It came out a few days ago. Apparently, it’s more of the same but twice as much which can be alright.
To those who’ve tried it, how are you finding it? Is it worth paying full price or should one wait for the summer sale?
Do not pay full price.
I read one review, whose quote I’m sure I’m butchering, but it was, roughly:
"Everybody predicted that the new Arkham game would be a soulless addition to the franchise in order to cash it out.
The good news is that’s the case.
The bad news is, it’s even worse than that."
The game is just… blah. It’s the same shit. It’s more an expansion pack, really, even with its story. Which is also kinda… blah. And no Kevin Conroy of Mark Hammel. Rabble, rabble, rabble.
Ahem. Wait for bargain bin.
It’s not quite that bad, I think. It’s more of the same. It doesn’t innovate but it doesn’t do anything badly that was done well in the first two.
You’re batman. You beat up thugs via punching. It’s perfectly good stuff.
Yeah, I’m liking it a lot. On PAr with Arkham City really, it’s just that there’s nothing really new about it in terms of gameplay, and the narrative is predictable. We all know how this song goes.
But it’s still a hell of a romp.
You could of picked it up on pre-order form GMG at $37.50. That’s what I did.
Anyway, the only real issue is that it’s a bit buggy at this point. I personally didn’t run into any major issues until TODAY. I’m now stuck in a loop, because I hit a save point, and right after the save point and after the “open door” animation I clip through the floor.
I REALLY hope they fix it, because as much fun as this game is, I don’t have any intentions of starting over.
Yeah, I don’t get the reviews on this one. “It’s too iterative, 6/10.” Meanwhile, the next Call of Ditto is going to get 9/10 for being exactly the same as the previous one.
Or everyone who plays Madden will rush out next year for the latest roster updates. (I don’t care what EA claims they’re doing to make those games better, the only reason most people buy them is because of the roster update.)
It’s not a bad game by any means. Perhaps some new stuff might be nice, especially since a lot of it seems like “take out these routers” instead of “take out these cameras” and whatnot, but I really haven’t understood some of the complaints. One that sticks in my mind is “there’s no civilians around” in a setting that is a winter storm incoming on Christmas Eve starting late at night. Who the hell is going to be out and about in those conditions other than cops and criminals? There are some good laughs to be had at the official game forums.
Lucky you.
The game won’t even run for me :(. It’s the weirdest thing : the multiplayer game launches fine (haven’t tried playing it because it honestly doesn’t look all that interesting), but the singleplayer just hangs in windows upon running.
I will say that even though the first really challenging boss fight against
Deathstroke
was annoying as hell since it took me about eight tries to figure everything out, I really enjoyed it. The game did a great job of making everything look cinematic and fluid.
I agree that it’s essentially a huge expansion pack to Arkham City with very little added features. And I’m still enjoying it immensely.
I think I hit the corrupted save file bug the first day I played it (Xbox 360), so I’m doing the 2 USB stick backup dance now.
It took me a while as well and I had to look up some tips. What killed me was anticipation and trying to jump the timing instead of waiting for the prompts.
I preordered it a few weeks back and my copy arrived last night. I’m about four hours in and I’m enjoying it so far. As has been mentioned many, many times: it’s nothing new or innovative. It’s just the latest entry in the series and it sticks to the highly successful Arkham formula. I’m perfectly happy with that. I punch and the peoples go down. The city is huge, getting around is relatively fast, and the side missions are engaging enough to be fun; everything a good sandbox needs.
My only real complaint so far is that it runs a bit jerky at times on my PS3. The whole reason I bought a console instead of building another new gaming computer was that I wanted to just spend $300 and get a system that I knew games would run smoothly on.
I also miss Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill. Does anyone know why they didn’t reprise their roles?
From a narrative standpoint, I’m mildly annoyed about (Arkham City spoiler):
They finally had the guts to kill off the Joker, Hugo Strange, Ra’s Al Ghoul, and Talia in Arkham City, and then they make the next game a prequel, so they don’t have to live with the consequences. Kind of a cop out.
Mark Hamill had said after Arkham City that it would be where he’d hang his Joker hat, because he thought it would be very hard to top his own performance or the script. He felt it was a fitting end for the character, and the perfect last encore for him.
