I’m sweating like a chicken. Sweat drips from the tip of my nose. I’m also drenched in sweat all over my back and my forehead is covered in drops. I should rest instead of sitting here stressing about writing a review. I should sleep for a while after wiping the sweat and drinking a glass of water. Because to my knowledge, there is not a single current game for any platform or format that is more physically demanding than the newly released exclusive Meta Quest 3 Batman: Arkham Shadow. It’s worse than the worst CrossFit workout, I’d say.
I’m not a VR fan. Quite the opposite. I’m too old to stand there with a plastic helmet on my skull and wave like a madman into the emptiness of my living room. I want to sit when I play. I want to be able to sit perfectly still and just wiggle my thumbs, and I want to look at my 98-inch TCL and not force my old man’s head into a VR headset. Still, I liked Half-Life: ALyx, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Asgard’s Wrath II. Really great virtual reality experiences that, along with Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Tetris Effect and Gran Turismo 7 VR, show what the format can offer , if the games are developed properly by the right people.
Batman: Arkham Shadow should be included in the same list of premium games as those above, and that’s largely because the developers had the good taste to tackle the timelessly brilliant Batman: Arkham Asylum, which of course they did Right is absolutely successful. The studio behind Iron Man VR (Camouflaj) has created a VR adventure that not only impresses and surprises, but also convinces, bridging the gap between Arkham Origins and Rocksteady’s first game in the brilliant trilogy about DC Comics’ greatest detective.
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Here the player takes on the role shortly after the events of Origins and, so to speak, shortly before Arkham Asylum. Batman is young, relatively inexperienced, but tough as nails, and when he faces off against the evil Rat King, who wants to cripple Gotham through a cult uprising, it’s up to you to stop the misery and put things right. Jim Gordon has been kidnapped, Blackgate Prison is burning (metaphorically, at least) because of the twisted and deranged Warden Bolton, and the Scarecrow is as manipulatively dangerous as ever in this dark adventure.
It’s clear from the start that the developers of Arkham Shadow’s main task was to try to emulate Arkham Asylum and turn the third-person action parts and detective/stealth moments into something resembling a first-person experience. Person perspective based on VR works. I have to assume that this was the most time consuming part of development to get right, as evidenced by the end result, which I think is much better than I could have hoped. There’s a tight, claustrophobic setting here that was missing from Arkham City and Arkham Knight when Rocksteady perhaps opened up Gotham too much. I like this. Within the technical limitations of the Meta Quest helmet, Camouflaj moves with a deftness that’s hard not to love. The feeling of being Batman is very well done, and the feeling of being able to move relatively freely in reasonably sized environments despite the game being essentially super linear is even better done.
Just like Arkham Asylum, you can choose your own approach based on your play style and mood. If you prefer to sneak past the enemies, maybe grab one or two from the ceiling and have them hanging from the ceiling on a cable, that’s totally fine. If you want to dive headfirst into every fight and let your fists do the talking, that works too. Structurally, like the first part of the Rocksteady trilogy, it is a kind of three-dimensional Metroidvania in which you move through a labyrinthine game world, collect clues, go back to find things you may have missed, and then move on. The atmosphere is brilliant, as is the level design and the pace is very balanced.
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The combat system, which previously seemed mediocre at best to me, is just as good. Dealing blows, switching between different melee combats, and keeping the tough henchmen at bay in the Rat King’s headquarters is as challenging as it is rewarding, and very rarely does it become annoying or unnecessarily complicated, as I often find in such experiences. of VR. It goes well, it really feels like the hits are doing damage, and as a player you have to stand in a room with a lot of surface area because you have to twist, turn, punch and hammer like crazy. I wouldn’t say you can play it sitting down and I wouldn’t say you can beat Arkham Shadow without breaking a sweat. I don’t even think that’s physically possible unless you’re in the best shape ever.
The only thing I really don’t like about this game is the graphics, which look old despite their nice design (I mean, it looks a lot like Arkham Asylum). Of course I understand the hardware limitations since Meta Quest is a standalone game that doesn’t require a computer, but still. Arkham Shadow looks old and that ruins part of the game for me. Especially compared to Half-Life: Alyx, it seems five or even six years older. In particular, the scenes and the way the various characters move and especially talk spoil some of the atmosphere, although the dubbing is very good (both Troy Baker and Elijah Wood do excellent work as Two Faces and Scarecrow) . ).
In short: It’s great to see really elaborate, well-made and successful blockbusters like this in VR. The format itself would have needed many of these games in an earlier phase to reach a larger and larger audience. If you own a Quest 3 or Quest 3S headset, you can’t miss Arkham Shadow.
