Batman: Arkham City

Playtime: 16.9 Hours

Finished 11 April 2026.

Played on the Steam Deck, just like Asylum; running the installer required switching to Desktop mode and a lot of the cutscenes (seemingly both live-action and pre-rendered) had some really weird framerate hitches, but the game otherwise ran flawlessly throughout, not even crashing once during my playthrough. I didn't have to change Proton settings or anything this time. It still looks and feels great for its time!

There's a lot more side content in this game, largely in the form of over 400 Riddler trophies... I don't really like the game enough to pursue full completion, especially since the estimate is that it'll take another ~30-40 hours to do everything. I ended up doing about half of the side quests, but otherwise focused mostly on the main story - the main menu shows 51% completion. After finishing the main story, I didn't bother finishing the Catwoman DLC because the final boss fight against Two-Face featuring INFINITELY RESPAWNING ENEMIES with guns was awful, and burned any interest I had in wasting my time on the other DLCs too.

In all fairness, I was already starting to tire of the game by the end so I feel like I was just looking for a good excuse to stop and avoid getting sucked into the well of completionism. I've got another 2 games in this series so I doubt I'll ever come back to this, but this was quite fun and well worth playing.

I think Arkham City was a really good follow-up to Asylum, meaningfully expanding the scope and depth of the game's world without sacrificing what made the first game special in my opinion. Rather than being stuck within just the asylum grounds in this game, the mayor of Gotham decided to convert a sizeable section of the city's slums into "Arkham City" where criminals and supervillains would be free to run amok under supervision of TYGER, a special force of some kind. Unfortunately, Bruce Wayne is attacked by Hugo Strange during a public appearance and tossed into the city alongside all the criminals he subdued in Asylum. After defending himself from a few assailants, Alfred sends in his gear and Batman gets to work, once again having to figure out the real purpose of this City.

The general world and level design is quite different from the prior entry, favoring a much more open approach this time to really maximize all the tools Batman has for exploration and travel. While the Asylum had only a few major overworld maps interconnecting a number of larger & more intricate dungeons, Arkham City has a comparatively massive overworld essentially scaled to an entire district of a city. A slight misconception I had initially from the name (Arkham "City") was if the game would feel more alive like PS4 Spiderman, but almost all of the inhabitants are enemies belonging to various criminal gangs, with the only "civilian" encounters limited to some sidequest characters and small political refugee events or encampments. That said, the openness of this game was not lost on me; tons of this game involves traversal between various locations across the City, which felt noticeably smoother and more fun than walking through a bunch of loading screens between the smaller areas in Asylum.

Unsurprisingly, the expanded game world also comes with a whole list of additional things that you can do. New to this game (I think) are a number of fairly involved side quests that you can access throughout the story. They total 12 in number, though they vary greatly in length and scale - there are some AR challenges for mastery of gliding and your grappling hook and a simple quest to grab some extra gear, a number of encounter with Gotham's gallery of rogues like Zsasz, Deadshot, the Mad Hatter, etc. While there doesn't seem to be that many of them, I felt like they mostly felt non-trivial and actually interesting pieces of side content that would be worth hunting down for fans of the characters. Personally, I didn't really have much motivation to continue sweeping the rest of them up after finishing the game but enjoyed my time with these. I also need to note that the Enigma challenges are back, and Batman has an insane 400 of them to do this time across the entire world. These generally involve little puzzles or hiding spots to collect a ton of baubles & stuff, basically the same as in the first game. I found them entertaining enough to get on the way, but I feel like it'd be a huge headache to try 100%ing this game just given the sheer count of these.

So the big tradeoff I felt in this game comes to the actual instanced levels/dungeons, which tended to feel smaller in overall scale. This could just be in my head, but I feel like Asylum had generally larger and longer dungeons with more intricately-designed encounters, whereas City simply could handle that same level of detail given the size of the playable area. Some areas like the GCPD and the Courthouse were essentially single-room combat arenas, and even some of the larger dungeons like the Sawmill were actually broken down into multiple segments accessed piecemeal throughout the game, making your ventures shorter on average. I was kind of disappointed that the entirety of the hidden Wonder City boiled down to ~3 rooms, 2 of which were basically just a walking simulator. I know it's a natural sacrifice that has to be made for "openness", and that it was absolutely the trend back when these games were released; I can see how this game handled the transition very well, but from the lens of a playthrough 15+ years after release, I feel the balance of the levels in Asylum ultimately made them more memorable to me. Maybe I'll feel differently down the line.

For the most part, combat doesn't really feel much different to me in this game. It's definitely a bit smoother, and as far as I know the smoothness of the multi-enemy counters and various other moves are noticeably improved from before, but all the strengths and flaws are basically the same as before. In any big fight, it feels like the game is built more around spamming the Counter button than anything to do with your unlocks or gadgets; meanwhile, lategame enemies slowly introduce more and more ways to basically restrict your useable arsenal to really hyperfocus in on a very simplified version of the gameplay. The smoke grenades are a really cool counter against the threat of armed criminals, but the stealth-heavy approach still reigns.

The story is a direct follow-up to Asylum's plot, but most of it was basically in one ear and out the other for me; for the most part, you just know that Hugo Strange is doing something weird in the central tower of the City, and in the meantime there's a ton of additional supervillains that come back. I'm not really sure if Joker & Harley really needed to take center stage in this again, but it was handled well enough; outside of a few notable characters, I don't really know the rest of the villains enough to really care about them. Basically, once you're done smacking everyone around, you learn of Hugo Strange's plan to just straight up exterminate everyone in Arkham City (including the criminals, villains, Batman, and any political prisoners). So you stop him, then punch out the Joker (who's actually Clayface) one last time before the real Joker dies to TITAN poisoning contracted at the end of Asylum. From all I know of Asylum, City, and Knight, most of the plot threads are handled consistently and true to the characters.

This game has its fair share of ups and downs, but I really liked it overall even if the combat is still a bit clunky for my taste. It's undeniable that it does a fantastic job of making you feel powerful and resourceful as the Dark Knight while maintaining a gritty feeling that feels very true to the spirit of Gotham. But I don't really have any desire to do any kind of completionist activities, given how annoying the Riddler trophies are and how obtuse some of the sidequests are; there's a lot to do, but something about the game just doesn't click with me as an experience I want to drag out for another 40-50 hours. I'll definitely look forward to doing Arkham Origin next though, and eventually finishing off the series with Knight down the line!

Catwoman DLC

The GOTY version of this game also comes with the Catwoman DLC, which actually integrates missions directly into the story - usually when Batman is in trouble. She controls a little bit differently - the whip and lack of glide limits her traversal capabilities a bit more than Batman, but she can climb upside down on surfaces for stealth attacks. In a brawl, she feels effectively the same as Batman given the same counter-heavy gameplay applies. Her story segments basically just involve a brawl with Poison Ivy's minions and a heist to get some money. However, her final boss encounter with Two-Face's minions was so awful that I didn't bother finishing the DLC and stopped playing the game. I don't really understand why infinitely respawning enemies with guns in the middle of a boss fight with very limited traversal was ever thought to be fun. I don't really care what they were smoking at this point, but it kind of killed any desire to do any additional cleanup (trophies, upgrades, challenges, quests, etc.).