The devs said they wanted a different voice for Young Batman, as Kevin Conroy’s was too gravely and self-assured.
But maybe it’s about the big bucks as well/on top of those two reasons ? Judging by videos I’ve seen (still can’t play the game) they also ditched the voice of Commissioner Gordon. And I gotta say, it feels kinda weird that Jarl Ulric Stormcloak is the law of Gotham 
FWIW, Al Ghoul’s body disappears in City, leaving his sword behind, suggesting he was resurrected
But if there’s one thing comic book characters are bad at, it’s staying dead.
Should of waited for a next gen console, or upgraded your PC instead. The game was actually bundled for free with a bunch of discounted GPU’s recently. These consoles are the end of their lifetime, and now that new consoles are coming out, they’ll be neglected by developers who are unlikely to spend the time and money to optimize things to the level they have been.
Although I don’t think this game is coming out on next gen consoles. Only PC.
The next one will though!
I wonder what it’s going to be like. Some rumors say something about a Batman out of the 50’s-60s Adam West style.
Not sure what to think about that.
I actually kinda like the idea. I’ve been thinking about trolling the official boards suggesting that the complainers would have been happier with a game based on Batman: The Brave and The Bold since this game is too much like the previous game for them to be happy.
This one specifically. His only superpower (beyond being a Batman-level manipulative bastard) is his ability to come back from the dead.
Which means, of course, that he gets to die a whole lot so the writers can show it off (see: GoodThingYouCanHeal :p). It was even an easter egg in Arkham Asylum : the first time you go to the morgue there’ll be a drawer open with a body bag and a toe tag bearing his name. If you come back later, the tag’s still there but the body isn’t (IIRC).
The latest update is live on Steam and it fixes several issues, including mine!
Yay! Played another few hours tonight. More of the same, yes… but more of a good thing, is still a good thing 
So I managed to finally play it… on my GF’s computer because it still won’t run on mine. It’s decent - not particularly innovative, basically a copy/paste of Arkham City with the good bits of Asylum tacked on, but it’s still fun to Batman people’s faces before hanging their terrified friends from gargoyles.
Gotta say though, of the two or three new things, those concussion grenades are the dumbest.gadget. ever. Take a harmless bunch of mooks you could yawn your way through ; turn them into unpredictable, unblockable combo breaking machines. Stoopid, stoopid, stoopid. And the worst part is, you have to use the shits to get the last rank of the combat challenge, or to get max points in the sparring sessions :mad:.
I don’t like how they changed the air attack, either. Used to be one of the safest moves if you jumped off a guy to hit another, now for some reason Bruce takes half an hour to clock the second guy on the ground and can’t block while he’s doing it 
Played a bunch more this weekend, and it’s bugginess is becoming very annoying:
Multiple game freezes, requiring powering down the console. Seemed to be related to a lot of things going on at once - if I had just finished combat so it was displaying XP calculations, was moving between areas, and switching into/out of detective vision, it was likely to happen. I took to just standing in place after any combat until all the XP awards were complete.
Sometimes I’d just lose all quick-fire gadgets in combat. No idea why. Not as part of the story or anything - I’d just be cruising through Gotham, decide a particular group of thugs look like they could use a good beating, and when I started fighting them the batclaw, batarang, explosives, even the stupid concussion grenade won’t fire. Had to quit/restart the game to get them back.
I looked at the “Synopsis” screen to see how far I was in the game, and it said I was 90% done with the story, which was surprising. But when I looked at the individual “unlocked” screens, they had gone way past where I actually was in the game, which spoiled some things for me.
But I’m still enjoying it a lot. Hopefully they’ll get a bug fix out for Xbox before I finish it.
Well, I finally beat it last night (having taken some extra time to do all of the available Most Wanted and most of the crime scenes) and was generally happy with it. Other than a bug at the end of the Firefly flight that forced me to replay the last part once, I didn’t notice any other real bugs on my PS3 other than one time that I had to restart a predator room because the last enemy was stuck running in a corner and couldn’t be hit.
I have to say, it’s a lot harder to take Batman seriously when he’s running around looking like Adam West. Amusing as all get out, but hard to take seriously.