LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
BACKGROUND BIT- This is a review from the perspective of someone who never played the previous game, Arkham Asylum. And also from someone who isn't particularly a comics/Batman fan. i.e. I'm looking at this purely as a game and as someone not looking at this as a sequel. Also most of the early reviews spend 90 percent of the time talking about early graphics glitches - I won't.
Buying / Steam, Bought this a week back in the sales at £10 which for a AAA title ain't bad This is a big install with all the DLCs and wotnet. 19 Gb on the drive. It takes a fair while to install and is quite slow to load each time, even from my SSD. Install is a bit of a pain in the ass too. You have to install Games for Windows Live aswell as Steam for it to work - also GFW Live crashed out several times when first running as it got itself in an autoupdate tailspin. Te logon to GFW Live takes several seconds after launching the game, as does all the intro movies - which can be deleted with a bit of hacking. Lesson in how to annoy legitimate customers 101.
Graphics in the game are real nice. I dabbled with DX11 but gave up on it and went back to DX9 mode as it made things a bit jerky on my low end gear (Radeon 5750). Didn't like the volumetric lighting anyway. Great artwork style - the city looks awesome. You can move fairly freeform around the whole of the huge prison city in the game. Swooping from tower-block to building to street-sign using the grappling hook thing is great fun.
The story isn't bad either. I don't know a huge amount about the bad guy characters but basically all the main baddies seem to be running thug gangs and have various plots going on and stuff. Can't say much more without spoilers. however you can't really change much of what is going on in the plot, and there are a LOT of occasions where control of what happens is taken away from you to a cutscene. Annoying.
However one thing that really has absolutely ruined the whole thing for me is the controls. At best, combat tactics are great and require stealth and siently taking down opponents from sneaky hding under grates, ambushing from behind on swooping down from above. HOWEVER. The game is clearly designed for a gamepad and as such is a truly awful mess of a console port. Like old-skool beat-em'ups, Tekken and so on, the combat is all about hitting button combos to do special strikes and moves. This fails on the PC on multiple levels. One, the PC keyboard isn't as well suited to this style of play. Second, half the time it simply doesn't register the combos correctly or more often sends you flying off in the wrong direction. This is the big flaw of using this with a mouse. - it is directionally challenged. it only really understands forwards, left, right, back, not fine ranges in between. Try to change direction using mouse and it screws it up regularly. In normal early 'thug' street fights it doesn't mater much - just keep hitting punch and most of the time you win. On boss fights and trickier situations in later parts of the game it all goes to pieces. Having a boss fight where you are trying to leap sideways away from a giant sword, and half the time you end up leaping straight at them or you simply freeze on the spot in a odd distorted comic book pose. Awful.
Not tired the DLCs yet - I've just reached what I know is the final boss battle in the main game but have quit due to not wanting to punch my monitor in frustration at the jerky unresponsive confused mess of a control abomination.
Overall, great attractive looking concept marred badly by poor frustrating execution.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by shaithis
