Rocksteady’s most recent Batman game Arkham City is proof that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Take the villains for example. The Batman franchise has a pretty big rogues gallery, a lot of colorful personalities with interesting stories. However they really are overdoing it in Arkham City, by throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the player.
The game starts with Professor Hugo Strange having taken over Arkham Asylum. Strange has Bruce Wayne arrested and thrown into Arkham City—an old part of Gotham that has been abandoned and now turned into one giant prison city like Manhattan in "Escape from New York." While trying to figure out Strange’s plan, Batman runs across the Joker and Harley Quinn after having saved Catwoman from Two-Face. The Joker poisons Batman with a disease he himself has somehow contracted. So now Batman has to go and find a cure for this disease before foiling whatever plan Strange is up to. To find the cure Batman has to find Mr. Freeze.
Meanwhile, the game offers a little switch of perspectives over to Catwoman, who has an encounter with Poison Ivy. Batman, on the way to Freeze’s hideout, has been contacted by the Riddler to solve some riddles he left EVERYWHERE in the game world. Also, after picking up a ringing payphone outside Freeze’s hideout, Batman has to rush across town to stop Mr. Zasz from killing random hostages. On the way to Zasz, Batman witnesses Deadshot killing another random guy and hops onto his trail. After preventing Zasz from killing a hostage by doing something that he told us to, Batman is off to Freeze again. After picking up some strange signal, Batman enters a random building, where Bane greets him, but not to break his back but to get some help from the Dark Knight because someone stole his sweetroll… err, his Titan (the super mutagen stuff from the last game) canisters which need to be destroyed. Batman finally gets back to Freeze’s lair, only to discover that Freeze is not here but has been abducted by the Penguin.
Everything but the kitchen sink. And it doesn’t get any better from there on out.
The game’s writing is probably the weakest in a big budget game in recent years, especially when considering the source material available to the developers. The voice acting may be stellar due to the animated series’ cast, but the cast can’t rescue the lines they have to say from being pretty badly written and the story from being an uninteresting, uninspired mess.
Overall, Arkham City lacks focus—in the story as well as in gameplay. There are too many villains and Batman characters stuffed into the game with little to no justification. The Joker and Hugo Strange are both are the main villains of the plot, and that split hurts the overall writing quality to begin with. Everything else just waters the game down, making each character's appearance feel like little more than an afterthought. Every other second some questgiver wants to shove another thing to do down the player’s throat. A phone rings. The Batcowl picks up another distress call. While on the way to a mission another Riddler trophy is found. And so on. At times, it can be really hard following the main questline. There are just too damn many distractions, too many fetch- and collect quests. The overarching narrative isn't strong enough to tie everything together.
The things the game does well have little to do with its writing. The open world is well done mechanically. There is no minimap to distract players from the action, and the Batsignal works as a marker for the next quest. Combat is fluid and mostly fun, though the larger brawls later in the game suffer from too many different enemy types and the lack of a lock on function.
There is some interesting thematic level design in the lower parts of the city, however the rest of the game world is the same old, slightly Bioshock-inspired ruined beauty—an aesthetic which has been done to death in games so many times that all the novelty this art style once had has long since been worn away.
Clearing a room of goons is still a satisfying experience, zipping and gliding through the city is great fun, but no matter much entertaining the pure minute to minute gameplay may get, overall the game is just falling apart with nothing to hold it all together. There is just too much that’s just uninteresting, uninspired and not too much fun. Arkham Asylum was a very good game. So obviously the expectations for Arkham City were high, and subsequently the disappointment is even bigger. Arkham City fails recreating the magic touch of its predecessor and loses whatever charm it initially had by trying to compensate with sheer unrelenting numbers of villains, sidequests and empty spaces. It’s a mess, a disgrace and the most poorly written AAA game of 2011.
