When I first heard about Batman: Arkham Asylum, I can’t say I really took interest. Being a casual fan of Batman thanks to the recent movie series, it wasn’t until I had a moment of boredom that I randomly decided to give the game’s demo a shot. I was glad I did – because Arkham Asylum ended up being one of the best games I’ve played – Rocksteady catching many people off-guard by producing a Triple-A title seemingly out of nowhere – creating a game with a great engine, beautiful visuals and an incredible portrayal of Batman and his enemies – full of the colour and imagination of a comic book, but also dark and gritty at the same time. Arkham Asylum turned me into a real Batman fan, even convincing me to purchase the latest issues of the Batman comics.

I’ve been highly anticipating Arkham City since it’s announcement, and enjoyed the official Arkham City graphic novel that leads up to the start of the new game (I’d recommend it as it bridges the two nicely), eager to get a taste of what’s to come. On release day, my copy arrived and I’ve since been playing the game to pieces at every opportunity. While Arkham Asylum was an unexpected hit, Arkham City is in a completely different situation – attempting to match or even beat the success of its predecessor. So, how does it measure up?

After the events of the first game, Warden Sharp took the credit for stopping the Joker - seizing power by using his lies to be elected as mayor of Gotham City. Using his new position, he deems Arkham Island unfit for containing the criminals of Gotham, instead turning a large portion of the city into an open-air prison surrounded by high-security walls – dubbing the area “Arkham City”, and leaving it under the control of the mysterious Hugo Strange - a psychiatrist and ex-patient of Arkham Asylum who has managed to deduce Batman’s true identity. Within the City lurks The Joker - still alive, but suffering from fatal Titan poisoning after using it on Arkham Island – vying for power against masterminds such as The Penguin and Two-Face, each fighting to take control of the city while Strange’s TYGER troops make sure that no-one escapes.

Rallying against the proposal of Arkham City, Bruce Wayne is kidnapped by Strange’s troops and thrown into the prison along with anyone else who opposes it. After a nice introduction where you get to play as Bruce being lead into the prison – including a fist-fight in handcuffs, he soon has his Batman gear airdropped in and proceeds to patrol the city as the Dark Knight to keep a watch over the inmates, and investigate Hugo Strange’s plans – an operation codenamed “Protocol 10″ apparently going to be set into motion very soon.

Obviously, one of the main changes to the game is it’s setting. While Arkham Island was a free-roam environment, the game was majorly set inside the various buildings of the island, all connected by outdoor grounds that were still fairly self-contained. Arkham City, however, is a large map consisting of several districts full of tall buildings. While Batman feels and plays very much the same as in Arkham Asylum, he has of course been tweaked to incorporate long-distance travel – most notably with the updated gliding mechanics. When you leap off of a building, you can now dive bomb during a glide to gain speed, and then open your cape to gain extra lift and speed. You can also unlock a grapnel ability that allows you to grapple onto a building and use hook to slingshot yourself forward to keep yourself airborne, which is a handy trick. The city itself looks great, and the fact that it’s set in a portion of Gotham means that there are a number of notable locations from the comics – including The Monarch Theater, Ace Chemicals, The Iceberg Lounge and the Gotham City Police Department Building. Obviously there are a fair amount of regular “filler” buildings, but generally there’s always something unique to see wherever you are.

In terms of combat, the game again feels much like Arkham Asylum - rather than changing or re-inventing Batman from scratch, they have simply upgraded him with some new abilities and gadgets. The free-flow combat system is much the same, utilising combo chains and counterattacks to access special attacks that range from disarms to instant takedowns. Enemies with weapons and guns return, as well as new enemies that carry shields – these can really cause problems when facing large groups of enemies as you need to perform a specific aerial attack to damage them, especially when combined with armoured opponents that need to be stunned with Batman’s cape attack before they can be attacked. While the old gadgets return, the explosive gel has been given a quick fire mode to help mix it into combat, and most other gadgets have combat uses as well – for instance, the REC Gear is a type of electrical device used to activate certain devices, but also doubles as a sort of taser that can be fired to shock an enemy in battle.

