Batman: Arkham City

This game's contribution to gaming history should be as example #1 in a design seminar about the importance of affordances. As, like, this is what you should not do.

But first, let's say something good about it. It's chock-full of Riddler puzzles and many of them are clever and fun, and even reaching them can be a puzzle. This is by far the highlight of the gameplay. But also some are very not fun, either because they rely on the finicky controls, or because they require you to find tiny objects in the huge, dark map, or are just out-of-place kindergarten-level riddles. There are also just far, far too many of them. Getting 100% will be a chore.

OK, on to what's really bad about this game.

Far too many essential mechanics are either poorly explained in a small note hidden deep in the menus or never explained at all. Too many times I had to look up solutions on the web only to discover that the game never taught me that I could do something very basic. Like being able to glide off walls, or that run-and-skid can go for a long time indeed, or that letting go of the glide button will automatically level you, or that flying into a wall will break it, etc. There are countless examples. And these trick moves are entirely unexpected if you consider that Batman can't do many rudimentary things. Like, jump. That's right! You can swing between buildings like a neurotic Spider-Man but can't jump. Except if you're in combat, in which case you can jump over people. It's as if the game tries to be as counterintuitive as possible.

Controls are generally abysmal. Traversing the open world is a sequence of halting moves and clumsy maneuvering around obstacles and generally feels like shaving with a butter knife. Your grapnel has a mind of its own and often it wants to take you to a building a few blocks away from where you want to go. Things are equally bad in combat, which is surprisingly even worse than in Arkham Asylum. The only fighting I enjoyed was stealth, which allowed for some basic tactics rather than just the boring mashing of buttons.

Really, this game is a step down from Arkham Asylum in many ways. Even the presentation is worse! Though the visual engine is more expressive, the designers made some poor choices. The city is washed out in an extremely low-contrast palette so details get lost unless you're standing right in front of them. This is "complemented" by a lot of decidedly clownish bright light points that distract from the little substance that's there. And with some notable exceptions the voice acting is dull, dull, dull. It feels like there's one actor doing the voices of all the NPCs, and it's always a tired wise guy cliché.

Arkham Asylum did not have an open world but it had big, complex interiors that were a joy to explore. Most buildings here are just a few rooms. And there's a load screen every time you move from the city to the building and back, which utterly breaks immersion.

As for the story, well, true to the open world formula there are a series of plots happening in parallel. This ends up making none of them feel urgent or important and indeed they do not cohere to a single narrative thread. The writing is generally sub par.

I find it incredible that Arkham City gets so many rave reviews. All in all it's a frustrating and mediocre game. The puzzles are fun, but as a whole I cannot recommend it.