I am Vengeance; I am the Night; I am BATMAN: Arkham City!

(I wrote these impressions during e3 while in LA, sorry for the delay in getting this up, I added a few notes, but they’re in parenthesis.)

I played Batman Arkham City on the show floor today and oh boy was it awesome! The world has been improved, better combat, more puzzles, and a whole slew of new villains. Get ready for what might be the best Batman game yet!

The first noticeable change in the game is the world itself. When the game begins you have access to just about all of it. You can go where ever and do whatever. If you want to do the main quest, it is there for you; if you want to rescue hostages and solve Riddler puzzles, you can do that. Traversing the world has also been improved. You can glide with your cap like in the first one, but now you can dive down to pick up speed and then pull up to boost yourself back into the air. You also still have your grapple ability, but now if you double tap a button your speed is greatly increased, which allows you to boot up to the side of a building, and then keep gliding once you've reached the top; similar to web swinging in Spider-Man. Another creative addition is way points; when you open your map and set a way point, not only will a marker appear on your compass, but a Bat Signal will appear in the sky above your destination. These elements will both make the game play better and also make it faster and easier to traverse the world.

Batman's combat abilities and gadgets have also been improved. The same combat style is there, making you feel like Batman with the ability to take on 20 enemies at once, but they have added new combos and skills. Now when you stun an enemy with your bat cape, you can unleash a slew of rapid punches ending in an upper cut. You can also counter not one, not two, but three enemies at once! Objects being thrown as you can also be caught and hurled back at the thrower. There are new environmental counters in battle, when you counter an enemy near a railing or wall, Batman uses those against his foe. You can use the Bat-Claw to latch onto an enemy and draw him near and with a button press you can use a takedown move to finish him off. Another combo allows you to place the explosive gel on the ground mid-combat instead of trying to stop during combat to place it, and probably getting punched. The zip-line has also been improved; while zipping across the line, you can shoot the zip-line in another direction, which adds a lot of potential for puzzles. Batman’s Detective Mode has also been, well not improved, they actually made it worse! This is not a bad thing though, it is a great thing! Apparently, a lot of gamers played Asylum completely in Detective Mode so they never missed anything, but that ruins the entire beautiful world that was created. Speaking of good looking worlds, Arkham City looks amazing; there is so much detail in the run down streets of this gang filled slum.

As many already know Catwoman (Selina Kyle) is in the game. Not only is she there, but she is playable. I got a chance to play as Catwoman, in a small segment, and see some behind closed doors game play of her. Her combat style is much different from The World's Greatest Detective, she is quicker and more agile, letting her swiftly move around enemies and take them down. She has her own version of Detective Mode, but it is more of a Thief Vision. She can see items on people that she can steal for various reasons. In the game play I saw, Catwoman needed to gain entrance into a vault which required obtaining key cards from a couple of security guards. One of her abilities is to crawl on the ceiling to avoid being seen, so she crawled up behind a security guard, silently dropped down to the floor, and quickly crawled towards him, staying very close to the floor, and easily lifted the key card from his belt and jumped back to the ceiling. Once she opened the vault the guards were alerted, not unlike The Darknight Detective, Catwoman is very vulnerable to gunfire, so it is important to avoid conflict whenever possible. One way to do this is when a guard is out of sight from the others, she can hang down from the ceiling from her whip, using her feet to silently disable the guard. Catwoman also will be able to traverse the world, and since she has no gadgets, she is limited to her claws and whip. She jumped off the rooftops, whipping nearby structures to reach other buildings. Since her whip does not retract, she has to then climb up the side of the building with her claws, similar to wall crawling in Spiderman. All in all, Catwoman looks like she is going to be a great addition to these games.

All of the new villains are promising as well. The Riddler makes his return from Arkham Asylum, but now is a physical being as opposed to just a voice. You still go around picking up trophies and finding question marks, but the riddles that I enjoyed the most in Arkham Asylum where the ones given to you as clues. In Asylum, contained in each area was one riddle for which all the information you had on it was a clue. For example, one riddle was “What time is tea time in wonderland?” and if you looked around in the corner of the room was a tea set. I want a riddle that makes me think and rack my brain trying to solve it. One thing I do know about the Riddler in Arkham City is there are select thugs roaming around the streets amongst others that stand out as green due to the Dark Knights Detective Vision. If you take down the group of thugs, but leave the green one for last, you will be able to interrogate him for information on riddles in the area. If you’ve seen the game play trailers you know that Oswald Cobblepot, better known as The Penguin, shows up with his gang of thugs.

Something I noticed when I was playing it, during a cut scene The Caped Crusader and The Penguin are taking about someone but the name is blocked out, who could it be? At first I thought it was going to be Robin, but I asked one of the developers and he said Robin is not in the game, so if it’s not Robin, I hope it’s Barbara Gordon, you may know her as Batgirl, or Oracle, depending on the timeline. (Side note; we now know that Robin will be available in the challenge maps, when Batman: Arkham City is preordered from Best Buy. Also I hear Talia al Ghul will be in the game, so she might have been the one kidnapped by The Penguin). Mr. Freeze and Two Face also make appearances in the game, among others, which I am excited for. My only concern is, is this too many villains? I love Batman, and he has some of the best villains, but how do they plan to get so many of them into one game? I would rather have just one or two villains, going more in depth into the psyche of that character as opposed to having random cameos of someone just to have them be there.

Though I have these doubts, I do have faith in Rocksteady Studios, I loved Arkham Asylum, and from what I played on the show floor, I’m sure I’ll love Arkham City too.