Batman: Arkham City Update

Time for an update on my progress in Batman: Arkham City: Armored Edition for Wii U. Here’s a new gameplay video:

I had recently defeated Penguin in the museum, and I now needed to find someone named Ra’s al Ghul by tracking an assassin. But while roaming around, it’s easy to get sidetracked. There are so many side missions and subquests that’s it easy to lose focus of the task at hand. You’ll see these green neon question marks, which means there’s a puzzle nearby that unlocks a Riddler trophy. And there are tons of those, everywhere you go. You want to collect them all.

Batman: Arkham City - Riddler's question marksThere are side missions where you solve murders CSI-style by analyzing bullet fragments and trajectories, there are missions where you run around town answering pay phones, there are missions where you rescue political prisoners from thugs, and so on. The map is just littered with all these little markers, each indicating an objective of some sort; I don’t even know what they all mean just yet. The game has so much to do, and that’s a good thing. I’m enjoying this game quite a bit.

Batman: Arkham City - CSI Eventually I got back to the main quest. I headed into the subway system and ended up at an area called the collapsed streets. This is the area that you can see in the video at the top of this blog entry. The part at the Wonder Tower Foundations is an example of the stealth used frequently in this game. There are vantage points high above the floor (they often seem to be gargoyles) and you grapple from one to the next. The idea is to wait for one of the enemies to separate from the rest, then sneak down and defeat him (silently when possible), then retreat back to your vantage point. Then you can watch and listen as the enemies on the ground freak out, especially when they don’t even see you. Even though I’m generally not a fan of stealth in games, these areas are a ton of fun–perhaps even my favorite parts of the game so far.

Batman: Arkham City - Vantage Point screenshotI then went to an area called Wonder City, where I had to scan the remains of mechanical guardians to find the location of a secret entrance that the assassin used. Once I was inside, I ended my game for the day. I’m currently 32% through the main story, and I’ve completed 16% of the game overall.

Batman: Arkham City - Mechanical GuardiansIn an unrelated note, my colorblindness cost me a life in the 3DS built-in RPG called Find Mii. I needed a hero with a yellow shirt in order to break an enemy’s yellow shield. So finally I got a yellow-shirted hero…or so I thought. I attacked the shielded enemy, but the shield deflected the attack. What? I didn’t understand it, and then I realized the hero’s shirt looked slightly greenish. It was a green shirt, but it looked yellow to me. Oh well.

That’s all for this time. If you haven’t seen my new feature showing my controller collection, give it a look.