Batman: Arkham City

BATMAN

ARKHAM CITY

R E V I E W

Batman: Arkham City, the sequel to hit game Batman: Arkham Asylum, let’s you become Batman once again. Now with more characters, bosses, challenges, and nearly everything you wished was in Arkham Asylum is in Arkham City. Better graphics, a larger map, more skills, more challenge maps, and so much more!

G A M E P L A Y --- The gameplay in Arkham Asylum is, in my opinion, better than Arkham Asylum in almost every way. The graphics are comparably better. The faces and details look more real than the ones of Asylum. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) is about the same as Asylum. The sounds have been improved quite a bit. They’re more realistic and fresh sounding. The camera angle is the same; over the right shoulder, but zooming out when fighting. The controls are basically the same as Asylum, and nearly every other Action/Adventure game for that matter. The map is five times larger than that of Arkham Asylum, making Riddler challenges harder than ever. Arkham City was built on the Unreal Engine 3, the engine of popular games like Bioshock Infinite, Borderlands 1 and 2, the Gears of War series, and the Mass Effect series. The game has a large free-roaming feel to it, but all the while you are still basically staying on the main story. The DLC for the game (Skins pack, Robin Bundle, Nightwing Bundle, and Harley Quinn’s Revenge) are very well done. The Skins pack adds several extra Batman skins, for play in the main game, or the challenge maps. The Robin and Nightwing bundles add Robin and Nightwing as playable characters in the challenge maps, as well as having their own maps. Harley Quinn’s Revenge adds a whole new quest, set after the story of Arkham City!

O F F E N S I V E  M A T E R I A L --- Unfortunately, this game has much offensive material for it’s T rating. The violence is pretty normal for an Action/Adventure game except Batman’s special takedown move breaks the thug’s arm or leg. The curse words in the game include: d***, h***, a**, b****rd, and b****. All of them are used fairly frequently by the thugs. If you only heard language from the cutscenes, my guess is there would be %70 percent less cursing heard. Unfortunately, there is no way to turn off the local surveillance, which is how you hear the thug’s chatter. You will probably hear 3 to 4 curse words in every half hour of gameplay. The suggestive material only consists of a few things. There are several neon signs throughout Arkham City that say “Live Nudes” and have a silhouette of a woman. While there is no way to see the “Live Nudes” it is pretty suggestive. Next, once or twice you can hear a few thugs having an inappropriate conversation, or making inappropriate remarks, but you can take these thugs out and stop the conversation whenever you like. Poison Ivy makes a return in her very scantily clad outfit in this game as well. (For more information on this outfit refer to my Arkham Asylum review here) Lastly, Catwoman’s outfits are very tight fitting and suggestive. Her combat moves are pretty suggestive as well. In one move she kisses the thug before taking him out. Other than some very mild suggestive themes scattered throughout, including liquor and tobacco references. On another note, there is one part of the game that refers to demonic spiritual references, but it’s not clear whether this is depicted as real, or a hallucination.

O V E R A L L --- Overall, I would give this game a C+ on the JMRS. The amount of offensive material really takes away from the great quality of the game. I would recommend this game to ages 16+. All-in-all, it’s really a great game. A worthy sequel to Asylum. The Game of the Year edition includes all expansions and the game, for the very low price of $20 at most retailers and $15 on Amazon. That’s a great value for all that is in this game, I highly recommend it.

Batman: Arkham City (PC, PS3, 360)

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