I replayed Arkham City recently, because my last 200 hours were a while ago and I’ve been holding off going in for more out of fear that I’ll stop wanting to find something new to play and just stick to what I really like. I do really like Arkham City, and upon perusal of my old review (from October 2016!), that doesn’t really seem to come across. I guess I must have thought that since it’s not good in the same ways as Arkham Asylum, it doesn’t deserve the overt recommendation that I so desperately wanted to give it. It’s a really good game, independent of its superior predecessor, and one that wears on it’s sleeve a love of the franchise so devout that you can’t help but kind of love it too. Is it poorly written? Yes! But only because such things as ‘narrative flow’ and ‘character development’ had to go in exchange for cramming in as many characters and elements as possible. As somebody who never reads comic books, Arkham City makes me see why other people like them. Goofy characters like Calendar Man and the Mad Hatter are presented with the same dark, gritty tone as conventional evils like Zsasz and Hugo Strange, and the game makes them all work. It’s a melting pot of the weird and wacky that’s so much fun it’s hard not to like.
Where Arkham Asylum is a tight, driven experience, Arkham City is a sandbox – not ‘sandbox’ in the Ubisoft sense, where there’s a game here that’s also got a large open world attached, but more in the sense that you’re given a huge variety of tools and scenarios to play with. Navigating the city feels smooth and quick, it’s easy to duck in and out of fights in the open world, and ultimately it feels like a place that actually dynamically changes as the story goes on. Arkham Asylum did this too, with Poison Ivy’s vines gradually overtaking the entire island, but Arkham City’s changes are more subtle – you’ll see different enemies in different spots as the three rival gangs gain and lose ground in their endless war for control of the prison. It’s impressive how densely Rocksteady have weaved in easter eggs and secrets, which appear almost as regularly as they did in the notably smaller Arkham Asylum. Scaling up the depth and complexity of the original to an open world setting was always going to be hard, but about as good of a job as was possible has been accomplished here, with impressive environments and a sense of continuity that just makes everything flow so nicely.
It really is an impressive accomplishment. It’s not better Arkham Asylum, but it’s as effective of a translation of that game’s gameplay, story, and mechanics into a larger game as could possibly have been done. If I’m going to quibble about what’s wrong with it, then yes, there are a few hundred Riddler trophies too many, and yes, every female character serves only to fulfill whatever fetishes the comic book nerds like the most, and yes, the GOTY edition splicing the Catwoman DLC into the main story does butcher the pacing, but these are just that – quibbles about minor things that barely drag down a wildly ambitious game that succeeds at just about everything it tries to.
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