Introduction

He knew he shouldn’t be out at this hour. It was pure foolishness, but he had to… for his wife if no one else. As if on cue, a voice shouted out from a darkened corner, “Hey buddy, where’re ya goin’?” The figure stepped out of the shadows and began following the man, grabbing him in three long steps. The dark figure, now a scarred and misshapen being, began sifting through the man’s pockets. In a desperate plea the man shouted for help, only to be hit in the gut. Then a gust of wind and a flash of black seemingly erased the hoodlum from existence. A quick glance to the man’s right revealed a caped silhouette beneath the bright moon – the Dark Knight himself.

Batman: Arkham City is the sequel to 2009’s smash-hit action game Batman: Arkham Asylum. As the name suggests, you will be reprising your role as the Caped Crusader against an even larger city-sized ‘prison.’ Arkham City is a textbook example on how to do a proper sequel: take what worked in the original, excise or improve upon what didn’t, and elevate that concept to an even greater scope. The PC version suffered from a few months of delay, but in response Rocksteady (the talented UK developers of BAA) has reintroduced the NVIDIA exclusives from the last game such as PhysX and 3D Vision, along with new DirectX 11 optimizations. How well it was executed, however, is up for some debate.





Like its predecessor, BAC will have you performing amazing feats of martial prowess as you beat down hundreds of brain-dead henchmen in your efforts to make the world a little bit better. This time, however, you get to do it in a quarantined, run-down section of Gotham City that is completely open for you to explore. Also new to the series is the ability to play as Catwoman (and other characters), a slew of creative puzzles, and tons of side-quests and challenges that seriously extend the game’s content and replayability. Arkham City also throws in pretty much every imaginable villain in the franchise into one game for every DC Comics fan to cream over.




Taking place six months after the disastrous events on Arkham Island, Mayor Quincy Sharp (the Asylum’s former warden) has built a new prison to house all of Gotham’s less-than-savory residents. However, the prison is more like an anarchistic ghetto where it’s every man for himself, while the main villains (Two Face, Joker, and the Penguin) wage a gang-war on each other for territory. Understandably, Bruce Wayne/Batman is perplexed by the idiotic idea of a free realm devoted solely to crime and tries to get to the bottom of it. Along the way, there will be plot twists, new threads of mystery, an endless menagerie of villains to work with and against, as well as riddles to solve for (who else?) the Riddler.


The brilliant voice-over cast from the first game returns to reprise their respective roles, including another outstanding performance by Mark Hamill as the Joker, for the last time. Also returning are every single gadget from the original game, but you get four new tools to use in your crusade against crime. Detective Mode has also been revamped, along with the “Freeflow” combat system, and Unreal Engine 3 has never looked better.