Batman: Arkham City

I wonder if the rest of the Justice League gathers around the Fortress of Solitude and gossips amongst themselves their envy towards Batman. Superman doesn’t get to appear in any award-winning video games. Wonder Woman wished that the rest of the world spoke in hush tones about anything she’s done the way the world does the Christopher Nolan Batman films. Green Lantern fantasizes about having an animated series that matches what cartoon Batmen has done over the years. I’m sure Martian Manhunter would love the attention of being in something as ironically revered as the Adam West series. Hell, in a parallel universe, Wolverine nudges up to Spiderman and says “hey bub, I wish Activision would stop dicking us over and make a real game like Batsy over there.” I guess talent is just drawn to the Dark Knight and his broody pecs. Maybe it’s because DC Comics learned hard lessons after the Batman and Robin movie nippled its way into existence. Maybe it’s just because Activision obtained the Marvel license just to spite the world.

2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum was developed by people that clearly have a high opinion of Batman. They understand that Batman has no qualms being outnumbered 20 to 1, and that being left alone in a room filled with thugs armed with AK-47s is a horrifying experience for the armed thugs. Batman is a character so badass that only traumatizing childhood experiences can bring him to his knees, and even that requires hallucinogenic gases. That passion for vengeance, justice and gargoyle statues translates over to Batman: Arkham City, a game that ventures further into the psychopathic pathos that comes with breaking bones and collecting green trophies with question marks on them.

The titular Arkham City is a decrepit part of Gotham City transformed into a giant prison, I guess because economic times are rough and building new prisons isn’t a good use of Gotham’s tax dollars. (What with all that money being spent repairing all those buildings the Joker keeps destroying and all.) Being that the prison is operated by Hugo Strange, a man you know is evil based on his facial hair, something is amiss and Batman must deduce what. This game signifies that “Batman: Arkham Subtitle” is a new set of Batman fiction with a specific continuity separate from the comics and not a random schlep of trademarked characters slapped into a single game like every other comic-book game. The events of Arkham Asylum carry over here, and new events happen with a great amount of weight and impact.

How unfair it is; between the Nolan movies, the comics and now this series of games, that Batman fans have three different continuities to be excited about. The Justice League have every right to be jealous.

Rocksteady Games makes a note to expand on every element of Arkham Asylum that people loved. The combat is still based on timing button presses to strike and counter in a way that better resembles action movie scuffles than a video game melee fight. After all, Batman is too cool to do air combos. But subtle tweaks, like being able to counter several people at once, or do a bread-basket focused assault on a single foe’s solar-plexus makes things feel more dynamic. The game also makes sure to assign a bevy of shortcuts to quick-use all of Batman’s MANY gadgets. Want to quickly whip out some explosive gel to freak out enemies? You can. (Don’t worry, Batman isn’t fazed by such simple things as C4.) In a way, Arkham City is the Anti-Wii in that it not only uses every button on the controller, but in two-three different ways as to really confuse your brain’s wiring. Practice makes perfect, just look at Batman’s first year.

(Note: That Batman: Year One cartoon was okay I guess. The Red Hood one was better.)

That big, yellow utility belt also serves to make the stealth bits more satisfying. The core idea is unchanged; you perch on gargoyle statues and try to silently outwit armed goons and watch as they get progressively more terrified of you. The biggest innovation is that sometimes you aren’t perched on gargoyle statues! Sometimes they’re just metal structures placed around the facility akin to gargoyle statues! You also have new ways to play with your foes. Like a remote control that will sabotage a guard’s gun without them being awares. Or an electric blast that triggers one’s allergic reaction to high voltage.

If you focus on following the linear storyline, you’ll quickly realize that you are playing through Arkham Asylum. A more refined version of Arkham Asylum that seems to have more villains than they know what to do with, but still Arkham Asylum. (No, seriously. Two-Face seems to be shoved into the storyline for no reason other than to be another leader of hired goons.) The big difference comes when you’re allowed to explore the world at large. Arkham City is indeed a sizable mini-city, a city filled with hoodlums who don’t have much faith in their employers. No one ever says “boy, our boss the Joker sure is a swell pal. I’m glad I chose the life of crime.” There’s an awful lot of radio chatter from assorted goons that set a tone, though I sure do miss the Joker’s passive-aggressive, sometimes very aggressive death threats over the Asylum PA.

Within this city is a bevy of Riddler trophies and side-quests that will easily overwhelm a new player. The worst moment of playing Arkham City is the first hour, when your Batcomputer explodes with waypoints about sidequests, and a young, nubile new Batman player just doesn’t know what to do. It’s even more dangerous to your senses when you explore the city and realize that there are more Riddler trophies on the streets than litter. The new travel mechanics, which consist of Batclaw-rappelling and a more exciting variation on Super Mario World’s cape flight, make navigating around the city a pleasant and speedy experience at the least.

