In 2011 Batman was just about at the full height of his pomp in the cinema and on console. The film The Dark Knight in 2008 and Rocksteady’s Arkham Asylum game the following year had made sure of that. In 2012 the film would get its sequel, but Rocksteady turned theirs around faster. Twenty-five years earlier in 1986, when the first UK #1 Batman game came out, it had been twenty years since a Batman film, but some things were still similar. The Dark Knight comic series was likewise midway through its run, and the game was likewise not based on it or any other existing Batman but its own imagined Batman.
The Batman game Ocean imagined in 1986 put a more light-hearted Batman in a 3D proto-Metroidvania, released before Metroid. Come 2009, Arkham Asylum took things darker, if not less cartoonish, but with its intersecting pathways accessed with new gadgets it was essentially built on the same principle. The gameplay utility of defining Batman by the inventive use of tools stretches over time, a view of him as a character who can trick his way through any situation but for whom it doesn’t come easily.
Superficially, Arkham City keeps plenty over from its predecessor, including the balletic combat with its comic book rhythms that Jaylee talked about in her guest post (and also the jarring treatment of female characters, Catwoman especially). It goes further still with the rogues gallery approach for its enemies, particularly in an enjoyably grotesque dying Joker. In how its world is organised, though, it newly bows to the trends of the time, giving you both a whole city to explore and a much more linear path through the story.
You get access to a massive range of gadgets pretty much right from the start, from batarangs to explosive gel, but simultaneously get led from place to place. The leading is often done through its own kind of clever tech, like being given a heat sensor and asked to find the coldest place around. However many decimal places the temperature is shown to, though, in practice that’s just a big arrow pointing the way to go, with extra steps.
This kind of performative complexity looms large in Arkham City. The number of different gadgets mean it’s never quite a case of just going and pressing an interact button with the one thing you can, like a clumsier previous generation of game adaptations. Stick on detective vision, though, every interactable object highlighted, and the difference doesn’t often feel much more than a matter of pressing a couple of extra buttons. This fits with the wider trend towards mainstream games making you feel clever without having to be clever, sharpened to an even finer point.
It might not have the same exploration-based story progression, but it did introduce one other modern type of lock. Since I’m playing in 2024, I am playing a used copy of the game. The first thing it asks for every time I turn it on is a code, which needs to be entered to access a set of levels where you play as Catwoman. Without a new copy, I would have to pay an add-on fee. However many gadgets I have access to in game, part of the story is locked behind a monetary gate. The lock will presumably remain in place even when the Xbox 360 store imminently closes down. Some creeping forces are beyond even the best-resourced heroes.
Top of the charts for week ending 22 October 2011:
