Pads & Panels

#2 Batman: Arkham City (PS3, 360, PC)

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment — Developer: Rocksteady Studios

Our Review

Batman Simulator 2.0 doesn’t disappoint, as it hits all the high spots gamers loved in Arkham Asylum and scatters them across an entire sandbox of a city to find. Rocksteady Studios is to be commended for continually getting what makes Batman fun. The double-edged sword here is – even though Arkham City is more robust than Asylum, gamers won’t get that stunning moment again where they realize that finally someone finally got a Batman game right. But the overall quality of the game is vastly improved, making it one of the year’s best. (more…)

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Best Video Games of 2011 – Honorable Mentions

Pads & Panels will soon be counting down its Top 10 Video Games of 2011, but before we get to that point, we’d like to pay mind to 10 other games that stood out as top contenders for the year. They were all part of our discussion and all deserve some recognition for their achievements in gaming, even if they didn’t quite make the cut of the illustrious Top 10. All 10 of these titles were games that earned our attention and respect in one way or another in 2011, the list of them effectively serving as our 11-20 choices, presented here in no particular order. (more…)

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Title: Bastion

Platform: 360 (PC)

ESRB: E10+

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Supergiant Games

Review By: Eric Stuckart

Rating:

Is it possible to reinvent the old school action RPG about the end of the world again? I was more than a little skeptical, but Bastion took the long-standing trope and grabbed me by the ears and made me pay attention and listen, and showed me a whole new world in a way that I haven’t experienced in a long time.

To paraphrase the world-weary voice of the narrator, the Kid wakes up on a floating rock in the sky after the Calamity, a cataclysmic event that much destroyed the planet and caused everything to splinter apart and become somewhat weightless. As he explores what’s left of his part of the world, he finds that paths will build themselves up right under his feet, always giving each of the game’s areas a “more than meets the eye” feel. The Kid eventually finds the Bastion, the meeting place for the residents if anything ever went wrong, but the only one he finds there is the old man, the one who narrates the story. He explains to the Kid that he needs to travel what’s left of the planet to find cores from each of the remaining areas so that they can rebuild the Bastion and use it to attempt to reverse the effects of the Calamity. (more…)

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Title: Batman: Arkham City

Platform: 360, PS3, PC (to be released)

ESRB: T

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Developer: Rocksteady Studios

Review By: Eric Stuckart

Rating:

When it was released, 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum was perhaps the greatest superhero game ever made, and for good reason. It was stylish, stuck to the source material pretty closely — despite the ending getting a tad bit too video gamey — courtesy of Batman scribe Paul Dini, was graphically impressive, and had some excellent voice work, bringing in Batman mainstays Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill to voice the titular character and the Joker.

Now, that would all be for not if it weren’t for the gameplay, which did a damn fine job of making the player actually feel like the caped crusader. One of the greatest feelings that Arkham Asylum was able to evoke was that of combining action, adventure, stealth, and subtle detective elements into the gameplay to create something that was not only fun to play, but highly addictive as well. In all honesty, the only problem that many players had with the game (ending non-withstanding) was the fact that the game was limited to Arkham Island, which meant that most of the action took place indoors, save for the random encounters on the small stretches of land between the buildings of the asylum. Fortunately for bat-hungry gamers, Arkham City took the fight to the streets, and what a fight it is. (more…)

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