...Should probably have mentioned that I didn\'t like that one of my favorite things about Asylum, the patient interviews, were locked behind, again, the open-world busywork that is entire rows of Riddler challenges. Oh well. For all I know I\'m misremembering and Asylum did it exactly the same way.
I'm of a similar mind. Gameplaywise, City is a better game than Asylum, standing on the shoulders of all the innovations of the first game. But Asylum benefits from the cosiness of the setting and the more focussed plot. City feels too big and meandering, and on attempted replays, I usually lose interest by the time I've taken down the Penguin.
Asylum is one of the few games I took the time to 100% complete, and with each successive Arkham title I was less and less interested in sticking around to do all the other fiddly bits.
Book me today! I also review weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs.
Man, I also failed to mention how I got all the Riddler trophies in Asylum because I wanted to, and in this game I was out immediately the second I got the number necessary to complete his side quest.
Yeah, I completely agree with your review. This was one of those games where I started playing full of joy, only to slowly turn into an \'is it finally over? Wait, no? Ugh, ok...\' to a \'finally its frigging over!\' by the end. Fun fact, this trilogy was the straw that broke the camel\'s back for me regarding to joker. At the time I thought this was the end of Joker for good, poor naive me and I ended thoroughly fed up with him to the point I abandoned Arkham Origins when someone told me that the joker was the big bad in it, and I didn\'t bother with Arkham Knight. (How does a character not only hijacks one game, but three?!)
Also, sadly Arkham Asylum is indeed the start of this pattern. From what I remember, it was really good but the game relies on Batman not stopping Joker several times due to the possible chance of killing him (which Batman from the animated series absolutely wouldn\'t care about, he isn\'t a murderer, but he doesn\'t lose sleep if people die during fights or exploding lairs), Joker having Nolan-esque powers over the plot (teleportation, invulnerability, people not just shooting him in the face when they could, etc)
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Sometimes, More Is Less
I should probably hold off on writing this review until after I've replayed Arkham Asylum, which I recently snagged very cheap on a Steam sale. But, well, after finally completing about as much of the main campaign as I care to, and doing enough of the DLC campaign to be reasonably sure I have its measure, I've decided I'druther strike while the iron's hot.
When I first got the game in college more than a decade ago, it was on PC, and it was a total disaster. On top of all the other bugs and problems, for some reason my plug-in controller's controls were all inverted, making the game a real chore to play. Those largely seem ironed out now, although I instead had to deal with a different problem: don't play this game without having played Asylum recently! It uses that game as a foundation to build on, and while this has its good side, it also means that you're gonna face a pretty steep difficulty curve if you come in without a decent understanding of that game's controls, quirks, inputs, and so on.
That said, the gameplay does have some fun enhancements over Asylum; most of the new gadgets do feel fun to use and are neat tools for many of the new puzzles or for use in various fights. My stupid shrunken brain wasn't as good at setting up traps or cleverly taking out foes as I remember being in Asylum, but it still meant I almost never felt like having a rough time in a given sequence was the game's fault rather than my own. I actually didn't love or prefer the open world to the first game's more dungeon-like structure from the start, and boy has ten years of open world oversaturation only hardened that opinion further, but I can't deny that using the traversal tools to get around is kinda fun sometimes, and there are more traditional dungeon levels throughout.
Story-wise, unfortunately, it's a pretty big downgrade. First, the obvious: a promising plot that features many lesser-known Batman villains is completely and utterly taken over by the Joker within the first mission or so, and he makes the rest of the game all about him. The story bends over backwards to hand the Joker unearned victories so that he can keep the spotlight on himself the whole way through, and poor Hugo Strange ends up reduced to an afterthought in his own game! Batman himself doesn't come off too well; while the first game did a good job of showing bits and pieces of his more compassionate side, a la The Animated Series, here he's a jerk who never spares any of the villains more of a thought than "Well, they're crazy!" The closest justification, that he's poisoned and not thinking clearly, is mostly implicit and doesn't necessarily make him much more likable, especially when he's being rude to innocent victims sometimes (although blessedly not always).
These problems come into conflux during the famous Mr. Freeze boss fight. While it is indeed really fun, especially when the player has used up a couple of the easier and more obvious means of attack, from a story perspective that fight happens only because Batman and Freeze take every possible chance to antagonize and escalate things with one another for no good reason to hand the Joker another easy win. In general, I think the talented and experienced voice cast of The Animated Series are carrying a lot of water for merely competent writing at best.
Or consider the Riddler challenges. While I appreciate the idea of adding some stakes to the Riddler's mind games from the last title, it also makes them feel much less optional. While I appreciate partial credit for partial completion, the fact that you've all-but got to complete the main story before resolving his sidequest (and a bunch of the other sidequests actually) doesn't feel great. This is only compounded by several sidequests concluding in unsatisfying Sequel Hooks for what was, by most accounts, a pretty mediocre sequel I was planning on skipping that doubled-down on things I didn't like about this game anyway!
Arkham City is a good game. But it could have been a great game, like I remember Arkham Asylum being (God willing nostalgia isn't that much of a seductive liar), if it were tighter, if it hadn't overcommitted itself to more at all costs. More terrain, more Riddler stuff, more Joker! As is, I suspect I'll struggle to remember the fun parts so much as the places it could've been better.