You can also finish off moves with a beatdown, mashing the strike button to pummel your foe – however, you're defenceless against other attackers during this process. If a character is marked with yellow arrow indicators it means they're about to attack with a knife to counter, you'll need to move back on each stab, before going back in to take them down. If an enemy throws something at you, you can deflect it right back using the counter button. The skill is also in developing context-appropriate reactions. While showing off the Challenge mode, Rocksteady's community manager was effortlessly attaining 50+ combo chains, wracking up mountainous scores. With better knowledge of the combo system, however, you start to string more flamboyant moves together, chaining multiple attacks, moving seamlessly from one baddie to the next. Just pounding the buttons and analogue stick produce an acrobatic display, with Catwoman, high-kicking here, whip-cracking there, and occasionally pausing, bending over to peck an enemy on the cheek, before throwing him over on to the ground. You can choose from Batman, Robin or Catwoman (though more characters may be announced) and the latter is just an absolute pleasure to control, her lithe animation and roster of slinking moves combining beautifully to create a combat system that both flatters and challenges the player. My hands-on 2D demo with the Challenge mode worked brilliantly though. Taking place on a static Gotham rooftop, the stereoscopic visuals added little in the way of depth, while Catwoman's speedy animation gave me double vision at times.
Two of the studio's team showed us a combat challenge where you select a character then battle ever-larger, more insistent waves of enemies. For Gamescom, Rocksteady Studios was also showing off Arkham City's expanded Challenge mode, which provides players with a range of contained gameplay tasks, based within familiar campaign locations. Where it didn't really help, or indeed work amazingly well, was in the actual combat segments. Sadly, I didn't get hands-on time with the 3D version, but I wonder if it will be useful as well as visually impressive, providing more depth perception for those precarious landings on tight ledges or looming gargoyles. Immediately, there was a real sense of scale, inclusion and distance it works in the way that successful 3D cinema works, by grabbing the viewer and for a few brief seconds taking them onto the other side of the screen. The title now joins Gears of War 3 as an interesting fresh recruit to consumer electronics' latest marketing drive.Īnd in a demo room in the Gamescom business centre, I watched impressed as Batman spread out his wings and swooped above a city that unfolded in three dimensions around him. Warner Bros announced this long-awaited title's support for the oft-maligned stereoscopic technology at Gamescom. You do look like you could cause our Brucie a whole lot of problems though, I'll give you that.If one game experience is capable of tempting 3D naysayers to don a pair of active shutter glasses and gawp in wonder at their screens, it could be Batman: Arkham City.
You're still a bit silly, even if you do have a scary robot voice now. And who wears a really, really big helmet. Victor Fries in his Rocksteady incarnation is clearly being pitched as an entirely serious character, and as this trailer suggests he's got Batman performing tasks for him, not as an out-and-out villain but as a dangerous psychopath obsessed with his frozen wife.
BATMAN ARKHAM CITY MR FREEZE HOW TO
How to make this pun-spewing pastiche remotely fearsome again? Well, give him a massive helmet, Terminator-esque body language, all manner of complicated-looking technology including some natty robot goggles and the sum total of zero one-liners: that's the Arkham City approach. From Batman's already ludicrous rogue's gallery (Man-Bat! Calendar Man!), his star is surely the most fallen, thanks to the governor of California's chilling portrayal in the most nippletastic of all the Batman movies. I have nothing but sympathy for poor old Mr Freeze and the comics writer who created him, Ian Cold.