Arkham Asylum was a huge hit, and nowadays anything related to the Christopher Nolan reimagining of the Batman franchise is pretty much a license to print money - so does Arkham City pull off the amazing win people were expecting it to?
Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann (5/5) feels the game appears a worthy successor to Asylum. "In the two years since Arkham Asylum, there hasn't really been anything like it until now. Getting another chance to use Batman's considerable combat talents as you engage in one of the best fighting systems going today is a joy. The city looks terrific, like it's one step away from just bursting into flames as criminals crawl across every single surface doing... whatever it is that criminals do when they're locked in a city-shaped prison. The interior areas look just as good, giving you a sense that, again, this is a realistic place that's been overrun. The voice acting, featuring plenty of the same cast members that performed so perfectly last time around, is incredibly sharp, with writing that fits what you'd expect from most of the different characters you face. But to sum it all up, it's hard to imagine any fan of action games coming away from Arkham City disappointed. It might not rewrite the book on Batman video games, but when you're building off of such a strong position--and you're only shipping the second game with such similarities, rather than a third or fourth--it's hard to bicker too much about what changes the developers did or didn't make."
Wired's Chris Kohler (9/10, spoilers) thinks he'll never get tired of the gameplay. "Arkham City is what every lesser open-world videogame wishes it could be, a few important pieces of core gameplay that have been polished to perfection, set in a wide-open city filled to the brim with things to do. And it does all this with narrative panache, spinning a story worthy of one of the world’s most famous superheroes. Weighed down by bloat though it may be, Batman: Arkham City is still one of the year’s finest games, filled with the capacity to surprise even players who’ve skulked through every inch of its predecessor."
Joystiq's Griffin McElroy (4.5/5) comes out of the review impressed with the polish Rocksteady has brought to this second franchise installment. "Rocksteady has moved closer to perfection with its second stab at this franchise, but the movement's come in inches. The motives of Arkham City's assemblage of villainous, would-be kingpins -- not to mention the motives of the Dark Knight himself -- never quite come together to form a compelling narrative. Still, the mechanical excellence and obsessive attention to environmental detail which surprised in Asylum have only been refined in City, and that's no easy task. Rocksteady has made the greatest Batman game ever crafted, and they've done that before. But breathing life into a staggeringly beautiful world; one which hums not only with opportunity, but ambition? That's a new trick altogether."
Destructoid's Jim Sterling (8.5/10) seems a little more muted in his response. "Batman: Arkham City tries to do too much and can come off a little heavy-handed, but that doesn't stop it from doing a vast amount of things right. It's a beautifully bleak game that constantly pays tribute to one of the greatest icons in comic book history and provides an experience that one can get lost in for hours. Its biggest problems lie in a combat system that manages to be too simple and too complex in the wrong areas, and this can often exasperate, but the overall product is one of the most absorbing and engrossing ones on the market."
Finally CNET's Jeff Bakalar and Dan Ackerman (no score) conclude Arkham City is the best Batman game ever made. "The game's biggest strength is something so many games lack: variety and pacing. Short segments of intense action are separated by more casual exploration and detective work, and players never find themselves doing the same thing for too long. There's still an over-reliance on the game's Batvision goggles, which can spot clues, see through walls, and probably reprogram your universal remote control. As in Arkham Asylum, it can become a crutch. Another small quibble: Batman's slow default walking speed worked fine in the confines of Arkham Asylum, but in the wide-open streets and rooftops of Gotham, you pretty much need to keep a finger hovering over the "run" button at all times. But minor issues aside, Arkham City still stands out as a must-play amid a crowded preholiday field, which already includes excellent games such as Gears of War 3, Deus Ex: Human Evolution, Rage, and Dead Island."
One final note of personal commentary here. I was not planning on purchasing Arkham City, partly because I really don't have the time to devote to it and partly because I'm feeling a little Bat-overwhelmed since The Dark Knight was released in 2008. I have little doubt, however, based on the reviews I have listed here and on my friends' enjoyment of Arkham Asylum that Arkham City is a game worth buying and playing, more so than whatever copy of Madden or Call of Duty that gets thrown at us this year. One of the features of Arkham City is that a portion of its missions involving Catwoman require either purchasing a retail copy of the game or purchasing an online pass, presumably to combat used game sales. While I know this is the sad reality of the game industry today, I don't think any reviewer should give a game containing such a mechanism a perfect score. While I know that a game review speaks to the initial retail quality of the game, the fact that there is crippling DRM in a game should exclude said game from earning the highest accolades - that is, if anyone who does the reviews wants to see the practice stopped.