All of that side stuff is going to take an awful amount of time to do. Most of the side-quests relate to assorted Batman characters in an interesting way. Some of them just feel like decisive game-lengthening excuses to pad out the time it takes to reach the vaunted “100%” status. There are 440 Riddler tasks that one must do before you can confront the Riddler. As of this writing, I’m merely at 200. Many of them are tied to some kind of mini-puzzle contraption of sorts, so at least there’s a sense that some care went into the preceedings.

Still, it’s hard to not feel like corporate executives put some hard pressure on developers Rocksteady to make this game as resale-unfriendly as possible. The campaign is a decent 10-12 hours, but I feel that time can be more than doubled if one is crazy enough to venture for all of the side content. Then there’s the whole Catwoman ordeal. There are indeed segments of the game where you play as the walking fetish generator. Catwoman only plays slightly differently from Batman in that she has less toy gimmicks, but can climb walls like a spid…cat. But still, these segments factor into the main plot, and certain Riddler trophies can only be collected by Miss Kyle.

But alas, you won’t be able to play through those segments without an online pass. As someone that bought the game new, this didn’t affect me beyond the half hour it took to download all 320MB of Catwoman. But I never felt inclined to sell my copy of Arkham Asylum. That title was so damn exquisite that I was obligated to revisit it time and time again just to remind myself. This whole online pass business is a very gross reminder that men in suits want to make every dollar possible by any means necessary. What’s to stop the next Batman game from making you buy every thrown Batarang with real money?

Until that horrible day comes, we can at least take solace in knowing that Arkham City is an excellent title. I could have easily saved the hour it took to write this by saying “if you liked Arkham Asylum, you’ll like this”, as that is truly what it all boils down to. Still, there are two very telling feelings that preach to the quality of the game. One is my personal sense of obligation to go back and collect all of those vile Riddler trophies. The other is disgust knowing that my online rental service sent me Spiderman: Edge of Time, and that I should probably play that next. Wish me luck.

4 ½ stars

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Hey, check it, transhumanism! I think Deus Ex: Human Revolution is trying to be an ominous prophecy of the dangerous melding of flesh and machine. The thing is that I don’t know if that’s so much a future thing than a present thing. We’re already being augmented with laser eye surgery, replacement limbs, Taylor Lautner’s hair and other things that cannot be considered natural in any way, shape or form. Are mechanical 2-foot arms concealing 6-foot blades that much more unethical than Tiger Woods’ enhanced eyesight? We’re already uploading our music collections to the Cloud, is uploading our consciousness to Amazon that far removed? Bring on the mothatrucking Singularity, folks!

I have much adoration for Human Revolution in attempting to let players pick sides in the maybe-edgy issue of man and machine becoming one. But the problem with the game’s approach is that the main character is a half-man-half-machine-all-cop who stabs sentries with his humerus knives and conceals sunglasses behind his orbital bone. So the game is already innately inching players towards “augmentations are fucking badass!” The only rebuttal the game offers to that argument is that your character can only stab as many people as he has charged batteries in…wherever it is he places batteries. Also, he replenishes his battery power with chocolate bars. So if you’re anti-obesity, I guess you’re also anti-transhumanism.

Deus Ex stars Adam Jensen, a security guy for whom emergency augmentation surgery transforms him from generic brooding soldier to generic brooding soldier with Blades of Steel and a giant arrow above his head screaming “I have a shocking secret.” Until he figures out that secret secret, he’s going to help the augmentation company he works for figure out whom was behind the terrorist attack that cost him his boring human arms. I don’t think I’d call the plot itself especially interesting, and anyone that heard a thing or two about a thing or two about Deus Ex 1 already knows what the Big Reveal™ is.

But it’s the world itself that makes Human Revolution intriguing. This game’s version of the post-machine future is as weird as you’d think it is. Implants are fetishized, machine-based drugs are causing an addiction pandemic, augmented people are hated by the general population due to sheer envy of their awesomeness, corporations are more evil and sinister than ever, and I don’t think the sun exists anymore. It’s fascinating to explore the various settings, see the curious augmentation advertisements, hack into computers and learn the culture of each company. (Hint: people are either angry, scared, or pulling porn spam pranks that were comical in 1999.) You do learn very quickly, that no one in the future is capable of remembering passwords, and must rely on sending themselves and their coworkers e-mails and hoping that their rivals don’t have a Level 4 Hacking skill.

