Batman: Arkham City review

More than most superheroes, Batman is defined by his limits. And so was Arkham Asylum. In taking the Dark Knight out of Gotham, Rocksteady didn't fulfil players' keenest Batman fantasy – that of swooping over a corrupted city before diving to earth to dispense vigilante justice. What we got in return, however, was a Batman so flawlessly attuned to his environment that it was hard to imagine him out of it. A terrifying blend of gymnast and wrestler, Batman's picking off, one by one, of the Joker's quaking minions in the game's stealth-themed rooms was an exercise in utter dominance of a tightly controlled space. His utility belt, meanwhile, bristled with a set of tools tailor-made for negotiating the asylum's Metroid-structured interiors and occasional open areas.

But after its introduction, Arkham City places you on the highest floor of a skyscraper, with a city at your feet. The effect is very nearly disorienting, if only for the sumptuous level of detail on offer. The wintry Arkham City is a carved-up and cut-off hunk of Gotham, a glorious mix of neon and sodium, rusted metal, soot and black stone. And the structure you're standing on, by the way, is the Ace Chemicals building: the place where a no-name hoodlum fell into a vat of chemicals and the Joker emerged. Your first objective, meanwhile, is the district courthouse where Harvey Dent was cruelly disfigured and became Two-Face. And a little distance away, as the bat flies, is the alleyway where a young Bruce Wayne watched as his mother and father were murdered.

Just as Asylum's madhouse setting allowed Rocksteady to bring a host of Batman's villains together in a relatively confined space (a trick repeated here), Arkham City has allowed the studio to pick and choose landmarks from Gotham's history in the creation of its environment. This is a city in which every street corner feels lovingly authored, visually unique and dripping with DC lore, trumping Asylum for detail and character despite the increased scale.

Two simple tweaks to Batman's controls make that scale easily navigable. The first is an early upgrade to his grappling hook that lets you fling Batman into the air rather than pull him on to a surface. The second is a dive-bomb manoeuvre that can be used to gain height and speed. Just as Arkham Asylum's combat captured Batman's devastating elegance in a scrum, Arkham City's flight controls offer a graceful, exhilarating freedom, tempered by just the right skill requirement to ensure that taking to the skies is always engaging.

In breaking out of the madhouse, Arkham City has also broken up the first game's labyrinthine, Metroid and Castlevania-inspired level design. Arkham City is a less interconnected place than the asylum, with interiors that, especially in its opening hours, feel smaller and more boxed-off from one another. This has a knock-on effect on the game's pacing. Whereas Asylum was a giant level through which Rocksteady could predict a player's path, drip-feeding set-pieces and diversions as needed, Arkham City is a series of isolated set-pieces you swoop between at your own pace.

Eventually, however, the interiors begin to resemble meatier chunks of the first game. A chilly museum taken over by Arkham City's vicious cockney gangster of a Penguin is a highlight, every exhibit containing a relic of his defeated foes (with gloating narration provided by the squat villain himself, of course). And a journey beneath the city surface is an archaeological expedition beginning in abandoned subway tunnels and culminating in a rather unexpected find. Objectives crisscross the map, encouraging you to stumble across the many sidequests placed en route. These include ringing phones that send you rushing across the city before Victor Zsasz claims another victim, political prisoners that need protecting from Arkham's less innocent inmates, and the Riddler's protracted game of cat-and-mouse across the breadth of the city.

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The core of the game – the three pillars of stealthy predation, combat and exploration – remains unchanged. Of those pillars, it's combat that bears most of Arkham City's weight. The elegant, flowing system of Arkham Asylum has been retained, with a few additions. It's easier to weave Batman's gadgets into combos, for a start, and a handful of new enemy types have emerged, including knife-wielding foes requiring a series of timed dodges to avoid. Enemies with guns still need to be taken on more cautiously – and have learned to counter your advantages. Henchmen wearing thermal scanners can pick out a crafty Caped Crusader hidden above them, whereas others wear a signal jammer that renders your X-ray detective vision useless. The need to swoop in and take out these individuals quickly impinges on your ability to skulk around the edges of rooms, picking off stragglers at leisure.

And the bosses are vastly improved. The first game's habit of pitting you against a steroidal, hulking brute hasn't been entirely broken, but these duels are interspersed with encounters truer to the nature of the supervillains you're facing than the finale of Asylum ever was. One fight, towards the middle of the game, deftly enforces you to think creatively about the full potential of your inventory, while another continues to mine the surrealist vein the Scarecrow sections of the first game introduced.

If much of Arkham City is iterative, cautiously upgrading systems that were more than fit for purpose first time around, then Catwoman is a more disruptive presence. Quick, lithe and outrageously sexualised (she often seems to be flirting with herself), she plays similarly to Batman yet feels nothing like him. Where Batman looks down on Arkham City from the air, she slinks and leaps across its rooftops, her whip pulling her towards vertical surfaces which must be crawled up with a few extra taps of the shoulder button. And while her combat skills are based on the same template, her counters and takedown animations exude a very different personality. She can use Batman's perches in stealth sections, but is better suited to crawling upside down across the ceiling. She's proof of the flexibility of Rocksteady's mechanics (given, at least, a suitably human hero), and that no developer is better at capturing comic book powers in-game.

Indeed, Catwoman is so fully fleshed-out that her slight presence in the game comes as a disappointment. Her few chapters are distributed unevenly across the adventure, and she's such an effective palate cleanser you wish you could see more of her. She's not the only character to feel underutilised in Arkham City, either. The game's premise, which sees different parts of the city claimed by supervillains vying for both power and screen time, lends Rocksteady's environmental artists a chance to give each section of the prison city a distinct personality, but comes at the expense of the intensity of the Joker-Batman dynamic offered in the previous game. Hugo Strange, the new warden of Arkham and the game's nominal primary antagonist, is a particular casualty of the packed rogues gallery, reduced to a background presence for much of the game.

But around the point that Strange's plans are revealed, Rocksteady cashes in on the open-world setting in a big way. Events spill out from interiors into the city itself in a manner only hinted at by the chases and search-and-destroy missions early on, leading into a series of – literally – escalating set-pieces. The stakes are raised considerably, and it's hard not to be caught up in the final act's breathless pace. The asylum setting has its advantages, but dramatic scale isn't one of them.

There's a wealth of content here once the drama's over, too. Wrapping up sidequests and Riddler collectibles could easily take hours, though it's fair to say that tracking down every last trinket is slightly less fun in a large, open environment. The challenge rooms, however, are an even greater diversion than before, thanks to Catwoman providing a second distinct moveset to master. As well as the combat and predator challenges from the first game, new 'campaigns' string multiple rooms together and limit your retries. And throughout the entire experience there's a steady feed of concept artwork, character trophies and backstory.

So if Arkham Asylum was defined by its limits, Arkham City is a careful, considered exercise in stripping those limits away. Its open city lets players be a different kind of Batman to the stealthy predator of Asylum – this is the Batman of dropped smoke pellets and theatrical getaways, the Batman with an ear to the ground for the strong picking on the weak, and the Batman who floats above the city with a gothic majesty. It's less focused, but more diverse, a miniseries rather than Asylum's moody one-shot. And at its heart, Rocksteady's defining take on its star remains just as you always imagined him – kicking, punching, sneaking and now flying. Arkham City might be filled with landmarks to visit and villains to smite, but being the Batman is still its primary draw, and Rocksteady doesn't let you forget it. [9]

Xbox 360 version tested.

Look out in our next issue, out October 25, for an interview with Rocksteady principals Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker about their relationships with Batman and Catwoman.