Speaking of gadgets, most of them return from Arkham Asylum (even with some new features), as well as a few new gadgets too. One such gadget is the Smoke Pellet, which allows you to escape from armed guards more easily, or else can be thrown into a group of enemies to disorient them and make them vulnerable. Almost every gadget has a secondary function or two, so there’s a good mix of abilities to play around with and multiple ways to tackle certain groups of enemies. As much as I’d love to spill all of the different combinations, I won’t spoil the fun as discovering some of the gadgets is half the fun in my eyes.

While Arkham City is huge, the majority of the storyline missions take place inside the various buildings dotted around the city – such as the Iceberg Lounge where the Penguin resides. Obviously, these areas are much like the buildings in Arkham Asylum (though not quite as big, as there are more of them), and you get to use Batman’s more sneaky abilities such as crawling through air vents and such while you are inside. These are generally some of the most interesting places in the city, all with their own themes and styles. One small detail I would like to note is that I was glad to see that they’ve not thrown gargoyles everywhere indoors – while gargoyles in Arkham Asylum were core to the gameplay, they were everywhere. In this game, however, there are a variety of different objects that serve the same purpose, just they’ve been designed to blend in with the theme of that particular area. Oh and by the way – enemies are a bit smarter this time round. If they spot you on one of these ledges in the rafters, they’ll promptly shoot it down, so you can’t abuse them quite so much as before.

In terms of in-game storytelling, the game has been crafted well, often flowing straight between gameplay and cinematic, sometimes taking you into a first-person view in certain situations, which gives you a more personal perspective in certain events. The cinematics themselves are of course as good as before, with all of the characters brought to life using the in-game graphics, all voiced excellently as well. While fans of the Scarecrow will be disappointed to hear that he doesn’t return, I’m happy to say that Rocksteady have found other ways of creating similarly surreal hallucination sections, so the game doesn’t suffer too much from his omission. Mr Freeze joins the cast also, fighting to save his wife Nora who has been taken from him – I found him to be a very interesting character and he’s among my favourites in the game.

Bosses have also seen some improvements in the game – while it’s still no God of War in terms of epic fights, there’s definitely been a reduction in battles that are essentially fighting large waves of enemies with the odd Titan thrown in – bigger bosses require Batman to avoid attacks while working out a strategy to damage the opponent (such as one that requires to set explosives in certain places around the stage), while some require more stealthy tactics to hide and strike when they’re not expecting it. That’s not to say that there aren’t sections where you have to fight groups of henchmen, but Rocksteady have obviously put a lot more thought into the bosses, which are more varied, fun, and look great. While you do fight a Titan henchman or two, it’s been made less systematic to take them down and you don’t have to keep repeating the same process of “dodge a dash, blind with a batarang, attack while they stumble around” like you did before.

Aside from the story missions, there’s a fair amount of things to do around the city. First of all, the Riddler returns with hundreds of challenges – finding his trophies, figuring out his riddles and destroying certain objects. However, the variety has been mixed up a bit more, and you often need to make clever use of the various gadgets to work them out, and I’ve found myself having to really think to figure some of them out. One small complaint I do have, however, is that while in Arkham Asylum you knew which room you were looking for a riddle solution in, this time it’s separated into districts, which aren’t clearly defined on the map – so it’s hard to tell exactly where to be looking at times, which is a bit of a nightmare considering how open the world is. While you can interrogate a Riddler goon to display where solutions are on the map, it then becomes a matter of just following markers around the map rather than genuinely trying to find answers. Of course, you can just ignore the map, but then as I said before it becomes quite difficult due to the lack of obvious area boundaries.

The best update to the Riddler is the new Hostage missions that have been added. Every time you reach a certain amount of Riddles solved, you unlock the location of one of his hostages. Going to that location, you’ll find a puzzle room which requires you to solve in order to navigate to the hostage and save them. And, unlike the first game, you can actually meet the Riddler in person in this game, rather than being purely a long-distance contact – making him feel like a real enemy, rather than just a random voice.