Very critical disclaimer: the Deus Ex franchise has never been kind to me. Deus Ex 1 is such a pure combination of action and RPG elements the likes of which I can never be made to comprehend. When I aim my handgun pointblank at someone’s temple, I feel cheated when a dice roll based on my firearms rating sides with temple. I’m so inept at bizarre stat-based action RPGs, I couldn’t even get into the dumbed down, baby’s first conspiracy thriller in that Deus Ex sequel. Human Revolution’s hardest difficulty setting is labeled as “Give Me Deus Ex”, and I shrieked! No! Please! Don’t give me too much Deus Ex. I’m Deus Ex Intolerant. I could cramp up real bad.

So I set the difficulty to the easiest given choice, “Give Me A Story.” I assumed that the game would dumb itself down enough that I could just breeze through the Deus Exey parts and admire Adam Jensen’s vicious arm blades. However, I quickly learned that I was misled. Cybernetic implants do little to keep my vitals free of enemy lead, it seems, and death is swift and frequent. Really, the one aspect of the game that was noticeably dumbed down was how the number of hack attempts given to break into any given machine would never diminish. So at the least, I felt comfortable that I could take all the time in the world breaking into a laptop and find all the penis augmentation spam ads I desired.

I also noticed that the game presented a more seamless and intelligent combination of those action and RPG elements that made me previously dread receiving more Deus Ex. When I aimed at someone’s head, I was kiiiiiiind of certain that one of those bullets would stay within my aiming reticle, in spite of any and all imaginary dice rolls. Your character isn’t leveling up a series of numbers that loosely resemble one’s ability to swim faster. You are making upgrade choices that have a practical and immediate impact on how you play.

For example, when you decide to purchase an upgrade that lets you punch through walls, suddenly all of these walls begin to glow, and new paths appear. Actually, I was so impressed with the might of my steel knuckles that I would smash through every wall smashable, regardless of relevance to my quest or guards with working eardrums. Most upgrade choices have a very real, practical impact on how the game is played. Suddenly, new paths open, stealth and/or gunplay become more plausible, and there are walls that have no business being left unpunched.

The game’s first few hours are among the most frustrating, if only because so many paths and options are blocked off on account of your lack of iron fists and poor stats. Every Praxis Point spent counts. A Praxis Point spent Practically makes you feel like a genius for running into a enemy gun turret that can be hacked or a wall that can be haymakered. (And I was giving many self-high-fives for that wall punch upgrade.) A Praxis Point spent impractically is aggravating. Avoid the “cone of vision” upgrade. Despite what you want to think, this game is not Metal Gear Solid; enemies have a field of vision wider than three feet ahead of them, and stealth requires a bit of thought and luck. Many of my early Praxis Point decisions were spent on trying to make my personal Adam Jenson not suck, in such areas as more inventory space or better hacking skills or such. By the end of the game, almost every area you want upgraded will be covered and you’ll have a mechanical jack of all trades.

Actually, the real worst moments are the boss fights, where you have to deal with superhumans with much more health and munitions than you unloading all of those health and munitions unto your iron pancreas. I had specked my character to be more firearms-friendly, on the easiest difficulty no less, and I was still finding myself cybermurdered repeatedly. I still had to do an awful lot of loading and saving every time I escaped 5 seconds of the boss fight with my head and sexy knuckles intact.

Endings are kind of dull, too.

Still, the biggest shock about Deus Ex: Human Revolution is that I actually found myself kind of half-liking it. There was a great deal of growing pains as I struggled to wrap my mind around the benefits of hacking computers or not murdering guards. But the game did manage to make all of its ideas click, by hook or by cybernetic crook. Not every person should play Human Revolution, but the person who wants nothing handed to them but the opportunity to make several unpleasant gameplay choices perhaps should.

3 ½ stars

X-Men: Destiny

One looks back at the lineage of X-Men games over the years, and sees that it’s a flimsy one. There have been great games, there have been less than great games. One can make the argument that the future for all mutantkind progressed as a species once LJN got their mitts off the franchise. But the one consistent fact about all of those titles is that they only have a skin-deep understanding of X-Men’s themes. You are with the good mutants, Magneto is with the bad mutants, you let the optic blasts sort out the rest. That Konami arcade game might fit into this group, I dunno, I remember Magneto welcoming me to die and maybe falling in a trap or two but that’s about it. There’s never any kind of attempt to explore the themes of racism that the (good) bits of X-Men fiction are so known for addressing.

So kudos to X-Men: Destiny for at least trying to take a gander at the ideas of segregation within the franchise. The game opens with a rally of some kind to unite all the people of different skin colours under one person that will obviously turn out to be the villain. Bad things happen, Race A blames the problems on Race B, and tensions fly. The player controls one of three plebian mutants that gets involved in the conflict, and can (in theory) choose to side with the X-Men’s Martin Luther King Jr. approach to racial conflict or Malcolm X-it-up with the brotherhood, serving the Honorable Elijah Magneto.

