Note: Unmarked spoilers to follow!
Guess Who’s Bat? Bat Again
Given how much I liked my initial playthrough of Arkham Asylum, I was all in for the sequel when I first heard it was announced. I had even learned more about comics in the intervening two years between the release of Asylum and City. When I first played Arkham Asylum, I didn’t even know who Oracle was without consulting the in-game character bios. By the time I played Arkham City, I was even able to correctly identify Azrael during his sidequest. And yet I still had no idea who Hugo Strange was. Even so, the prospect of getting to know a bunch of new Batman villains was a selling point, not a detraction.
Arkham City? Are They Zoned For That?
For anyone who hasn’t played the game, Arkham City revolves around a significant section of Gotham City being walled off into a massive open-air prison, and all of the prisoners from both Arkham Asylum and Blackgate being thrown in to fend for themselves. Even for a comic book plot, the idea of any city being in favor of turning huge swaths of its streets into a permanent urban warzone is ludicrous. It’s pretty clear the desire to make this game open world came first, with the plot bent to those ends. The prison is overseen by Hugo Strange, a chinstrap-bearded dork whose biggest claim to fame is being the Batman villain who consistently knows Batman’s true identity. When Bruce Wayne starts organizing protests against the prison, he’s arrested and thrown into Arkham City, prompting him to start taking down the prison from the inside. If you can get past the premise, which obviously took a lot of inspiration from Escape from New York, it’s a passable excuse to create an open world area that is nonetheless populated only by highly punchable criminals.
Previously, on Arkham City…
When I first played this game, it didn’t take long for it to surpass Arkham Asylum from a gameplay perspective. The combat system, already very good, now felt both more expansive and responsive. There were almost too many options in battle, between new combat abilities and an expanded array of Bat gadgets. The Predator stealth sections returned as well, and I still loved them. The biggest improvement between games came in Batman’s traversal moveset. Instead of having to finish a glide before you could grapple to a new ledge, Batman could hook onto a new vantage point in mid-flight. An upgrade would allow him to launch off the new grapple point, allowing for a continuous, uninterrupted chain of launches and glides. It made gliding feel much smoother and less stuttery, a very important feature for Arkham City’s much larger floor plan. The map is around five times larger than Arkham Asylum, a significant increase but still miniscule by the standards of most open world games. Arkham City is still small enough to where the lack of fast travel option doesn’t feel like a hindrance. The core gameplay felt like an improvement over Arkham Asylum in every way, so it was easy to default to it being the better game.
However, even at the time I was not blind to some of the game’s faults. The grungy, brown-gray XBox 360 era art style was still in effect, and the writing still suffered from DC’s increasing focus on grittiness and ultraviolence. The release of Arkham City just happened to coincide with the New 52 relaunch of the DC comics universe, and while I can’t say for certain whether the New 52 editorial direction directly influenced the writing of Arkham City, it’s easy to draw parallels between the two. It’s not hard to imagine Arkham’s Joker cutting off his own face and stapling it back on just for a gag. This even extends to main villain Hugo Strange, whom the Arkham games continue to insist is not only a mental match for Batman, but also a master martial artist who could totally take Batman in a fight.
Every time someone made fun of his beard, he did one (1) pushup
Plenty of other Batman villains got similar edgelord makeovers. Penguin’s monocle is replaced with part of a broken bottle that’s permanently implanted in his face. Every villain has had their body count dramatically increased. Mad Hatter is not just obsessed with “Alice”, he’s murdered several “Alices” in pursuit of his delusions. By far the most ridiculous portrayal is Calendar Man, here reimagined as a Hannibal Lecter type serial murderer who is also as jacked as Batman. It reads as desperation to make these characters as bleak and menacing as possible, presumably to make beating them up all the more satisfying. If the gameplay of Arkham City built on what Arkham Asylum started, the writing also followed the lead of the prior game, with all the good and bad that implies.
Back on the Streets
Similar to when I first played Arkham Asylum with little experience playing action games, I first played Arkham City with relatively little experience with open world games. No Elder Scrolls, no Far Cry, no Assassin’s Creed. I had played Saints Row 2 then-recently, but I hadn’t touched the Grand Theft Auto series since Vice City. Suffice to say, I had a very narrow conception of what constituted an open world game back then. Since then, while I still haven’t played a Far Cry or Assassin’s Creed game, I have taken the plunge into Morrowind and Oblivion, more recent open world games like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, as well as more primitive open world titles like Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows. Having played a greater variety of open world games, it seems like Arkham City was modeled after the GTA style of open world games: a single path of progression along the main quest, but littered with sidequests and collectables of various levels of involvement. There’s no real variation in character building or alternate story paths to take like in more open-ended open world games, but the experience is also much more focused and compact. I certainly didn’t hunt down every collectible in GTA 3, but I did track down every Riddler trophy in Arkham City. Twice.
