Batman: Arkham City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My favourite comic book character has always been Batman, and not even the Joel Schumacher films were able to put me off the Caped Crusader. So I was delighted to discover that Arkham Asylum was a video game that fully captured everything that is great about Batman and his supervillain nemeses and the universe in which it all takes place, as well as functioning as a really good game on its own merits. Needless to say, hopes for the sequel were high.

Arkham City, as the name suggests, has opened up the action beyond the famous asylum, with former warden Quincy Sharp now Mayor of Gotham. He has sectioned off the slums and turned them into an open-air asylum, allowing criminals to roam freely and form gangs under the leadership of some very familiar faces. For his opposition to the scheme, Bruce Wayne gets arrested and thrown into Arkham City, giving you the rare opportunity of controlling him out of costume for a short while. Long enough to encounter a cockney Penguin (!) and his thugs anyway.

The game very quickly introduces its main characters, with Catwoman, Two-Face, The Joker, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Hugo Strange already making an appearance as well, and I’ve only been playing it for around half an hour in total. The action is equally familiar to anyone who played the first game, with lots of jumping, gliding, hanging and punching. A lot of punching. At first the feeling of deja vu was a little disappointing, but as the game expands, you see that there’s a lot more going on. Not least the addition of Catwoman.

Technically she’s an add-on character that you download using a code given in the packaging, but it’s great fun to have her missions thrown in as well. Playing as her doesn’t feel that different to being Batman, because largely they do the same things, but there are differences and she certainly moves in a different way. Slinkily, as you’d imagine, in her gravity-defying dominatrix costume. The female characters are rather lustily-drawn, but such is the way of both video games and comic books, targeted, as they tend to be, at lonely teenage boys and overgrown lonely teenage boys. There is more to her than her cleavage though, and she’s a fun character to play.

There’s a long way to go yet with Arkham City, I’m currently on my way to find Mr Freeze, hoping that he won’t look or sound anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger. The joy of having such an imaginatively-created landscape to explore probably lifts it above its predecessor, which laid the groundwork with a stunning version of the asylum. I’d argue that these two games have captured the world of Batman better than any of the film adaptations have done so far, even the ones I really like. And there’s not a ZAP or POW in sight…

Related articles

• Behind-The-Scenes Of Batman Arkham City: Take A Journey From The Asylum To The City (g4tv.com)
• Batman Arkham City Developer Has “Lots Of Exciting Ideas” For Their Next Project (mynintendonews.com)
• GOTY 2011: Best Action Adventure Game – Batman: Arkham City (news.softpedia.com)

Written By James Ellaby

Editor of New Adventures In Hi-Fi, writer of content, digital communication type person and lover of all kinds of music, films and TV both high-brow and trashy.

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