(kl0n) ᗜˬᗜ 👍 tarafından yazılan son incelemeler

These games are not masterpieces, but by the time I'd completed each one I'd ♥♥♥♥♥♥ attached to a few of the characters. The puzzles are mostly good, a few outstanding ones being either braindead-easy or illogically challenging (you might miss an object due to poor artistic choice, an item might be poorly detailed, and specifically in VLR's case, you might need to switch to Easy to get any proper clues), and VLR's characters aren't anywhere near as well-rounded as 999 (it literally has characters infodump their backstories fairly late into their exclusive timeline after many screens of obnoxious interactions, rather than flesh them out as the story unfolds like in the first game), but the plot of both always began with a slow burn and went uphill from there.

I can only hope Zero Time Dilemma ends the series on a satisfying note.

Relaxing mobile/tablet game.

Short, sweet, charming (and gay). No matter what actions you take, it ends in misery, but you get attached all the same. It's a lot of fun if you're a masochist.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, maybe hack-n-slashes aren't for me, even Furi couldn't put me to sleep.

Crashes on the second runtime onwards, and controller support ends there as well (playing on a Dualsense).

The gameplay was a nice puzzle, but the music clearly shows the game thinks of itself as some profound indie experience which doesn't work so well when you're a billion-dollar megacorp IP.

Overall, 1/10 for immersion and pure technical fails.

Bigger and better, it's improved on Arkham City in every way. Bigger map, a vehicle to help navigate this expanded terrain, and tank fights (and Riddler collectibles) to give it an air of necessity. Anything from the previous games were either kept the same or directly upgraded. Combat is mainly untouched (including Batman's patented Disarm and Destroy), with slightly new enemy variations to be aware of (such as shield brutes). Gadgets and stealth mechanics have been refined, the most obvious examples of each being the Disruptor and Fear Takedowns, the latter of which I've only seen re-used in one other game I've played (Ghost of Tsushima). Gadget cooldowns in general are much saner compared to Arkham City, especially Smoke Pellets being usable more than once per stealth encounter now, so there's no need to be so stingy with those any more.

Aside from the odd lategame bug (like glitching after a death in a stealth boss fight and walking, not gliding, off a vantage point while aiming the REC gun), my only complaints were with the storytelling. The Season of Infamy DLC was a wonderful way to wrap up the stories of characters from previous games that fans may have been curious about (especially Mr Freeze), but most of the base game's side missions were map-clearing busywork (some of which I did still very much enjoy) or pointless hunts/chases (both fire missions, hunting Man-Bat, bomb defusals, checkpoints, and watchtowers), which were successful in making Riddler's collectibles seem that much more appealing. You also had one-time missions (involving Jack Ryder or Lucius Fox) that seemed to only exist as filler despite having both been built up as something big, and I do wonder if these missions were shortened as a result of rushed development. I thought the Two-Face, Penguin, serial killer, and Riddler missions were great though, both narratively and in gameplay. The only reason the main story has any more weight than Rocksteady's previous games is due to how heavy-handed they wanted to be about Batman: Arkham Knight being the series' swan song, and unlike with Arkham City, the game's story, gameplay, and general pacing isn't at odds with its theming too, so I stayed immersed easily.

Batman's sidekicks seem to have generally been aged down to all be closer in age, with the exception of Robin being aged up. Changing Barbara's voice actress to somebody younger than in the previous games and then making her seem a naive damsel in distress (although admittedly Batman's entire entourage gets kidnapped throughout this game) shouldn't sit very well for any Batman fans. I still wish I could've seen more interactions between the Bat-Family overall. It was fun playing as Nightwing, Catwoman, and Robin in their respective moments tag-teaming with Batman, with their movesets and arsenals from Arkham City being mostly unmodified as well for any players retaining the muscle memory.

Altogether I'd say it's an 8/10 game, and I don't recall the last time I spent the best part of a month playing a game so obsessively, nor am I going to stop any time soon.

Improves on everything Asylum did while keeping (most of) what made the first game great. Very good worldbuilding, even if the plot leaves something to be desired.

