Pros & Cons
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- Exciting fighting, crime-solving sequences.
- Excellent voice acting.
- Huge amounts of unlockable content.
- Ability to play as Catwoman puts a fun new spin on game play.
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- Borrows voraciously from previous game.
- Some aspects of story and game play stretch suspension of disbelief too far.
- Boss battles too easy.
- Many side missions don't compare favorably with main game mode.
"If you liked X, you'll love Y!" might be the cheapest of critical plaudits, but sometimes absolutely nothing else will do. So here goes: If you liked Batman: Arkham Asylum, you'll love Batman: Arkham City ($49.99 for PC; $59.99 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360)—primarily because developer Rocksteady Studios and publisher Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment leave you no other choice. Borrowing everything from its blockbuster 2009 predecessor that wasn't nailed down—and prying up practically everything that was—Arkham City delivers as much in the way of action, excitement, and (literal) high-flying thrills, but little of the invention that made Arkham Asylum such a standout. This makes the new game, derivative nearly to the point of distracting, but even so it's loaded enough with rocket-fueled fun that it still stands as one of the best PC games you can play.
Out of the Asylum and into the City
At least the game's creators don't downplay the relationship between the first game and this one; the two unquestionably take place in the same universe, one essentially unaffected by DC Comics' recent full-catalog reboot of its properties. (Barbara Gordon remains Oracle and is not Batgirl again, for example.) They also take place within a reasonable time frame with respect to each other: Arkham City is set approximately a year after The Caped Crusader cleared out Arkham Asylum.
View All Now the brilliant psychologist Hugo Strange has convinced the Asylum's former warden (and now Gotham City mayor) Quincy Sharp to wall off Gotham's slums and fill the area with former Asylum inmates and prisoners from Blackgate Penitentiary—all of whom are under Strange's direct and dictatorial control. But after master criminals, petty thugs, and perhaps a few people Strange merely wants out of the way are loaded into what's being called Arkham City, Gotham decides it doesn't much trust the idea and begins rebelling. One of the movement's most powerful voices is Bruce Wayne, who holds a press conference decrying the Arkham City effort—after which he's captured and thrown in there himself.
Where Wayne goes, Batman follows, and it's not long before The World's Greatest Detective is trying to clean up the zone from the inside, and learning that things aren't all that they seem to be. Neither Sharp nor Strange, for example, may be operating entirely of his own volition, and The Joker is being afflicted by a strange disease that could endanger the citizens of Gotham if a cure isn't found in time. And, what do you know, Batman himself is now coming down with many of the same symptoms...