also legal because you-know-what-I-don't-fucking-care-anymore!  It's tosh.  Patent, obvious tosh and it gets in the way because you spend your time going "wha-? But-?  I-?  Gah!" rather than "pow! Biff! Blam! I'm Batman!"  Arkham Asylum might have been rather uninspired when it came to its main plot, but at least it made sense.  (In a superhero kind of way.)

On The Other Wing

Let's be fair, it's not all bad.  Arkham City is a polished game that's positively steeped in Batman lore and feel.  Short of having your parents murdered in front of your eyes and then dedicating yourself to brooding whilst wearing a silly hat, this is as close to being Batman as you'll get.  The samey-samey gameplay I bashed for its unoriginality is tweaked to a razor's edge and the brief Catwoman sections are a nice change of pace.  There's lots of additional challenges and collectables, if that's your thing.  It's just not enough to pull Arkham City up from the depths of its mediocrity.