The first game had a variation of 9 combat moves, and this one ups that count to 13, at the cost of heavily nerfing the Batclaw. You get new abilities such as Freeflow Focus, which lets you move faster while enemies move slower (but you can still take damage and lose your Freeflow in this state). For traversal, you get a new Grapnel Boost which lets you glide around without ever having to touch down as long as you have something to boost off of, and there are a few glide-powered takedowns which make street brawls that much more fun to start. There are new enemies, such as armored and shielded enemies, but you still have knife-wielding enemies (taken down a little differently this time), and Titan thugs, who are mainly saved for Riddler's Revenge.

Riddler's Revenge is the main blemish on this otherwise-fun game. It's ridiculous that they managed to make collectible-hunting so fun, but then rewarded our efforts with THIS. For completion, the first game only made you complete 4 maps on 2 difficulties for both combat and stealth (totalling 24 medals in each). In Arkham City, you have 24 maps (12 with normal difficulties and score tiering, 12 on extreme), and that's not all. You also have to complete "campaigns", gauntlets of 3 challenge maps in a row where the aim is to earn all 9 medals (earning all possible medals from all maps) in one go. Also unlike the first game, the score tiering is much harsher this time around. For most combat maps in Asylum, the old formula was Silver and Gold tiers being double and triple the Bronze score respectively, but now in Arkham City they're double and quadruple (respectively), making each map much more of a grind. The whole thing seems sadistically designed to punish players, rather than supplement the experience like Asylum's challenges did.

A little messed up, but it was a great way to make us care about pre-established characters (that I previously found annoying).

Cw: contains venting, a reference to the prequel, Amogus.

• Timing/flow of combat is wonky, freeflow seems to be inconsistent all-around. I know players claim there's a rhythm to it and that you shouldn't button-mash, but my experience has been the complete opposite.
  
• You only have a window of like 1-2 seconds at most to add each successive move to your combo before it expires.
  
• Countering only works if you're within the enemy's attack area (so you could be millimetres out of it and break your combo in your attempt to counter because the game decides this time that it won't clip you into countering their move and you're left grappling with thin air)
  
• You're told far too late in the tutorial stage that you have to work up to a x3 combo (with regular hits) to enter freeflow to begin with, after numerous skirmishes with Blackgate thugs.
  
• The other type of enemy engagement, the stealth, almost feels like an afterthought. There is only one ability upgrade that pertains directly to your stealth moveset, and while more of your gadgets are oriented at stealth sections rather than the open combat/freeflow sections (in which you're only allowed to effectively utilise the batclaw and batarang without breaking combos), the core game (at least in story mode) doesn't have enough of it to make you feel like you get to use them well enough. The predator challenges do somewhat recognise it since their medals demand that you make use of the otherwise-underutilised bat-gadgets.
  
• Most boss fights are basically the same, fight a brute hopped up on Titan while his comrades attempt to wear you down. Only 2-3 boss fights are any different here.
  
• Being only able to heal by gathering XP, whether from collectibles or beating fights, made progression annoying for most of my first couple of runs at this game. It gets better if you get the hang of freeflow and/or just reload when you take major damage though.

Scarecrow and Ivy's boss fights/levels were genuinely FUN boss fights, Riddler's collectibles felt padded but not to the level of, say, a Ubisoft sandbox, and more importantly they were all easy enough to complete without having to use the internet as long as you find his maps, despite whatever he incorrectly claims. Combat is satisfying once you get the hang of it (I recommend practising your available moves in challenge modes if you're not getting frequent high combos in story mode). Mark Hamill absolutely nails his Joker persona as always, but Kevin Conroy's performance wasn't as dramatic as he could've been in the climax, far too quiet.

The game radiates machismo, which is very much take-it-or-leave-it as Rocksteady's ideal Batman clearly seems to be one that prefers to primarily solve things with his fists. The game has standard backtracking to older areas with newer gadgets, just as with any Metroidvania. I personally enjoyed this part but I understand that most people typically don't care so much.

Bottom line, it's a superhero game with quality beyond games as buggy as are released nowadays, so I'd recommend it to anyone. Has a good amount of replayability in the challenges, which I'm probably gonna try for next.

Turned a casual bird/flight sim from something that sounded conceptually boring into a serene experience. I still come back to this soundtrack on quiet nights, especially Home.

I wonder what other beautiful games and music Forgotten Key might've put out if they still existed today. A pity we'll never know.