Arkham City

OK just for a change I thought I would post up about something else completely different and its...... the video game Batman Arkham City, which I recently finished on the PC.  Being a bit of a gamer I quite like playing a few games now and then, and I've spent the last few months mucking about with my PC trying to optimise it a bit more, by chopping and changing hardware.  I must admit though I have been doing this way too much lately, and I have finally grinded to a halt with the upgrading, which is just as well since I am currently out of work.

But anyway here is more about the game itself, as the plot focuses on Bruce Wayne (voiced by Kevin Conroy, who previously did Arkham Asylum)) at the start of the game being captured by the villanous Hugo Strange (Corey Burton), and left at the mercy of the prison population of Arkham City.  Arkham City itself is a section of Gotham City that has been closed off and populated by the low life, criminals and other villains that inhabit or inhabited Gotham.  Wayne is left to the limited mercy of the Penguin, but he manages to escape and climbs to the rooftops where he contacts his butler Alfred, who sends him a package with his batman suit.  Wayne puts on his Batman outfit and then scouts Arkham City to try and locate Catwoman (Grey DeLisle) who has been captured by Harvey "Two-Face" Dent (Troy Baker).  Batman soon finds Catwoman and rescues her from Two Face who he ties up over a pit of acid and leaves him there, but at this point a bullet is fired at Catwoman, which misses.  Batman then scans and analyses the trajectory of the bullet to where it came from, and soon finds out that the Joker was behind the assassination.  Batman on tracking down the Joker finds out that his arch-villain has been infected with a compound known as Titan that is slowly killing him, and Joker captures Batman and straps him to a chair, wired up to a drip which Joker has injected his blood into Batman.  Joker then kicks Batman through a window, who now has to try and find a cure, as he too will die if he doesn't.  Batman then tries to locate Freeze, who he believes may have the cure for the Titan virus, but after a battle between the two, Freeze tells him there is no known cure, but there is one hope that if he can mix a compound which he created with an old foe of Batman's, Ra's Al Ghul, then he might have a chance to survive.  In the meantime Hugo Strange is planning on using his Titan compound to wipe out the population of Arkham City, which he calls Protocol 10.  So Batman has to both try and find the cure for the Titan formulae and stop Protocol 10 from happening.

Batman Arkham City is a terrific follow up to the excellent Batman Arkham Asylum, and it features a great cast of villains and colourful characters.  The voice acting here is top notch, with Kevin Conroy giving a fine performance as Batman, and he always plays the dark knight with such great confidence, and at times he sounds almost arrogant.  Mark Hamill also makes a great return as the demented and villaneous Joker, and plays the character with usual amount of insane glee and viciousness.  It also highlights what a good actor Mark Hamill really is, and how underrated he is as a performer, whether he is on screen or behind it.  The other voice actors are also very good, although I'm kind of surprised that they always seem to go for making a few of the villains with English accents, such as the Penguin and Freeze.  The plot is also really compelling and it keeps you interested in what is going on, and it helps with the voice acting being of such a high calibre. 

Gameplay wise, Arkham City is superb, as the controls are very easy to use and the combat system is great, with a whole variety of upgrades available for Batman, including gadgets as well as new combat moves and combos.  You also get to play as Catwoman, which isn't too bad either, as its not bad watching a saucy looking video game character, with a great butt in leather running round the rooftops.  However one gripe I had about the controls was the use of Batman's gliding and using the dive bomb move, this was especially really annoying to use in the fantasy scene where Batman has to follow Ra's Al Ghul through his virtual reality world, because if you touch any part of the world you die, and I kept dying over and over, trying to get use to the dive bomb mode!!  But that's about my only real grip about the game.  

Graphically the game is also great, and the environments are beautifully realised with great detail, however I did find the game was a bit jittery and buggy now and then on the PC.  Being a new release, it also features DirectX 11 enhancements such as texturing and tessellation (which basically means texturing of shapes leaving no gaps, such as honeycombs and tiling).  But I did find these to be quite buggy aswell, so I turned off the Directx 11 features, and it runs much smoother without them from what I heard.  With updated drivers this will no longer be a problem I'd imagine, but in the end its just some fancy features which just adds a little bit of eye candy to the image.  Basically Arkham City is quite a demanding game PC wise so you do need quite a powerful system to run it, in fact I had read the recommended requirement for a graphics card was a Radeon HD 6970, and I only have a 6870, which is fast as it is! 

Another very noteworthy aspect of the game is its music score, which is absolutely superb, and it sounds similar to the music from Christopher Nolan's Batman films.  However this score also has its own feel to it, and there are many great dramatic passages in there, and the theme tune used on the menu screen is really good, as soon as you hear the score you know its a good one. 

Soooooooo that's my critique on Batman Arkham City, its a great game and a superb follow up to Arkham Asylum, so if you are a gamer and haven't tried it yet, give it a go as you will not be disappointed.