While the Riddler is by far the biggest side-quest, there are a mixture of other side-misssions that can be accessed – these mostly take place in the city itself, as opposed to the storyline missions that are usually indoors. For instance, one quest has you working alongside Bane to destroy Titan containers around the city, while another has you tracking the serial killer Zsasz by answering payphones and rushing to another phone within a time-limit. Some of these missions are better than others, but it’s great to see a few extra characters incorporated into smaller roles, and it adds some more variety to the game.

Assuming you bought the game new, the game comes bundled with a DLC code that adds Catwoman to the game. While many people tend to groan about DLC, it’s meant as an incentive to buy the game first-hand, which at this point you probably would be doing anyway. If you get the game new, the DLC would cost you £7.99, which isn’t cheap (the developers want a cut of your cash, if you buy it pre-owned), but Catwoman does add a decent chunk to the game. Make sure you download Catwoman before you play the game, as her chapters actually get slotted into the game’s storyline into the relevant places, and she’s quite fun to play as.

Although she plays similarly to Batman, she does have some differences – firstly, that she cannot glide, but can instead use her whip and claws to swing about and leap up walls, and she also has the very cool ability to crawl on the ceiling when there is a metal grating to grip into. Combat-wise, she plays using the same free-flow system as Batman, although her animations are much more agile, and she has a few of her own gadgets including caltrops to trip enemies, and special attacks utilising her whip.

While Catwoman doesn’t have as much storyline as Batman, she’s still rather well developed (pun not intended). She has her own set of upgrades (not as many as Batman, but she does also share some of his unlocked abilities), is fun to play as, and most importantly to me, is also able to free-roam Arkham City at certain points (and also post-game, so don’t worry you can always go back!), including her own set of Riddler trophies to find. She can also access all of the challenge maps, so aside from Batman’s story missions you can use her for everything that he has access to.

While the game is a good length and there’s a fair amount of missions, one thing I did find was that the game perhaps wasn’t paced as well as Arkham Asylum. When I’m playing games, I do try to spread out side-quests over the course of the story – while it was fairly easy to work out how much of Arkham Island you had explored, there’s no real indication in City that you are nearing the game’s conclusion. By the end of Arkham Asylum, you had defeated all of the villains who made physical appearances in the game, and it was clear that events were reaching their climax as events unfolded. With City, however, some villains make appearances but never really play major roles in the plot – Poison Ivy and Two-Face specifically had smaller roles than I expected, and Killer Croc was said to be loose in the sewers, so when the final parts of the story took place and they hadn’t been dealt with, I wasn’t ready for it - expecting some extra story arcs beforehand that never occurred. I’m not saying that the game lacks villains or content, because it at least equals that of Asylum - but City ends with villains that are still roaming the city doing their own thing, leading me to think there was more to do before the end. There’s post-game free-roam so you’re free to clear up any side quests, so that’s not a problem, and the story itself is very good – plenty of exciting moments, plot twists and shocking moments that often surprised me (in a good way.)

Overall, Batman: Arkham City is a worthy sequel to Arkham Asylum, which is no easy task considering the high bar the original set. The change of scenery has both good and bad results - while the open world looks impressive, opens up room for extras and is fun to navigate, it does mean that there are more areas that you will only ever skim past, perhaps not as easily appreciated as the few beautifully crafted buildings that made up the entirety of Arkham Asylum – making the game feel a little more Assassin’s Creed than Metroid, but the game does generally maintain all of the great qualities of the original and it feels like a natural transition to a larger scale setting. The story is very good with plenty of unexpected turns, and ultimately doesn’t disappoint.

I just hope that if Rocksteady continue with DLC support, they’ll be adding extras to the free-roam, not just the challenge maps – I’m not bored of Arkham City yet!

