I was able to avoid the temptation to purchase Batman: Arkham City new, even on Black Friday, and instead borrowed it from my brother. For which I am now grateful.

Because Arkham City isn't cutting it for me.

I loved the original game, Arkham Asylum, and its successor features a lot of the same game mechanics, great graphics, and characters, only broader in scope. You have an entire city region to navigate, with the same abilities you ended Arkham Asylum with, and as such there a number of side missions and content to go through.

And yet, Arkham City leaves me cold.

I should love the fact that there are a large number of things to do in the game, but it all sort of feels like work. The Riddler trophies, for example. My understanding is that you're not going to be able to get them all right off the bat; that for some, you'll need to return later, perhaps after you've upgraded certain certain abilities. But I feel the same way here as I do in the first game. Namely, there's just so many, it'd be like having a second job. And they seem much more challenging to obtain now, whereas previously the majority could be grabbed right when you found them. Meh.

The story is the biggest fault here. It feels artificially decompressed in spots.  An example: Batman needed to break into a museum to find Penguin, but discovers that his nemesis is using frequency scramblers that are preventing Batman from continuing. So now he needs to trudge about the city, look for these 3 scramblers, destroy them. More funny is that the scramblers have 3 screens that you must destroy. Which left me scratching my head; what's the point of them having 3 screens? It just wastes your time. Seemed like a poor game design decision.

I found myself wanting to just get through these events so that I could progress the story, and had little desire to partake in the side missions.

And seriously, what's up with the Augmented Reality training missions? I started laughing when I had to repeatedly glide through rings (reminiscent of Superman 64, which is never, ever a good thing), because I imagined what city residents would think if they saw Batman doing this. "Hey, dude, no need to save the city or anything, just keep trying to glide through the air, okay?"

Giving back Arkham City to my brother next chance I get. Maybe down the road I'll give it another try, but right now, I'm just not feeling it.