A lovely game about appreciating nature in cute cell-shaded graphics. You play as Alva, a young girl who's visiting her grandparents on an idyllic island. But it soon becomes clear that a greedy capitalist wants to tear down the beautiful nature reserve to build an ugly hotel. Your mission is to identify all the wildlife living on the island as well as do side missions to earn favor among the inhabitants so they sign a petition to stop the construction. The characters aren't very complex, but that is sort of the point of this kind of story. It's more or less a children's game when it comes to the story and I have no problem with that even though I'm 35. It was lovely to engage in this naive world and save it from being ruined. The cell-shaded graphics are very nice and gives the game a timeless cartoon appearance. The music is fitting but the game knows when to be silent and just lets the sounds of nature carry the atmosphere. Fitting when the game revolves around nature. After a while, I also understood that the background wasn't just soundscapes but that all the sounds from the birds and animals had an actual source! So when you were looking for the last birds you could reference your bird manual to hear the sound and then follow the sound in the game world. I thought that was really neat and actually gave the locations even more beauty since you knew all the sounds you heard came from "real" birds. It's not a long game, I finished it in one evening, but I think that's alright. I can definitely see myself getting the urge to spend an evening playing it every other year or so. I would love to see more entries where Alba travels to different parts of the world.
Overall a great action game in third person with stealth elements. Swinging around hiding in the shadows and picking the goons off one by one and seeing their panic meter go up is great fun. I won't dissect the combat system since that's probably the most famous part of this series and everyone knows about it. I'll just say feels good and Batman feels like Batman. The boss battles are good but can get a bit repetitive since many elements are reused throughout the game. The style of the game is what I'd describe as gritty comic-book style. Overall the art direction with its dark, gothic atmosphere is fantastic. The locations are as diverse as you could make them without it feeling out of place. Most of the characters are great looking although this is probably my biggest gripe with the game on a couple of levels. Firstly the variety of the goons is too small. They all look almost the same. Secondly, I just didn't like the over-the-top muscles. In my taste, it's fine to have some comic-book-style muscles here and there, but in this game every inmate in this insane asylum is about as ripped as Schwarzenegger in his prime. It gets a bit ridiculous and takes away some of the grittiness of the presentation. The supervillains were all fantastic. The script is well written for the medium and over-the-top in a charming way. The voice acting is phenomenal. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill are on top of their game. Both bring the game a fantastic Batman Animated vibe. Hamill will always be the best comic-like interpretation of the Joker for me and Conroy's voice simply IS Batman for me. Arleen Sorkin as always does a great Harley Quinn. Her delivery of "Bye-bye Batman" at the death screen is just great. I could go on about the voice actors because every one of them is amazing. Tom Kane and Wally Wingert are also great, alright I'll knock it off. Finally, this is a game that actually got collecting stuff fun. There are a couple of reasons for this. Many of the collectibles give you backstories to the asylum and its inmates, some familiar that you don't meet. It's great fun seeing how the different villain's cells look. It also makes the game a bit of a metriodvania in that you need to backtrack to get many of the collectibles. But since the map isn't too big and the puzzles aren't too convoluted it makes backtracking to collect stuff feels like you're mastering the game instead of tedious busy work like many other games. There are few games that I spend the time collecting everything but this is one of them.
Overall a fantastic sequel to Arkham Asylum. It takes the same gameplay and applies it to a new story set in a more open setting. Arkham City is a gated-off part of Gotham that was made into a maximum security prison (basically like Manhattan in Escape from New York). The world isn't very big but it basically functions as an open world with side quests and collectibles while the main quest sends Batman around the map to explore the interior "dungeons". This is the main difference in design compared to Asylum, which was more of a metriodvania where the exteriors functioned as a hub. Sure the hub had some collectibles, secrets and fights, but you spent the absolute majority of the time in the different interior levels. In Arkham City, you spend the majority in the open world (at least if you do the side quests). When it comes to combat it's basically an improved version of the one in Asylum, which is great. The only thing that annoyed me was not being able to cancel takeout animations if someone is attacking me. It's like Batman has the reflexes of a bat except when he's in the middle of finishing someone off. Then he needs 5 seconds where he can't interrupt what he's doing. Otherwise, the combat is extremely fluid and responsive. I also love the fact that the stealth gameplay isn't slow. It feels just as great as in Asylum to quickly jump down, take someone out and then disappear leaving the rest scared. But I think Asylums level design was better at encouraging stealth while City favored brawls a bit more. The open world also doesn't feel designed with stealth in mind but this is also somewhat true for the dungeons. Compared to Asylum, City's dungeons are more focused on complex ways of traversal with gadgets and then rooms with brawls, than the methodical hunting Batman does in Asylum. The mechanics are there though, this is just my experience of the level design. My big gripe with the game is that the story isn't written in a way to encourage exploration since Batman is always on a literal timer in the story (not mechanically but narratively). As I was playing the main quest I found no motivation to stop and do silly riddles while Batman/Gotham was on the verge of death/collapse, it just didn't make any sense to me. So I finished the main quest and put the game down but after a week I felt the need to return and do the side quests. It was nice that the game allowed me to return after the credits and story wise I still think it makes sense for Batman to tie up the loose ends. The side quests themselves were fine. Some endings hinted towards a sequel (Mysterious Watcher and Identity Thief) so it'll be interesting to see if they are resolved in Arkham Knight.
