Released:2016/10/20 Genres: Action game, Adventure game, Fighting game Developer: Rocksteady Studios Platform: PlayStation 4 Xbox One Publisher: Warner Bros. Games Series: Batman: Arkham I like reminiscing about old good video games so it would be absurd to call this a review. Lets go back in time:
Graphics
This 2016 remaster of the original 2009 and 2011 release of Arkham Asylum and City respectively is a well polished remaster. For a hardcore fan of Batman games who would have had played the original titles its a no brainer that you will be easily impressed by the visual polish from this software rendition meant for 7th gen consoles to the 8th, furthermore it feels good to just run the old code on the latest consoles as it hardly even taxes them. I am console centric by the way so I cannot speak for PC but soon my pirate friends I will be covering more on a midrange PCs.
Character models are better compared to Arkham Asylum not by a large margin though, shadow detail is much better though obviously without RT as the games were made specifically for last gen consoles. On Series X you can switch on auto HDR. I find Arkham City very much presentable in modern standard aesthetics of video game looks and its actually good to revisit some of these old titles because video game development now actually takes years and its no longer the days were you could have multiple sequels of the same title series in the same hardware generation.
Expectations are high from the gaming audience, the fanboys are hard at work (we thank them for that because after all its your hard earned money but on the same doesn't entitle abuse) and definitely its high pressure on development. So even though you may have powerful hardware you may find that its hardly utilized per generation resulting in generational overlaps like in our case the PS4 and Xbox One systems are not letting us go.
Still on this note to give examples: God of War 2018 which was dedicated to the PS4 hardware then the sequel Ragnarok which was cross gen which is in stark contrast to the PS2 era and PSP where you would have multiple God of war titles (God of War 1,2 Chains of olympus etc) in a single generation of hardware. There are even better examples for me to mention in terms of even longer development cycles like Red Dead Redemption which was released in 2010 then the sequel which was a prequel in the line of story came out in 2018 and that's 8 years later and since then we have never had a Rockstar title apart from GTAV remaster which is round about 5 years till now from RDR2. So even though PS4 and Xbox one are old you can see they only ran 2 Rockstar titles of which one was a remaster, so was their full potential reached pushing those game engines on that hardware? Something to think about I guess.
Back to the topic at hand, Arkham City is proper in-terms of resolution and performance, I say yes its really good and to a certain degree I would even dare say Arkham city has a clean city look than knight which though it looks incredible the 30fps cap I believe really blurred the visuals because in motion in Arkham knight things look blurred up sometimes. It would be nice if Rocksteady put 60fps in Arkham knight because in my opinion 60fps makes animation look good in motion.
The only thing I don't like about the game all things considered is the menu presentation, I think they could have done better its kind of all cluttered. Its important because this is were you handle your character stats and cosmetics and it doesn't look attractive. Arkham Asylum had a simple look which was ok but City didn't come right here.
Gameplay
Before I start I am pretty annoyed with my webhost Wix, I am trying at present to attach various videos of gameplay but they don't want because its from Tiktok. I embedded the videos in YouTube because Wix accepts YouTube but still it gives an error. So I am going to just give you some links here that you can click, I have also tested them on my end so they did refer me to what I wanted you to see so hopefully on your end you can see as well:
Trust me I hate doing things this way its pretty messy but hey Wix says no so maybe its time I move on from them sigh, anyway gameplay is the pinnacle reason of playing Arkham games. Its fluid and one of the best beat them up combat experiences you can come accross. You will take great pleasure in a lot of combos, stealth, direct confrontations with easy button management. You don't just play as Batman, you play as other characters which adds more to the fun. On this note I am sad that they want to release this:
Yes that mess was delayed, I don't want to rant right now because I don't have the energy but that's terrible, a complete veering off from the original Arkham mechanics. Its one thing to bring something new but its another to make sure it doesn't destroy the original foundations of what the company's art is known for. Gotham Knights was another horrible game I even avoided it but will pirate it and play it on PC yes PIRATE IT you read right and to add to this mess these modern titles don't even look current gen, just purely horrible. Maybe management and teams changed I don't know but Rocksteady has lost the plot. I would like to just vent out but I leave this for another day
Story
Arkham City elevates the story from Arkham Asylum, befitting of a proper sequel with zero conundrums to the plot with compelling villains and a vast depth from the Batman universe lore. Yes it did in its day take the best game of the Xbox 360 but I do feel Arkham City deserved GOTY for 2011. Its been out for over ten years but if you have followed us for a long time I do not delve into story details because somebody has still not played a game you may have played so i rather give a generic overview for expectations and in this case there's no room for disappointment. Everything is laid out with purpose and this game in particular is full of surprises as the story expands.
I long for Batman games you go back to these grass roots of the original Arkham games and sprout again from this beaten path because with the disappointing releases of games like Gotham knights with which one day we shall cover it leaves me to wonder why Warner Bros did not stay on the pivotal mechanics of these games. We need to RETURN TO ARKHAM indeed.
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