Been playing Batman: Arkham Shadow on the Meta Quest 3S, and…it’s pretty frickin’ good! The Arkham series of games has always been known for having good storylines, a revolutionary freeflow combat system, and a Metroidvania style map progression where you need to come back to old areas with new equipment in order to advance or obtain collectibles. I think when this game was announced, most people scoffed at the idea that a VR experience could maintain that kind of gameplay. Certainly my limited experience of VR to this point suggested such, as I had pretty much played silly simulators or games where your character just warped to various points and could be finished in just a couple of hours.
I’m pleased to report that the developers knocked it out of the park with this! It looks just as good as any Arkham game, the story is good, combat works differently but still has the feel of the freeflow system from previous games, and there’s just lots of little touches that really put the shine on this experience. Such as detective vision. Sure, they could have just had you press a button to activate it, but instead you put your right hand up by your head and then pull the trigger button, as if you are activating something in your cowl. To glide, you extend your arms and pull the triggers as if grabbing your cape and you can direct yourself a bit by leaning to one side or the other. It adds to the immersion.
Traversal and combat are the biggest changes from previous games. There are only certain grapple points that you can use, which makes sense in interiors, but when you are used to zipping all around the city using it, there was a section early in the game that felt very silly when you couldn’t just grapple over to the building you were tying to get to. Not a big deal overall though. I do get a bit thrown when moving from gargoyle to gargoyle as often the screen will go black and then reappear with you facing forward off the statue, rather than the direction I was facing before. Can be detrimental when you are trying to swing between a bunch of them so enemies lose track of you.
Combat is actually a bit of a workout. You have to pull both triggers on a controller to make a fist and punch, and then actually throw a punch and you will lunge at your target and hit them. Then you are prompted to either do a straight punch or a hook. Do it successfully and you continue your combo, but get it wrong and the enemy blocks. Hit them three times or so and they typically get knocked down.
If you see a warning that you are about to be hit, you just need to push a hand out in that direction and you will counter. You can also dodge back or to the side by tilting and clicking the left control stick. Pushing forward on the right control stick will make you vault over an enemy to let you attack them from behind, though since that stick is also used to turn in 60 degree rotations, I sometimes end up facing away from the enemy when I finish it.
You can cape stun by “grabbing” a corner of your cape out at the side and then swinging your arm forward, allowing you to pummel them unconscious, or you can jump on a downed enemy to do the same, both usually taking three to five punches and the faster you punch the more likely you finish without getting interrupted by another enemy. If you build up your combo meter you can do a finishing attack to instantly take out an enemy with a punch, uppercut, and then double downward strike on the shoulders. Dealing with knife wielders is especially fun, as you need to do a counter, then physically dodge by tilting your body one way or the other, or even ducking to avoid their strikes, after which you can hit them.
I’m not in the best shape, so after a combat with a bunch of guys I’ll actually be a bit out of breath. So yay, playing this doubles as cardio!
There’s still predator sections as well, where you are trying to take out enemies silently, which usually involves sneaking behind them and pushing your hands forward while clicking the secondary triggers on both controllers, at which point you then choke them out by yanking them back and forth a few times. Or you can hang from a gargoyle and just yank them up and toss them, burst out of a floor panel, etc. All the usual things from previous games.
All in all, this is a full Arkham experience, just tweaked to take full advantage of the VR interface. I also really like how they’ve tried to give most of the items and environment some permanence. I mean, often in these VR games, you reach into a wall and your arm just moves through it. On most surfaces in Batman, while your physical hand may keep moving, the image of your hand stops on the wall, even flattens out your fingers when you push. Sometimes to an excessive bendy degree, like if you run you finger over a bottle while trying to push into it, the finger bends backwards in an bit of an unnatural way, but the overall effect is still pretty cool.
There are a few bugs, but nothing that cannot be overcome. The worst is occasionally when you grapple, you normally push forward on the right stick to mantle up, but sometimes it glitches and puts you up but not forward onto the platform so you fall. Usually a restart fixes this but I had one section where it didn’t. I had to get past it by “physically” grabbing the edge of the platform and “pull” myself up. Other than that, there’s been just a couple of hiccups when loading new sections of the map, everything else has been smooth.
So, longwinded review over. Awesome game. I’ve played for many hours and I’m still only 54% of the way complete, and there’s also a few challenge arenas for combat and predator included, plus I’ll want to go back and try to collect anything I’ve missed once I finish the story, so I’m definitely getting my money’s worth. Moreso since the game came with the system. Also the developer has announced further content to come, so that’s exciting too!
