Batman: Arkham Shadow review – grandly scaled and detailed

Batman: Arkham Shadow swells with the atmospheric and environmental elements we’ve come to expect from depictions of Gotham City: dark lane ways, long shadows, musty corridors, neon lights. This dank and brooding place is a holy grail for production designers, with harshly lived-in aesthetics and a tendency to come alive at night. The more rain the better—like Ridley Scott’s metropolis in Blade Runner. It’s a joy to experience the city realised in this engrossing AAA game, which is large in scale but often impresses the most with small details, like the kick we get from observing our Bat-shadow cast on the ground. 

Most of it transpires in the huge Blackgate Prison complex, rather than Gotham City neighbourhoods. But painting an impression of life on the streets is the key prerogative of its lengthy prologue—which captures a scent of revolution in the air, rising up from the sewers. A maniacal villain known as the “Rat King” has built a large and violent following by appealing to the downtrodden and disenfranchised, planning a “Wrath Day” to inflict maximum damage on the city. Early on we hear the villain tell Batman “you punch down, we rise up.” That’s a hell of a line. Later on, one of his followers yells at us “you’re a tool of oppression—a cop with a cape!”

Dialogue like this muddies the protagonist’s place in the moral scheme of things. Are we an inflictor of vengeance, or an instrument of justice? The “shadow” in the title refers to a concept developed by Carl Jung: a hidden, repressed, guilt-burdened aspect of the psyche. At one point, deep in the game (no spoilers), this is thrillingly actualised, abstract psychological converted into dramatic scenarios and navigable spaces. 

The aforementioned feeling of potential revolution is difficult to convey, as are the associated feelings: resentment, rage, bitter longing…the songs of the damned. We hear the noise of a rebellious crowd on the soundtrack—more than a murmur, less than a roar—and see pictorial evidence around town that something big is brewing. I noticed a sign on the ground that combines a drawing of a rat alongside the words “BITE BACK.” Later, a rat graffitied onto a brick wall next to “END THIS FAILED EXPERIMENT.” The Rat King’s fanatic followers move into War Boys-esque religiosity when they scream phrases like “rat’s don’t surrender, we are reborn!”

We hear less of such phrases when the drama relocates to the aforementioned prison, and we go undercover as a rough-as-guts inmate named “Matches Malone,” in order to win the trust of criminals and obtain more information about the Rat King (whose identity is a mystery, giving the story an element of “whodunit”). But we don’t hang up our cape, alternating between Malone and Batman. Nor do the combat scenes cease: prison guards, as it turns out, don’t care for the Dark Knight, and the feeling’s mutual. There’s more punch-ons with them than there are the criminals. 

On the subject of those punch-ons: the combat scenes are very satisfyingly executed. Instead of groaning at the sight of yet another onslaught of foes to vanquish, I looked forward to it. You don’t take them down softly, like you could with a gun; your whole upper body is required. The challenge with embodying characters like Batman, or any superhero really, is to translate their mythical fighting abilities into enjoyable gameplay sequences that can be endlessly repeated, feeling germane to the character and universe.

Yellow indicators appear to show us where to hit each enemy and when to dodge attacks from others. The challenge is to maintain an unbroken sequence; if we hit a certain number of correct moves in a row, we’re rewarded with a special high-damage move. It’s unclear whether Batman, in the narrative world, can also see these visual cues. If so they’re diegetic, occurring within the context of the story. If not they’re non-diegetic, existing purely for the player, outside the story world. It works either way. 

The narrative plays with Batman lore, sometimes in ways that are quite cheeky, messing with the stories of side characters, which include Harvey Dent, Commissioner Gordon, Carmine Falcone and Doctor Crane. The plot more or less follows a three act structure—with a particularly meaty middle section—and satisfyingly scales up in the last couple of hours. Flashback cutscenes are unconventionally presented from an aerial view, looking down on characters, thus de-personalising them: taking their faces away, removing human details. It’s an interesting choice but I don’t think it works. 

Far better is the approach taken in a memorable scene in an alleyway (no spoilers) that folds together past and present, real and imagined, crossing timelines and states of consciousness while maintaining environmental consistency. Arkham Shadow’s semi-regular “crime scene” moments also do this, the investigation of particular objects triggering backstory information and launching hologram-like renderings of past events. Using space to tell stories is the secret sauce of VR—easier said than done, but generally pulled off impressively in Arkham Shadow. This game does lots of things right, and some things spectacularly well.