[PS3] Batman: Arkham City ROM Download

Batman: Arkham City ROM Screenshots

Batman: Arkham City ROM Description

Batman: Arkham City is the acclaimed sequel by Rocksteady Studios to Batman: Arkham Asylum, which set the benchmark for superhero games in 2009. This time, the scum and villainy can’t be contained in just one area. All manner of thugs, felons, and criminal masterminds have been walled off into the slums of Gotham, an area dubbed Arkham City.

Bruce Wayne begins his adventure in serious trouble. He’s been captured, and his secret identity has been compromised. Everything flows smoothly from action to cutscene to quick time event, sometimes hard to distinguish. The experience is moody, brutal, and thoroughly enjoyable from the beginning. Perhaps not right at the beginning for those who bought the game new.

It’s no surprise Arkham City has a much more explorable area than Arkham Asylum, but there are also more gadgets, more attacks utilizing the verticality of the cityscape, more villains, and a frightening amount more Riddler content. While out on the town, Batman can also avail himself of the many optional missions with the same polish as the main storyline and woven seamlessly into the narrative, so it doesn’t feel out of place for Batman to table a previous objective for a few minutes to complete a side quest.

Batman: Arkham City has built a combat system with depth thanks to its complexity and challenge. Better execution is rewarded with some experience points and a warm fuzzy feeling, but since encounters are often just mobs of goons you can fumble through, perfecting your skull-cracking skills is its own reward. Those who enjoy the combat have tons of challenge modes to enjoy, with prey to terrify and beat senseless.

Batman utilizes gadgets against bosses, much like against common thugs, with similar levels of awesomeness. A few exceptions require the player to master the bat and demonstrate prowess over the array of technological brutality at hand. But some bosses, like the one in the creepiest museum in the world, though tonally and visually heightened, are a bit boring.

Arkham City may have lost some of its charms, evolving into an open-world-ish game. But it also refines and builds upon the already rich experience of Arkham Asylum. Once again, Rocksteady has produced an engrossing, impressive, really fun game that happens to feature comic book characters. It’s not just the backhanded compliment of “good for a comic book game”; it’s the closest we’ll get to feeling like Batman until the next one.

Batman: Arkham City will certainly come up in Game of the Year discussions and is absolutely worth playing.