Pros:
+ Great story with plenty of unpredictable moments and surprises
+ A natural evolution of Arkham Asylum’s abilities – updated movement, combat skills and gadgets
+ Arkham City looks great and is fun to explore, with both Batman and Catwoman
+ Deeper Riddler challenges and side-quests give plenty to do outside of the storyline

Cons:
- Ending came a bit suddenly for my liking, the game didn’t naturally feel like it was drawing to a close
- The size of the city makes things feel a bit more spread out than the original, leaving many buildings and areas that are somewhat forgettable, as opposed to all of Asylum’s intricately designed areas.
- The Riddler challenges are hard to find and left me resorting to secret maps more than before.

Score: 9/10 – Another amazing Batman game from Rocksteady delivers a worthy sequel to the amazing original. The move to a larger setting has both positives and negatives, but the game has plenty to offer and a variety of extras to explore. Definitely worth a purchase.

- Leon

Batman: Arkham Asylum was one of last year’s biggest games – taking a fresh look at the Dark Knight’s world and building up a game from scratch – a dark and atmospheric title with the psychopathic Joker entering the halls of Gotham’s Psychiatric Ward and letting loose the madness within. A sort of semi free-roaming title, perhaps in a similar vein to Bioshock, Arkham Asylum had it all – fun combat, plenty of gadgets, exploration, beautiful graphics, your own Batcave and a fun story. The only downside really was that at some point, it had to end.

But where could they go from there? Arkham Asylum was perhaps the Batman title, and it made me wonder – who could possibly follow as a villain after the Joker, Batman’s most renowned villain? And how could they possibly beat Arkham Asylum for a setting?

Well, the answers have now become clear – in the form of a new teaser site. At the moment, it’s little more than a short trailer, but the video gives us some answers, while leaving us with ever more questions.

The teaser begins with a view over Arkham Asylum – the battlefield where the last game took place, where the Bat conquered his foes in an insane war against the Joker and his henchmen, the place now looking quiet after the events of the first title. However, as the camera pans past the gates of the Asylum and into Gotham itself – it’s apparent that something is wrong.

People are fighting in the streets, fires and explosions are going off every few minutes. What’s going on here? Are these people civilians, or ex-Arkham inmates? The camera pans through the wreckage, and through some doors into some sort of dilapidated amusement arcade, the body of a lifeless person carted around by an old car on the tracks. The place has a creepy clown-like feel to it…

And then we go up, to the upper floor of the building. The recognisable figure of the scantilly clad Harley Quinn appears before us, walking toward a hidden figure sitting in a chair before us. She turns to him, as if nursing him, or easing his pain. Of course, that hair does look rather green, doesn’t it?

And then we see him, at last. The Joker – weary but as crazy as ever, cackling to himself as he looks over Gotham, before his insane laughter leaves him in a coughing fit. Clearly the last battle damaged him, but he’s well and truly alive. Of course, who could ever follow the Joker, but the Joker himself?

After his spluttering is over, the Joker’s face fills with evil resolve, and we are greeted with the symbol of a crumbling Bat, before finally the ominous words… “ARKHAM. HAS. MOVED.”

So that’s it – you can take the Joker out of Arkham, but you can’t take the Arkham out of the Joker. Rather than returning to Arkham, it looks as though the Joker has come to Gotham itself, in some sort of scheme to unleash his madness upon the dark city.

There’s been little else in terms of news for Batman: Arkham Asylum 2, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll be seeing more Bat/Joker rivalry, this time taken to Gotham’s dark streets. What effect this will have in terms of scale of the game we will have to wait and see – but I think it’s safe to assume that the sequel will sport a similar free-roaming gameplay style – since that is perhaps what embodies Batman: Arkham Asylum itself. And if Joker and Quinn are alive – perhaps that means we’ll be seeing the likes of some of the other great bad guys from the original, such as the hallucinogenic Scarecrow, the monstrous Killer Croc, and the venomous Poison Ivy. I, for one, am excited.

But for now, that’s all we have to give you – stay tuned for new info in the next few months. I know the teaser’s got me salivating for more.

-Leon