Batman Arkham City.

I finally got around to finishing Batman Arkham City. I had the game on Origin , but the version I played and beat was on Steam. I got the steam version free along with Arkham Asylum because I own Arkham Knight on Steam. It was some bonus WB gave out to people who kept arkham Knight even though it was riddled with bugs and performance issues.

Anyway, I noticed that the Steam version had performance issues that I don't have on the Origin version. The Steam version had dipping FPS issues on a consistent basis on max settings. I didn't have those issues on Origin on max settings though and running Arkham Origins on max which is a nicer looking game ran perfectly smooth.

The game itself was quite fun to play through. Arkham city is a prison city for Gotham's criminals which the mayor of Gotham let a maniac named Hugo Strange to control because he got money out of it or something. Either way, Strange was using it for his own purposes and now all hell is breaking loose in the city and The Joker is a big part of the goings on as usual.

Joker is sick with some kind of deadly virus and he traps batman, injects batman with his blood so that he is sick too and is forced to hunt down a cure. This takes Batman on an Easter egg hunt that brings him up against a bunch of his usual baddies, including Ras Al Gul, The Penguin, Mr Freeze, The Joker and countless goons that follow the different bosses.

Batman analyses crime scenes using detective mode to find clues as to where to go next and when you need to get somewhere you can zipline and glide across the city with relative ease. Its pretty cool to fly around the city and seeing the snow, the lights and the buildings going by below you.

There are plenty of upgrades to unlock as you gain experience from beating up thugs or destroying security cameras or finding Riddler trophies. The upgrades give you new combat moves, upgrade your equipment or make your armour take less damage from bullets or melee attacks.

The combat is fairly simple. You just need to press X to hit bad guys and press Y to counter them. You can also use your gadgets in battle and against certain thugs you may need to attack from behind or disarm them first with specific moves before you can beat them into submission.

There are times when you need to take out a room of baddies without anyone seeing you or else they shoot the hostages. Those are pretty fun but like the regular combat can get repetitive.

The boss fights are fun for the most part and the story was really good. I especially liked the part when you had to track down Ras al gul and then take the trials to get his blood. I thought that was the most interesting part of the game and I also felt that his daughter talia was one of the more interesting characters because of her relationship to batman. They have a child together who is now Robin in the comics.

The game has some side quests to take on that will put you up against other characters from the batman comics. Hush, Deadshot, Bane and The Ridder. Though when you solve those quests the confrontations with those characters is pretty anti climactic. The riddler challenges can get tedious as there are almost 200 of them and you need to find them as batman , then switch to Catwoman and find some that only she can get.

Yes you get to play some parts of the campaign as Catwoman. Though not very much. SO little in fact that I wonder why they shoehorned her in. I thought she would play a bigger part but it was pretty underwhelming.

There is also DLC called Harley's Revenge. Dealing with Harley Quinn being upset and blaming Batman for the death of Joker, though I also think it may have to do with her blaming Batman for her lost pregnancy. I'm not 100 percent sure on this and need to look it up, but in the main campaign, you can come across a pregnancy test which shows positive. So it looks like Harley was pregnant.

Later, in the DLC campaign, if you enter that room again (which you have to) you will see that same test sitting by itself, but in the middle of the room there is now a crib with a small Joker doll in it and all around the crib are a bunch of pregnancy tests scattered around it all showing negative. That to me shows that she lost the child and kept taking tests hoping one would show positive again. I'd blame batman too as early in the game he beats her down pretty hard that any pregnant woman would lose a pregnancy after that hit.

In the DLC though, you play as Robin trying to save Batman. It was kind of neat to play a robin , and the DLC isn't overly long so it wasn't bad.

I haven't gotten all the riddler trophies yet because its pretty tedious but I finished everything else in the game. I want to go and finish Arkham Origins before moving on to Arkham Knight.

In closing, Arkham City was a really good game. When Arkham Asylum came out It was a huge step forward for super hero games and Arkham City built on it very well.

The game tends to go on sale on Steam for about 4.99 pretty often so if you have been on the fence about the game, wait for a sale and then try it out. You get a lot of bang for your buck and you get a really awesome Batman game.