Recent reviews by PSYmoom

Good game!

Good game!

Good game!

Ark with Pokemon Pals.

This is a hard game for me to review. Objectively, Arkham City is a good game. However, I was very disappointed by this game. Maybe it is a product of its time, or maybe my expectations were too high after playing Arkham Asylum, but Arkham City felt like a disappointing sequel. It does not innovate itself enough to warrant existing as a sequel, both narrative and gameplay wise.

The pacing of the story was awful and all over the place. They jammed so many villains in the main story, and this left no room for Titan-stuff/Protocol 10 to breath. You were constantly chasing various macguffin for the first half of the game that did nothing to advance the story. Then out of nowhere, the game presents you with a twist regarding Protocol 10. In addition, the twist was so bad that it could have only came from a mustache-twirling villain. To be fair, Arkham Asylum also had a "chase macguffin from villain to villain plot", but that worked as an origin story. If the second entry of your trilogy had no meaningful character nor plot progression, then you are doing something wrong.

It's not all bad though. The second twist regarding Titan-stuff was quite good as it made sense logically/narritively + was foreshadowed. And the boss fight against Mr Freeze's boss fight was was executed (even though it does not make sense narritively for them to fight in the first place, but I digress).

The gameplay felt repetitive due to poor level and quest design. Various locations would get reused throughout the main story mission, which meant navigating through the same corridors multiple times in a single playthrough. And you cannot excuse the game but calling it a metroidvania! Blocking access to parts of the game due to plot-specific reasons should not make it a metroidvania! Walking around in the same crammped cooridors as Batman is the anti-thesis of fun! I would take a thought out, but linear game like Arkham Asylum over something like Arkham City any day. At Asylum had the decency to give previous locations a redesign if they had to be revisited.

Gliding through the city is fun, but gets tedious after a while. There is a huge circular restriction zone right in the middle of the city which cannot be glided through. This forces you to always travel in an arc around the circle, making the city essentially feel like a straight line. And the main quest would often take you go from one end to another which added to the tedium.

On the plus side, Arkham City does include a new gadget that was incorporated in both traversal and combat in an interesting way.

I was initially going to give this game a thumbsup, but then I played Arkham Knight. Now Arkham Knight is not perfect. However, it addressed all issues I had with Arkham City game which makes Arkham City game is easily skippable. And life is too short to play skippable games.

Arkham Asylum is a great game. It is peak Batman experience where you best various Gotham villains in their own turf. Honestly though, this game has been analyzed to the high heavens, so I won't overstay my welcome. I do want to spend some time talking about the FreeFlow combat system.

People love to dunk on the combat system by calling it a triangle simulator (among other things) and I find those comments reductive. The game does start out really easy, where every enemy is counter-able. However, I want to argue that the game was deliberately designed this way to help fulfil the superhero fantasy. As the game goes on, you can unlock various over-powered combos that have over-the-top animations. Exploring all combos and chaining them together is where the fun comes in. You get to weave and dodge between the various goons in new and creative ways, progressively getting better at it as the game goes on. Eventually, the game introduces various enemies that cannot be countered, forcing you to change up your playstyle. At the risk of sounding cliche, the combat system is deliberately designed in a way to really make you feel like Batman.

When the game's epilepsy warning will give you epilepsy.

I really enjoyed this game. It felt like a fresh take on the Miniclip/Underground 2D point-and-click flash games. As expected, the game is littered with excessive gore and absurdist humour. What I didn't expect was a complex, but intriguing story that kept me hooked to the end. In addition, dialogue is crisp, voice acting is excellent, world is immersive, animations are smooth, puzzles are complex but intuitive and there is no inventory management (which is a blessing for point-and-click adventures). The game does end in a cliffhanger, but regardless of that, I am excited for the next game (if it happens)!

One complaint that I have about this game is that there is no level selector in this game and you only have one save file available to you. As such, you will have to replay the entire game from the start if you want to see the outcome of the different choices presented. Although an unintended side-effect of this was that I didn't actually get to see how much choices matter, making the game seem larger than it might be? Now that I think about it, the different choices are probably different ways to kill people lol.

The game was enjoyable enough for me to roll credits. The art style is gorgeous and movement is fluid. Every stage introduces a new mechanic that keeps things fresh. This keeps exploration and platforming interesting all game long. There are also hidden Easter eggs and references littered throughout the game that are nice to stumble upon.

While you don't play games like these for their story, I will still mention that the story felt a bit underwhelming to me. The premise of tiny creatures living and thriving in a giant house is really intriguing, but unfortunately was never utilized to its full potential. The developers did highlight various problems a civilization can run into in every stage, but the resolution of these problems were laughably bad. It felt like watching a history piece on the French Revolution that ends up with everyone actually eating cake.

The only thing going for this game is its movement system. And honestly that is enough for how low the game costs nowadays. Definitely skip all cutscenes and side-missions as they are painfully generic. There is fun to be had in the main mission and base capturing though, as it gives you a reason to zoom around like an action superhero.

Note that he game now comes with a jetpack DLC that you should definitely enable at the start of the game. It makes the movement more fun and faster, which is greatly appreciated.