Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Of Batmen and Catwomen!

Not so long ago, I finally sat down and finished playing through Batman: Arkham Asylum, and it was good. It was real good, one of the Batmanniest games I’ve ever played. It captured a very specific kind of lightning in a bottle, allowing players to slip into a very specific, very tenuous power fantasy rooted in playing a total badass who, despite his capacity for action, is still quite vulnerable, both physically and emotionally. It was an incredible gameplay experience, one that I wouldn’t have guessed would be surpassed any time soon.

Then Rocksteady Games released Batman: Arkham City, and kicked it up a notch. There’s fundamentally not much difference in the way each of these games plays. The combat mechanics and movement mechanics are actually almost totally unchanged. But a handful of new toys, paired with a totally new approach to map design, have fixed issues that I didn’t know existed in Arkham Asylum, issues that are now glaringly obvious.

For example, did you know that Arkham Asylum had terrible map design? It really did! The maps were mostly long corridors, and even the outdoor areas were confining in their own way. And navigating these areas was often just unfun, a great way to kill a power fantasy. I never thought about how fun gliding as Batman was in Arkham Asylum; in fact on a few occasions I lamented how slowly I’d glide about as I drifted towards a mass of enemies, longing to lash out at them with my Bat-fists. Arkham City addresses both these concerns handily, by both revamping movement mechanics and introducing a new overmap which is actually enjoyable to navigate.

Instead of a series of gated areas, there’s a big open space for you to jump around in Arkham City, a literal city of tightly designed little puzzles and quests. Moving from place to place within it is an absolute joy, and occasional races and movement challenges where you’re asked to glide in a specific fashion are a joy to try your hand at. Moving through this rich landscape is further augmented by a set of new movement mechanics that make gliding a more nuanced experience than simply holding down the spacebar. Now players can regain momentum by swooping downward and coming back up on an upcurrent. They can use their bat grapple to gain momentum by overshooting their target and glide with even more energy than before instead of just tapping F when appropriate. There are gaps to slide through, alleys to run across… And a whole new character with her own way of moving across the map: Catwoman.

I’ve only had the pleasure of playing as Catwoman twice, but so far it’s been a pleasure. Her mechanics are different enough, without muddying the core play, to really prevent Batman’s movement and combat mechanics from growing monotonous (there’s a phrase I never thought I’d write). And the parallel story is light and amoral where Batman is moralistic and brooding, funny and serious both with a little bit of sexy thrown in. She’s a perfect tonal break from the rest of the game. It makes me feel pampered, it’s so good: if I tire of beating up baddies in the name of justice I’ll get a chance to lie, cheat and steal with some delicate stealth mechanics and a delicious new flavor. She even has her own collectibles, centered around a series of movement puzzles every bit as rich and nuanced as Batman’s (though, to date, they’re a great deal less frustrating). Her focus on fluid, carefully conserved momentum and grace is so refreshing, and scrambling up the side of a building, getting little bits of apparently insignificant feedback along the way, is both distinct from and every bit as pleasant as gliding across the city, pausing only to use my grapple to vault myself ahead.

The end result is an uninterrupted, fictionally consistent flow of play that varies just enough to keep the game from ever growing into a slog with a carefully selected array of minimalist gameplay elements that vary without over-varying, differing just enough that the play seems to develop a different flavor rather than a really different feel. You’ll always be eating a popsicle while you’re playing Arkham City, but what flavor popsicle? What shape? Who cares? It’s a good fuckin’ popsicle. That’s the compact they’re making here. If you enjoy the sort of experience Arkham Asylum introduced you’ll enjoy Arkham City. You’ll even see solutions to problems, now quite apparent, that you didn’t notice in Arkham Asylum while you were playing it. From a structural perspective it’s fascinating that Rocksteady has developed such a polished and well rounded piece of game. From a storytelling perspective, it’s essentially a well crafted exquisite corpse: all the elements of greatness are there, but they’re disjointed and non-sensical. If you’re looking for a cogent narrative, Arkham City will just barely deliver, if you ask it hard enough to. You’re going to have to do a lot of the work as a reader, putting the pieces of the story together and making the leaps of faith that it requires. But you’re not here because you wanted to read a good book: you’re here because you wanted to be Batman, and in a sense Batman has always been catalogued by the tumultuous, nigh insensate array of events that permit him to interact with his rogues’ gallery. His narratives, while fine by comic book standards, are often less interested in developing a character (Batman’s been Batman for a long while, and his uncompromising dedication to justice is, in a sense, one of his strongest character traits) than they are with presenting readers with a barrage of cool, symbolic people for Batman to fight.

If you look at the narrative of Arkham City in this light, its’ sloppily arrayed thematic barrage is just another feather in its stylish Batman chapeau. By making its story a little dicey, it taps into the appeal of the books and retains a great deal of what makes them great: the variety, the wonderful inconsistency and the splashing, tremendously wonderful noise of Batman’s world is not a place where complex stories emerge. It’s a place where larger than life archetypes clash and inconclusively part, a place where actions are repeated again and again, where climactic action is a temporary gain against a foe who, by nature of Batman’s world, must be stored for later use in one of the varied mythical prisons that dot the DC Universe like In-And-Out Burgers.

I’m far from done with Batman: Arkham City at this point. It could emerge as something completely different in its third act, something with a strong, coherent narrative I can really sink my teeth into. But I don’t need it to, and frankly don’t want it to. I want it to be beautifully erratic and varied. I want it to be deliciously silly and deadly serious in the same beat. I want to fight sharks on icebergs while I rescue besieged police officers. I want to glibly find the cure to a disease I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist in my blood while pausing to fly through glowing hoops for bonus points. I don’t want to have someone guide me through a Bioshocky experience. If I wanted that, I’d go play Bioshock.

Fuck that. I’m here to hang out with Batman.