![]() I love the side missions, Riddler trophies, rhythmic combat and comic book shenanigans. I'm a Batmobile apologist – no, a Batmobile fan – and it's worth keeping that in mind when I say that the Arkhams are among my favourite modern action games. ![]() ![]() In Asylum, the titular institution is changed by events in the game, and in Knight the whole city undergoes a couple of transformative events as villains and (anti)heroes alike unleash their powers. There's a parallel in the treatment of the various iterations of Arkham/Gotham across the three games as well. Batman pays a heavy price for surviving all of those cutscenes, and that creates a continuity between the scripted sequences and the rest of the game. In a world of Teflon protagonists, who can survive a localised apocalypse without looking any the worse for wear, Asylum's Batman looked like he'd been “in the wars”, as my mum would say when I came home from school with a scuffed knee. He's tough, matter of fact and confident in his abilities, but the wounds and damage show that he's not invulnerable. No matter how desperate the situation becomes, and how many betrayals and escalations he has to deal with, his voice rarely wavers. It's fair to criticise or at least question the narrative shift toward a militarised Batman in the Arkham series, the actual characterisation of Wayne, the man beneath the cowl, is effective. While it'd be interesting to see damage occur in real-time, it could also lead to a ludicrously charred and ruptured hero – barely five minutes go by without a baseball bat to the Batbonce, and every encounter with a supervillain would leave more scars than a Victor Zsasz cosplay.ĭynamic damage isn't the point of Arkham's damage modelling though it's a storytelling device, and it's a damn good one. It's scripted as well, the cuts, scorches and bullet-holes all occurring in cutscenes rather than while you're actually at the controls. The damage shown across the three games, all of which begin with a pristine Batman in a fresh suit, is cosmetic. Before Gordon can even respond to the call, Batman has hopped in his Batplane and jetted off to deal with the new threat. There's a grim punchline at the end of the game when Commissioner Gordon tells a battered, bleeding Batman to get some rest, right before a call comes in to alert the cops to a bank raid. The cape is torn during a fight with Bane, when poor Bats is hurled through a wall, and he gets a laceration on his face, as well as a cut across the chest that goes straight through his armour. The damage can be seen as he puts his fists into the suit's gauntlets, the skin split and shaved down almost to the bone.Īrkham Asylum puts him through the wringer. Even before he suits up, becoming the Bat, Wayne gets his knuckles bloodied fighting off some angry inmates and a few of Penguin's new recruits. It all goes wrong, of course, and he ends up incarcerated. He's campaigning to shut down the new Arkham megaprison, figuring it'd be impossible to punch an actual city into submission as Batman, so using his billions and position among the wealthy and influential to strike from a political angle. We only see him briefly as Bruce Wayne, at the opening of Arkham City, and even then he's doing Batman work rather than living the playboy lifestyle. ![]() One of the themes of the Arkham games is that Batman never really stops working. More importantly, he gets a heck of a five o'clock shadow. But, no, the cape had been torn and as the long night in Arkham continued, Batman's beatings would make marks all over his suit. It does occasionally catch on railings if you brood-squat at an odd angle, but this was different an occasional flash of colour in the gloom of the garment* caught my eye and I thought Bats' big old utility belt was glitching through the cape. A few hours into Arkham Asylum, I thought Batman's cape was glitching.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |