Arkham Combat: Love it or hate it?

@Byshop: Good points, all, and I really think you nailed the depth debate. If you don't much like it, you just chug your way through it and tend to not look too deeply into it.

There is one other thing, though- I never much cared for any of the Arkham games as games. The stories are basically interactive episodes of Batman: The Animated Series(which isn't a bad thing, it's just lost the novelty after AA), the predator segments are stealth( which I no longer really have the patience for), and the rest is all puzzle solving(which is interesting until about halfway through, when it just becomes tedious). Really, for me, the only part of the game that keeps my attention is the combat. Which is likely why I loathe Arkham Origins- they screwed up the implementation, making combat a train wreck by comparison, and they didn't even have a bitchin' new endurance map. 1 vs 100 was okay, but after beating it without taking a single hit for the second time, I went back to the Iceberg Lounge.

@BranKetra: the weight really comes more from the physics engine than anything else. When you hit somebody and they crumble, or you hit an armored thug with an REC and he goes flying off into another goon. It was just so satisfying. In most hack & slash games, you hit an enemy four or five times and you're lucky if you get a minor recoil animation.

@foxhound_fox: yeah, you're definitely killing me here, considering the only hack & slash I've played since Arkham Asylum launched was Metal Gear Rising.

Now, considering the thread was originally supposed to discuss Arkham-style beatem ups, does anyone here like any of the other games in the genre(the list I made two pages back is most, if not all of them) BETTER than Arkham?

The inexperience with those games is contextually relevant because of how this discussion has progressed, but considering he originally made this thread about Batman Arkham games and he has played them, I believe we should focus on that. Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, and all the others have interesting combat systems, but they are not the same. In hindsight of my previous comments, "Batman Arkham" as we continue to call them would be best discussed if actually focused on instead of constantly being compared to different games. After all, El_Zo1212o did ask a couple questions only about that franchise: "Positive or negative?" and another about our Iceberg Lounge high scores.

I love the combat system. It isn't as deep or complex as DMC, W101, or Bayo. But that isn't the point of the game. Its just simple fun.

@ Byshop

Don't forget how much I hate cutscenes too ! :)

Still mad about Dark Souls ?

Yep, that move has been existing for years. You're welcome, BTW. :D

It's serviceable. It's far better than something like Assassin's Creed, but it's no where near ass good as something Bayonetta. But Batman isn't a spectacle fighter, hand to hand combat isn't the game's focus. The combat is appropriate and solid enough.

But with each new entry in the series it's going to become less and less appealing. I mean, I'm not very excited to play a fourth Arkham game, to be honest.

Played it a couple summers ago in really quick succession (played it on hard); I'm thinking of replaying for a retrospective impression. What I remember is amazing stealth and atmosphere, but I was a little distant to the game because I'm not the biggest batman fan (Batman as a protagonist; I love the villains), and the combat just never really grasped me or satisfied me. It was possibly due to the lack of necessity in combos or due to my lack of interest in brawlers. I asked my girlfriend who also played it, but who didn't finish, and she said the combat was just to simplistic for her; it didn't offer up much challenge.

We haven't done the challenge rooms or gone for highscores, but why would we if the combat was the thing that impressed us the least in the campaign?

@ Minishdriveby

The Challenge Rooms and Campaign were identical. The only difference was the Challenge room evaluates your performance after each encounter, there by providing you the incentive to use the complete skill set which is directly proportionate to the the games depth and difficulty, in other words the fewer moves you use the easier it seems. Also Arkham Origins has Multiplayer, you and girlfriend can team up as Batman and Robin.... Its a very intimate experience :D

@Lulu_Lulu: Intimate. Cute. :P

But Lulu's just made the most succinct point so far about the "simplistic" question: "...the fewer moves you use the easier it seems." When you're playing for high scores, you really get to see the breakdown of how certain moves score higher, then the point score for each move is multiplied by your combo count. In this way, it really underlines how strike-counter-strike-counter is not a winning strategy.

^ I've always assumed theres been alil romantic subtext in between Batman and Robin.

@Lulu_Lulu: considering Batman never seems too broken up about it whenever Robin gets shot to death in AO mp, I kinda doubt it works that way in the Arkhamverse.

lol. I'm sure he's hurting on the inside but has to be strong for Barbra and Alfred.

@Lulu_Lulu: don't you just have an answer for everything...

I personally love it.

@ El_Zo1212o

I can't sleep. So I think about these things in detail.

Unless something spectacular happens, I think this thread's gone as far as it's going.

Current tally:

+26

-4

And it seems like, at the end if the day, the dissenters just prefer faster-paced hack&slash, or melee/shooters.

Oh, and not one Iceberg Lounge score besides my own, which makes me winner by default at 2.51M.

The problem with hack and slash is that it can very boring very quickly.

I watched the Bayonetta video that someone posted earlier? See, THAT's boring! It's not impressive to do a million hits in one combo anymore. People talk about depth in these fast-paced hack n slash games, but I don't see it. Not even in MGR, which is essentially what you said about it earlier; kill one person, move on to the next guy. That goes for ANY hack'n'slash I've ever seen or played. Sure, it makes you a complete badass (videogames are supposed to do that for you after all), but after awhile, it grows boring and stale.

@Metamania: yeah, I really expected MGR to keep me hooked. I played Arkham City nonstop for ten months. I spent 5 months playing Captain America: Super Soldier over and over. I've been playing TMNT:OotS since it launched at the end if August.

I played through Metal Gear Rising once, made it through about a third of a second playthrough and sold it. It had some of the same kind of SO UNSTOPPABLE moments that I live for, but it just felt too out of control. I felt like I was just hammering out a couple of variations on the same few combos rapid fire.

I just prefer the pacing of Arkham combat- queuing up attacks, taking a long animation and using the second or two to scan the crowd and decide on my next two or three moves, and using my most painful looking finishers whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Yeah, that's what I was saying there was no real motivation for us to do the challenge rooms because we didn't really find the melee combat the most enjoyable thing in the campaign. Good games, but I don't think they're some of the greatest games of the generation; however, I'll have to possibly go replay it over the summer and see if impressions have changed over time -- I guess that's the good thing about never selling games in my collection.

@Minishdriveby: I'm telling you, play the Iceberg Lounge. The challenge maps are all 5 waves of between 5-15(10-20 on extreme) enemies and they just don't push you to use your full skill set unless you're predisposed to score chasing. Plus some of them throw Titans and Lieutenants at you, which can really disrupt the flow and ruin a potentially record-breaking run.

The Iceberg Lounge on the other hand just keeps pouring badguys into the arena(raising the total enemies on screen from 3 all the way up to about 20) until they take you down. It can last from 5 minutes to over a half hour depending on your skill level.