Batman vs AaAaAA
I played through Arkham Asylum and quite enjoyed it, and am in the middle of a similarly enjoyable playthrough of Arkham City. In both cases, the games do a great job of making you feel like Batman. Combat relies on agility, awareness, and gadgets; the plots feel like you’re playing through an episode of the show; the characters are captured well, and in some cases even given nice flourishes, showing that the game isn’t afraid to innovate on its source material, a fact also made evident from their original plotlines. These games let you be Batman, and there is a lot to be said for that.
But as a mechanics/systems-inclined player, I’ve always found something to be a bit off-putting about the games. It spent a long time dancing around the tip of my tongue, felt but unexpressed. It is to the game’s credit that it took me so long to realize, and once I did it made sense why I’d had trouble articulating it. That problem was that the games had been so busy making me look and feel cool they hadn’t really let me make myself cool.
This is most succinctly shown in the combat system, which magically transforms your semi-coherent mashing into a balletic beatdown. All you have to do is hold in the direction of an enemy and hit ‘attack,’ and you will leap through the air at an appropriate angle and pull off some neat move or other. Now, designing a system that makes Batman flow so wonderfully through his combos is really cool, and good on them for making it, but there comes a point where that’s all it is. Lather, rinse, repeat as needed, and season with counterattacks to taste. Despite the fairly dull base of gameplay, it feels great because you look cool while doing it. Now, this analysis isn’t entirely fair; there is actually a decent amount of depth you can get into with combos, stuns, and gadgets, but the extra effort never felt particularly rewarding.
The combat system also shows its weaknesses in the boss fights, which are rarely combat proper at all, though this isn’t necessarily a fault since making them puzzles allows the game to do some cool gimmicks and thematic elements. Still, the fact that a combat-centric boss fight would be so dull I think attests to the system’s flaws; it was really made for taking on swarms of goons, and is not really extensible to other fields. Even the special enemy types often feel like more of a chore than an organic part of a combat encounter. The problem they bring is that there’s usually only one specific way to deal with them. If that’s ever the case in a game, it had better be a really fun one thing, because otherwise it’s going to get tiresome.
DmC suffered from this with the enemies only vulnerable to certain weapon types. Now, making certain strategies more difficult against some enemies is fine; like how the slow gauntlet weapons of DMC are bad against numerous small enemies. But the point is, they were BAD, not completely ineffective. Basically, don’t put hard counters in your game, mkay? It kills gameplay. If you’re worried that a certain element (like a Batman gadget) won’t get used in combat, maybe make it more fun to use? Or have some faith in your players :)
Another example of how the game focuses on being cool for you is the forensic investigation. While I understand that it would be nearly impossible to free-form something like this, it remains the case that they feed you your tasks, give you a trail to follow, and send you off with no thinking or detective work required.
A lot of what my complaints boil down to is who is in control. In the Arkham games, the game is fully in control; it dictates the flow of events, through scripting or through the systems themselves. While it might be a bit of a hyperbole, I would go so far as to say that many modern games don’t trust their audience, and as a result give them watered-down gameplay in easy-to-handle chunks that don’t require a great deal of critical thinking or execution.
On the other side of the control coin, we have games like DMC and, since I’ve already talked DMC into the ground, AaAaAA. In both cases, the player is given a great deal of license to make what they will of a situation. In the case of AaAaAA, it mostly consists in a choice of routes; what structures and objectives do you aim for, and what do you pass up? That fundamental difficult choice, combined with the game’s core mechanic of endangering yourself to score the most points, make for an incredibly interesting game that all stems from player choice. I particularly respect AaAaAA’s minimal infrastructure on top of this gameplay; there’s a level select screen, which houses some funny dialog and ambiance, and then it’s straight into the levels, one after another after another. Even the order of levels is left up to the player. You can advance methodically along the board or plunge straight down on one particular path