Fightin’ ‘Round the World City
From a gameplay perspective, my replay of Arkham City has changed my opinion very little. This game controls like a dream. The few rough edges of the combat system from Asylum feel ironed out, while a significant amount of flair has been added to the animations in combat. Pre-scripted combat animations have variations that take the environment into account. Batman will slam enemies into walls or bounce them off dumpsters if he happens to be near them. Henchmen for different supervillains will dress in outfits that match their bosses, giving you an easy visual cue as to whose turf you’re in. Many gadgets have applications in combat as well as puzzle solving, which gives an almost overwhelming number of options in combat. New enemy types accompany these new combat abilities, forcing you to switch up tactics to deal with them. It’s a fantastic system, easily the biggest improvement over the first game.
Unfortunately, the Predator gameplay seems to have suffered a bit from the transition to an open world system. Whenever you encounter a stealth section in the overworld, the design of the arena is very basic. Enemy patrols are fairly basic, hiding spots are sparse, and takedown opportunities lack variation. Fortunately, this only applies to the outdoor areas, as the various indoor locations have stealth section arenas more in line with the quality of those in Arkham Asylum. There’s even a full on boss battle revolving around Predator gameplay. When Arkham City applies itself, the stealth sections are just as good as ever, but the kind of meticulously crafted hide and seek playgrounds that make the Predator sections so much fun are difficult to replicate in an open world teeming with opportunities for emergent gameplay, so the quality of stealth encounters varies much more than the combat encounters.
On the subject of boss battles, Arkham City once again improves upon those in Arkham Asylum. The majority of Asylum’s boss battles boil down to brawling masses of henchmen until the game decides you’ve beaten up enough, at which point Batman lays out the supervillain in a cutscene. Even enemies that can match Batman in a fight, like Bane and Killer Croc, are relegated to gimmick fights. Arkham City handles boss fights against physically imposing villains like Solomon Grundy much better. The henchman brawl boss fight against Ra’s al Ghul is elevated by a lot of stylistic flairs that make it particularly memorable. Mr. Freeze gets what is easily the best boss fight in the game, a dedicated Predator stealth fight where he deploys countermeasures against every takedown type after taking damage from them, forcing you to switch up tactics after each successful hit.
That’s Victor Frieze, Batman. With a deep V
While the Predator gameplay isn’t the best across the entire breadth of gameplay, Arkham City honed the combat system to the kind of system that would become the standard for 3D action games across the industry. The boss battles are also greatly improved in both spectacle and variation of gameplay. If you’re just in the game for the fighting, there’s no question that Arkham City is an improvement over Asylum in every respect.
What if We Kissed Under the Space Needle Built by Ninjas?
However, I am not just into games for the gameplay. If anything, story in games has only grown more important to me over the years. I was pretty harsh on Arkham Asylum’s story, and the basic premise of Arkham City doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence that it has improved. When starting the game, I was struck by the revelation that I remembered basically nothing about the game’s third act beyond the Joker dying somehow. So the writing may not be the best, but is it at least better than Arkham Asylum?
After playing the game, I would say that overall the story is better. If Arkham Asylum felt like a theme park version of a day in the life of Batman, Arkham City feels like it’s actually building out the world and setting up its own continuity. The status-quo-restoring events of Arkham Asylum lead into big changes for the Arkhamverse, from the construction of Arkham City to the Joker contracting a fatal illness as a result of the final boss fight in Arkham Asylum. Batman has a slightly more nuanced relationship with his villains, entering into tenuous truces with Bane, Talia and R’as al Ghul, and Mr. Freeze over the course of the story. Mr. Freeze is one of the few characters to escape the grimdarkification most villains got; his characterization is basically unchanged from the Batman Animated incarnation. The inclusion of Catwoman as a playable character lends more shading to Arkham City’s portrayal of Batman’s rogues gallery. Not only is she a tenuous ally, rescuing Batman and being rescued in turn, but her mini-campaign also shows Poison Ivy just keeping to herself, sitting out of Arkham City’s eternal gang war. Riddler’s collect-a-thon includes unlockable interviews between several of the major villains and Hugo Strange, giving the villains a chance to bounce off one another in entertaining ways. Most of the villains are still nasty pieces of work, but there’s marginally more layers and motivation to them than seen in Arkham Asylum.
The voice acting is still excellent as well. Kevin Conroy always brings it as Batman, but the Arkham City script gives him more material to flex his delivery with, especially in the opening when he’s campaigning against the prison as Bruce Wayne. Mark Hamill is at his Joker-y best, and Corey Burton (Brainiac from the Timmverse shows) gives a memorably smarmy performance as Hugo Strange. However, for the second game in a row, the MVP of the voice actors for me was Wally Wingert as Edward Nigma. He does such a good job at making the Riddler condescending and patronizing right up until the point where you start to solve too many of his riddles, at which point he becomes panicky and defensive. He even accuses Batman of looking up the solutions online. Hearing every one of his lines was a big motivation for me finding all the Riddler trophies again (and with 440 of those suckers around, that’s no small undertaking). The voice cast is excellent, and this time around the script actually gives them some decent scenes to work with.
