Batman: Arkham Shadow

I am sweating like a little wet vole. Sweat is dripping from the tip of my nose, dripping. I'm also drenched in sweat all over my back and my forehead is covered in beads of it. I should really be resting instead of sitting here stressing about writing a review. I should sleep for a while after drying my 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 Meta Quest 3 exclusive Batman: Arkham Shadow. It's worse than the worst of workouts, I'd say.

I am not a VR nut. Quite the contrary. I'm too old to stand with a plastic helmet on my skull and wave like a madman in the living room. I want to sit down when I play. I want to be able to sit perfectly still and only move my thumbs and I want to look at my TCL 98' and not squeeze my old man head into a VR headset. That said, I really loved Half-Life: ALyx, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission and Asgard's Wrath II. Genuinely great VR experiences that, along with Beat Saber, Superhot VR, Tetris Effect and Gran Turismo 7 VR, prove what the format can offer, if the games are developed in the right way by the right people.

Batman: Arkham Shadow should hereby be put in the same fine premium pile as the games I mentioned above and this is largely thanks to the fact that the developers had the good taste to study the timelessly brilliant Batman: Arkham Asylum, which of course they did absolutely right. The studio behind Iron Man VR (Camouflaj) has put together a VR adventure that not only impresses and surprises, but convinces and builds a bridge between Arkham Origins and Rocksteady's first game in the ingenious trilogy about DC Comics' greatest detective.

The player assumes the mantle here just after the events of Origins and just before Arkham Asylum, as it were. Batman is young, relatively inexperienced but tough as nails, and when he's pitted against the villainous Rat King, who has plans to cripple Gotham via a cult-like rebellion, it's up to you to stop the misery and set things right again. Jim Gordon has been kidnapped, Blackgate Prison is on fire (metaphorically, at least) because of the twisted, unhinged Warden Bolton, and the Scarecrow is as manipulatively dangerous as ever in this hard-boiled adventure.

It's clear, early on, that the main task for the developers behind Arkham Shadow has been to try and mimic Arkham Asylum, turning the third-person action parts and detective/stealth moments into something that works in a VR-based first-person perspective. I have to assume that this was the part of the development that took the longest to get right, as evidenced by the end result, which I think is much better than I had dared hope for. There's a claustrophobically successful, tight framing here that was missing in Arkham City and Arkham Knight when Rocksteady opened up Gotham perhaps a little too much. This I like. Within the confines of the technical limitations of the Meta Quest helmet, Camouflaj moves with a dexterity that is hard not to love. The sense of being Batman, here, is very well realised and the sense of being able to move within just the right sized environments relatively freely, despite the game being essentially super linear, is even better realised.

Just like in Arkham Asylum, you can choose your own approach depending on your playing style and mood. If you'd rather sneak past the enemies, maybe pick up one or two of them on the ceiling and let them dangle from the ceiling in a wire, it's perfectly fine. If you want to throw yourself headlong into every fight and let your fists do the talking - that works too. Structurally, like Rocksteady's first instalment in the trilogy, this is something of a three-dimensional Metroidvania where you move through a maze-like game world, collecting clues, going back to find things you may have missed and then moving forward. The atmosphere is brilliant, the level design brilliant and the pacing very well balanced.

Equally good is the fighting system, which I thought beforehand looked mediocre at best. Handing out knuckle sandwiches, jumping between different melees and holding off the hard-hitting henchmen from the Rat King's headquarters is as challenging as it is rewarding and very rarely gets annoying or unnecessarily complicated as I usually find this type of VR experience to be. It flows well, it really feels like the punches are doing damage and it requires you as a player to stand up in a room with a lot of surface area as you will be rotating, cranking, punching and hammering like a madman. I wouldn't say this is playable sitting down and I wouldn't say you can get through 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 don't really like in this game is the graphics which despite nice design (same here, feels a lot like Arkham Asylum) look old. Of course I understand the hardware limitations that exist given that Meta Quest is a standalone headset without the need for a computer, but still. Arkham Shadow looks old and that ruins some of the experience for me. Compared to Half-Life: Alyx in particular, it looks five or maybe even six years older. In particular, it's the cutscenes and the way the various characters move and especially talk that spoil some of the atmosphere, even if the voice acting is furiously good (both Troy Baker and Elijah Wood do a bang-up job as Two Face and Scarecrow).

Ultimately, it's great to see really lavish, well-made and successful blockbuster titles like these in VR. The format itself would have needed a lot of these games at an earlier stage to reach a wider and larger audience. If you have a Quest headset, you just can't miss Arkham Shadow.