…or that’s how things appear at the onset. There’s a meter at the pause menu that fills up in favour of the X-Men or Brotherhood based on whose missions you choose to do. However, the mission structure never changes much. Good or evil, you are still beating up legions of the same bad guys. I guess they affect which muties fights alongside you. They probably affect which bosses you fight, but I went with the pro-X-Men path and I still spent more time fighting fellow X-Men than I did the Brotherhood threat.

See, the game does that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 trick of teasing a moral choice based on thought-provoking themes, but then pairing both sides of the conflict against a common generic force of evil trying to destroy the world. So the “pick a side on this touchy issue” business means nothing in the end and serves to make me feel stupid for writing those first two paragraphs in this review. The loot drops and rewards for quests seem to be randomly generated too and have no basis in your moral choices. Maybe the Brotherhood ending is different from the X-Men ending, I have no way of finding out since I can’t seem to find that ending on Youtube. I sure as shit ain’t beating this game twice. So really, the difference between choosing between one side over the other is a matter of whether you find polygonal Emma Frost sexier than polygonal Mystique.

So you either choose to play as a hokey football jock, a hokey Asian stereotype or a guy that looks like a hokey football jock. You then choose whether you want your drone to have energy blast powers, shadow blade powers or rock hand powers. The three choices lead to different ability unlocks later in the game, but all amount to the exact same type of God of War-derivative style of action combat that dominates the entire game.

The combat itself is competent, if a tad imprecise and clunky. Rare is the confrontation that your mutant can’t keep his or her archtypical ass up and thrive. There’s one boss fight that comes in three stages, with no checkpoints or health power-ups, that stood out as one obscenely difficult challenge in a series of otherwise breezy and repetitive fights. I’m at least willing to karmatically forgive that specific part of the game thanks to a more interesting boss battle with a very giant, very nimble, very fly Sentinel,. I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that you will indeed fight a giant Sentinel. That one boss fight is really the game’s one other strong point, besides how the game’s script and voice acting can sometimes be so hilariously, unintentionally bad.

See, the the game uses that God of War-derivative combat as the answer to every question. Did you just walk into a new room? Stop and beat up these 50 enemies within 3 minutes. Did you decide you’d rather accept a bonus mission from your broski Colossus instead that poser Quicksilver? Here’s a combat arena with two or three of that flamethrower mini-bosses. Did you try to explore the environment looking for hidden secrets? Here’s a combat arena as a reward. Just finished the game? Be treated to the largest combat arena of them all as the end credits roll. Over and over and over again, you will be locked in a room and asked to defeat X number of the same human goons the X-Men are sworn to protect. The only time you aren’t beating up human beings and reinforcing negative mutant stereotypes is spent climbing and speed-shimmying along ledges that are so brief and easy to navigate that they don’t exist for any reason other than to give your knuckles a break from jaw-cracking.

There’s a loot system that seems to randomly generate “X-genes” as rewards for exploring or doing way more combat arenas than the game forces you into. These power-ups are named and based after various characters, so you can give your character Colossus-like steel skin or Iceman-like…err…ice skin, or what have you. It’s nice that the game has SOME kind of character progression, but it feels immoral that your dullard protagonist can casually steal the unique identity traits of iconic characters that are infinitely more interesting than they are. And that leads to the greatest lesson that needs to be learned from this experience.

Call it the DC Universe Online quandary. It’s obvious that Silicon Knights spent a lot of time designing character models for all of the X-Men, as well as moves and effects so they can fight alongside your character. So why are we not controlling the X-Men themselves instead of these three new generic imitators? Once upon a time, Electronic Arts made a spectacular failure called Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects. That was a very middling game where Marvel characters battle Electronic Arts-created heroes. All of the EA heroes came across as cheap knockoffs that will never be seen in another video game, comic, movie or Playboy spread again. No superhero I could ever create will ever come across as more intriguing than Nightcrawler, nuanced as Magneto or Canadian as Wolverine, so please give me the real deal.

If I want to make my own dream superhero, City of Heroes just went free to play. Champions Online is free to play. DC Universe Online is to play. Putting a pencil to a piece of paper and writing my own comic books is free to play.

This is neither an especially noteworthy action adventure, nor the ideal use of the X-Men license you are looking for. It’s also sadly not the comeback I was hoping Silicon Knights would make, though I guess the Silicon Knights that made Blood Omen and Eternal Darkness are too busy raising families and enjoying life to make anymore dark fantasy action titles. Go play X-Men Legends. Go play X-Men Legends 2. Go play the X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game. Go even play that wackyass Konami beat-em-up on XBLA. I promise they’re all much better than this.

2 stars.