Wii U Batman: Arkham City – The Dark Knight's Weakened Armour

I find it hard not to be excited about Wii U. I'm a redoubtable optimist when it comes to new consoles. After all, they don't come around very often, and the GamePad – with its touchscreen and other gizmos – genuinely offers new possibilities to game developers. Currently, it's just potential, untapped and unexplored, but it's definitely there. And at this year's E3 when Miyamoto took to the stage and showed the world Pikmin 3 for the first time, it all made sense. For a moment.

This was a Nintendo franchise that had skipped a generation to be reborn on a new console with an even stranger controller. He talked about deep game mechanics and how they would take advantage of GamePad, as the colourful troupe of Pikmin dutifully constructed bridges in the background. We were sold. Here was a game that sensitively utilised the new hardware. And then, as everyone has been so eager to point out, the wheels fell off.

Lots of people have pointed their smug fingers at the decision to finish the conference with Nintendo Land as the major slip-up. Yes, it might not have been the rousing final note we were all hoping for, but flimsy cardboard Wendy houses aside, I actually think Nintendo Land has promise. Providing Nintendo is smart enough to update it regularly with new attractions, it could be somewhere players will visit regularly. But neglected, it will surely disassemble into a rabble of easily-forgotten mini-games ("that was a nice break, but we'll go somewhere different next year").

The most awkward moment, for my money, was when the line-up of third-party titles was unveiled – in particular, Batman: Arkham City – Armored Edition. Some grand claims were thrown about. We were told that this was a "unique must-have edition" of one of 2011's best games. So what has Rocksteady been up to with wonderful toy that is Nintendo's Wii U. Well, not much. Cut to a pre-recorded video of the game's director Sefton Hill, who "shares in our excitement for the franchise to come to the Wii U". Ever the pro, Hill did his best to stifle his enthusiasm, and spoke about how the "gameplay has been expanded with some awesome new features designed specifically for this new console". Cue the the introduction of Reid Schneider, VP of Production at WB Montreal – the studio responsible for the Wii-U-ificiation of Arkham City, not Rocksteady.

Perhaps I'm being a tad harsh and unrealistic about the investment of time it would take to properly adapt the game. But Rocksteady has lovingly supported Arkham City with a wealth of carefully-crafted DLC since it came out last October, so it seems strange it wouldn't want to take advantage of this new technology first-hand. Schneider went on to claim that the GamePad will "revolutionise the way you play the game", and he's right, in part. Having played Armored Edition, there are moments when the new control mechanics work wonderfully. It always works best when using the touchscreen compliments what's happening onscreen. So in Arkham City, whenever Batman enters Detective Mode to search for clues, you're asked to hold up the GamePad and align it with your television. The screen on the GamePad is used to scan the area for streams of incriminating molecules or patches of blood. When you find a clue, you touch the screen to examine the evidence more closely. It works really well, but it hardly transforms the game.

Similarly, when Batman is forced to use his cryptographic sequencer to hack locked doors, you're presented with a simple mini-game on the GamePad. Again, it makes sense because switching to the GamePad mimics what the character is doing on screen. There's a touch of performance to the whole thing. But the experience is ruined when the game asks you to do something unnecessarily fussy simply for the sake of using the touchscreen or the gyroscope. My concern is that games that have already been released on other consoles will feel obligated to use the Wii U's features at every opportunity – a way of justifying not only their very existence but perhaps a second purchase – even if it's detrimental to the game. This happened a couple of times while I was playing Armored Edition. Selecting items from the GamePad's inventory, instead of the onscreen UI, feels overly fussy; you can map items to the D-pad, but it's still a bit fiddly and looking down from the screen every time you need a new item breaks the flow of the game. Another equally jarring moment comes when you try to use the remote batarang: as soon as you throw it, you need look down quickly at the GamePad's screen and guide it using the gyroscope. It's said that this new control system affords an "unprecedented amount of accuracy", but it took me several attempts to guide the batarang effectively (and I'm not terrible at games). It was during these frustrating, distracting moments that I really questioned the claim that this is the most "immersive" version of the game yet.

Batman: Arkham City – Armored Edition, then. It's an unwieldy title – some flashy words have been crudely-bolted onto a good one – and in many ways, that's symptomatic of the game itself. Arkham City is still present and of course it's still great (though it doesn't look quite as good on Wii U – textures are muddy, as if modeled out of clay, and environments are less detailed). But onto this great game, WB Montreal has grafted some new mechanics: some work brilliantly, effectively taking advantage of the console's unique set-up, while others tarnish the experience. Armored Edition is an okay retread, but if you've already played the game it's unlikely that you'll want to revisit the streets of Arkham.



Source : ign[dot]com