Where this game loses me is narratively, this series is based of a book and is frequently praised for it's narrative. But as someone who didn't read the books I felt like I was missing a ton of context in the story. There's so many story beats where you meet a random character for 3 seconds and Artyom decides to then follow them and agree to their every order because? reasons? You're supposed to care about these characters but the game never really bothers fleshing them out. Doesn't help that all of the dialogue in the game is delivered with very poor voice acting, and the main character, who's internal thoughts I am interested in hearing, is the only one who never speaks (outside of loading screens, which makes it even more jarring). Overall I think the big picture story and themes are interesting, but the story presentation and delivery is a massive miss.

I wish more open world games during the 2010s took cues from this instead of Skyrim and Far Cry 3.

- A lot of open world games seem to completely neglect level design, but Arkham City puts so much of it's content in interior areas where it gets to make use of some more focused level design akin to the first game. It doesn't feel like the open world has replaced the game, but rather compliments it.
- The world isn't ridiculously big, but it's dense and full of interesting nooks and crannies to explore.
- Side content was very well done. Each sidequest line was distinct and made great use of Batman's rogue's gallery. Challenges were varied, fun and well paced. Even the collectibles, like Riddler trophies, were often accompanied by a decent little puzzle rather than the freebie that most open world collectibles end up being.
- The world seemed to be reactive to your game progress. Liked that thugs would frequently reference the state of the story.
- Traversal feels amazing. A lot of open world games are huge but feel like a slog to get around in, but you can tell making it fun to get around the map was a huge priority for Rocksteady with how good they made gliding and grappling feel. In many ways, this is a precursor to the highly praised traversal mechanics in the Insomniac Spiderman games, and I dare say that I actually prefer Arkham traversal in some ways.

Game definitely has some rough spots, like the boss fights are straight up not good, and the story feels like it's overstuffed. But damn even though this came out in 2011 it's still better than 95% of open world games today. Hoping the new Spiderman can give this a run for being the best comic book game. (Edit: It did not but it was still very good)

Story was pretty good and I liked the overarching themes. But I don't think they explored the alternate history angle enough and the romance was really badly written. But otherwise enjoyable and the voice actors all did a fantastic job. Cutscene cinematography and direction is far ahead of most shooters out there.

Gunplay felt a bit off to me, it felt good enough to control but the audiovisual experience was underwhelming. The game's pretty visually busy and often the enemies kinda blend in with the backgrounds. The enemies don't react enough to getting hit and I also felt like the gun sounds were mixed weridly and lacked punch. Definitely a game that could have used hitmarkers to enhance the shooting feedback.