There’s also a skin that makes playable characters look like their Timmverse designs. Or at least mascot costume versions of them
This tentative praise for the story does come with some big caveats. First and foremost, both the premise and gameplay encourage the reactionary dehumanization of the gangs’ rank and file members. They’re frequently seen either terrorizing the political prisoners (aka the unambiguously “good” prisoners), talking about how much they want to beat up Bruce Wayne, or leering at Catwoman. Instead of finding maps to locate Riddler trophies, you have to find his henchman (hidden among groups of other gang members, so you have to beat them up as well), threaten them with gruesome injury, then punch them out as soon as they give Batman what he wants. Even after Batman rescues a henchman from being dropped into acid by the Joker’s men, the henchman immediately attacks Batman as soon as he turns his back.
Later on, as order in the prison breaks down, the henchmen stop talking about murder and start wondering if they’re all going to freeze to death or starve first. One henchman strong-arming a political prisoner mentions that he needs medication to suppress his violent urges, and yet the only resolution to this scenario is to counterattack him so hard his face turns concave. Even when the game tries to comment on how the Arkham City system brutalizes the prisoners, the fact that you can only interact with the world through violence makes Batman just feel like he’s joining in on the brutalization.
Arkham City also doubles down on the undeniable misogynistic streak from Arkham Asylum. Catwoman gets a laughably cheesecake redesign to match Harley and Poison Ivy’s, with absurdly male-gazey motion capture to match. Most of the henchmen you encounter while playing as her will comment on their “hotness” and how they can hardly believe they can survive in Arkham City without being sexually assaulted. It really is disconcerting how often that second bit comes up in dialog. Talia al Ghul returns to the story at the 11th hour pretty much just so she can get fridged in the most blatant manner possible. Despite being billed as an exceptional fighter with an army of ninjas at her beck and call, she’s apparently no match for a scrawny clown. In fact, fridging female characters is a regrettably frequent recurring plot element of the Rocksteady Arkham games. Poison Ivy also dies in Arkham Knight, and fast-forwarding to 2024, the ignoble conclusion of the Suicide Squad game reveals that, in a game called KILL THE JUSTICE LEAGUE, the only Justice League member who actually dies is Wonder Woman. As a cis dude I have the privilege of being able to ignore the worst implications of these writing choices, but I don’t fault anyone who considers this a dealbreaker.
There’s no way I was going to miss the chance to include this video
Replaying the game, I also figured out why I didn’t remember much about the game’s conclusion: the story definitely feels like it peters out towards the end. After an incredible one-two sequence of boss battles against R’as al Ghul and Mr. Freeze, the story loses a lot of momentum once Joker hijacks the plot. The climactic confrontation with Hugo Strange feels like an afterthought, and the final boss fight against Clayface is one of the game’s worst. Even the playable epilogue offers little in the way of closure to the story. The game offers plenty of exciting set pieces, but feels like it drops off significantly after the Mr. Freeze fight.
The Dark Knight Concludes
My final thoughts on Arkham City is that it’s a quintessential sequel. It escalates everything the first game established, which unfortunately includes its successes as well as its flaws. The reactionary implications of Batman beating up endless hordes of remorseless murderers are only more troubling when he’s doing it while they’re already in prison (and freezing and starving). The treatment of female characters is even worse, even as Catwoman is made playable. And yet, the sheer visceral thrill of fighting a room full of Penguin’s thugs, or a battle in the mind against R’as al Ghul, remains incredibly enjoyable. It’s a study in gameplay excellence that just also happens to exemplify a lot of the worst writing tropes in comics of the time.
Stray Observations –
- I started out keeping count of the number of times characters said [gendered slur that will get me auto-modded] for another one of my counting gags. That joke was ruined when I started playing the third Catwoman interlude and quickly lost count.
- While trying in vain to find background information on why Hugo Strange was so swole, I discovered that the Joker’s plan in Arkham Asylum (creating mutated hulking henchmen to fight Batman) is actually Hugo Strange’s MO. He’s done it like three times in the comics. Was Hugo Strange supposed to be the main villain of Arkham Asylum, who was then switched out for Joker to get a more recognizable villain?
- While writing this article, I discovered that a part of the advertising blitz for the game involved releasing an entire album of original songs supposedly inspired by the game. Artists on the tracks include Panic at the Disco!, Daughtry, and Serj Tankian, lead singer of System of a Down. Enjoy, if you dare!
