No joke. I hate ths game.
I bought Arkham City because I had watched Drave play Arkham Asylum and thought it looked really cool. When Black Friday rolled around, I used a variety of coupons and deals to get the game for somewhere in the vicinity of $3. Last night, I sold it on eBay for $30. Of course, I had started playing it only three days earlier. Completion percentage? Around 4%. So why is it gone so fast?
In this game, you get to be Batman. That’s pretty cool. Being Batman feels badass, up to a point. That point is when you’re standing in a loading bay trying to figure out that the R2 button actually has some purpose when using the electro magnetic pulse projector weapon thingamajig, even though you’ve been told you use R1 to fire it. It’s not badass trying to get the controller to recognize a quick tap for detective mode as opposed to a full press for environmental scanning. It’s not badass when you’re supposed to “quick fire” your batarang or batclaw when you’ve never been introduced to that concept before. In fact, it’s only badass when you’re being like Spider-Man.
Arkham City is ridiculous amounts of fun when you’re outside pressing X and R1. X dives and floats, R1 grabs on to nearby rooftops and hanging points. Diving around the city pressing R1 is a blast. You can just fly around the city without ever touching the ground. It’s the stupid levels that get in the way.
When I’m crawling around stupid sewers trying to follow pipes, and then I bust out of the ground to press the square button in rapid succession until everyone falls down, I’m like … wow this sucks. Who can button mash faster, me or the AI? For as long as I played, it was me. I’m certain that later in the game it would have been the AI, but I’m not even going to bother.
I’ve heard there’s tons of little easter eggs in the game, perfect for fans of the Batman comics. (I’ve always been a Marvel guy myself, although The Long Halloween is pretty fantastic.) But all I’d found up to the point at which I quit was a bunch of question marks that I’m supposed to collect that appear to open up some challenge maps that I never attempted.
Listen, here’s the thing about me as a crappy gamer. I fucking hate open world games. Hate them. I do want to be led in a specific direction and given a puzzle to solve. And as the industry keeps pushing more and more in this open-world direction, they give me fewer options for games to enjoy. To me, open world games means either missing a bunch of stuff that’s in the game, or reading GameFaqs a lot. Now, I’m a GameFaqs power user, but actually keeping my laptop next to me while playing a game is not fun.
Arkham City may be a great video game to some, but to me it was a dark, muddy shit storm.
