Well, I finally got to try out the Demo for
Arkham City yesterday at the
San Diego Comic Con. What can I say? This game is
**** awesome!!! Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick! The demo itself contained not One but Two working levels. The first Demo is something that everyone has already seen by way of footage released from
E3 2011. It's the level that introduces
Two-Face and
Catwoman. But what you don't see in the videos is that it's much much longer. Time wise, I think it took 15-20 minutes to complete. The flying aspect of this level is pretty damn impressive and very additive.
The
Cryptographic Sequencer Gadget is different this time around. It's has elements of the old one but is different in execution. Also, pretty cool detective mode play action in this level where you have to analyze a gunshot fired from a Sniper from an adjacent building that was trying to take out
Catwoman. Once you discover it's trajectory, that's when you advance the 2nd half of this
Two-Face/Catwoman level.
The other Demo Level is what I would call
The Riddler Maze. This isn't the exact name of it. But since I forget to mentally take note of it's name, I am going with
Riddler Maze as it best defines what it is. For this level,
Bats has to make his way through a path, while avoiding the shock floors and spinning "wheel blades" as he must duck and jump over ledges, etc... Here you have to use the remote Batarang to get to veeeery hard to reach spots to knock out electrical boxes to turn off sections of the maze. I am talking about having to use the remote to guide the batarang under and over objects that are blocking your path. This isn't a direct line of sight toss here.
One of the coolest things I discovered during this level, even though I already heard about it through one of the
Developer's Diaries, was that of the Zip-Line. When
Bats uses the Zip-Line from Point A to Point B, you as the player and slow down
Bats and turn left or right and look for a new spot and shoot another Zip-Line and change your direction mid flight. Think along the lines of Bats doing his version of Spider-Man and you get the idea here. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay cool. This level took about 15 minutes or so.
This was by far the longest Demo I've ever played. One thing I didn't like about the Demo is that during Detective Mode during the Catwoman Demo is that when you are out in the City, the skyline and buildings look really bad. Some sort of clipping. I'm sure this is just a bug that will get tweaked before the games release.
Other than that, THIS is the game to beat this year. The cut scenes are
**** awesome! And this time, when you talk to guards, they don't look stiff as a block of ice as they do in
Arkham Asylum. The facial animation looks gooooood. The whole game is sick!
I asked the floor person in charge of the game as many questions as I could think of. I asked about how many more gadgets
Bats will have this game. He ALMOST let it slip the the exact number but then caught himself in the nick of time. All he would say is that it's a lot more. I asked about
Robin as a player character and if
Best Buy was the only way to get it. He said that for the time being,
Best Buy has the exclusive, but that once that exclusive agreement expires,
Robin will be available as a DLC. His words, not mine.
Downside to playing this Demo.....
The wait time for this game is gonna be even longer because I got a taste of the good stuff and I have nothing to play now that can measure up to it. Bah!!!