The Stack

Arkham City is the same sort of open-world game as GTA3: a sculptural artifact, where the player becomes intimately familiar with the details of a space that they cross over repeatedly. Such a game succeeds or fails on the basis of how enjoyable it makes the act of traversal. And that’s where Arkham City really shines — not in the story or the fighting or the puzzles, but in the way Batman moves, the way he vaults over fences and grapple-guns to ledges, the way he flies.

Which is a strange thing to say: I grew up in a time when one of Batman’s defining features was that he didn’t fly. But the Christopher Nolan films had him using his cape as a hang glider, so that’s firmly in the public idea of the character now. I have the impression that it was part of the character as originally conceived by Bob Kane, too, but like most of his ideas, it fell by the wayside — although every piece of Batman media has to have the words “created by Bob Kane” in its credits, nearly everything about the character we know was invented by Bill Finger. At any rate, Batman flying was definitely not within the budget of the 1960s TV show that defined the character for an entire generation. Likewise, the idea that Wonder Woman can fly always feels weird to me, because I grew up with the Lynda Carter version, which had similar constraints. It feels less weird to me with Batman, possibly because, being named for a flying animal, it always felt like he should fly. Or maybe it’s just because I’ve had more opportunity to get used to the idea, seeing how there have been more Batman games than Wonder Woman games.

At any rate, the flight in this game feels really good, and kind of flight-simulator-y. From a glide, you can go into a dive, pick up downward momentum, and turn that into horizontal speed by spreading your cape out again, or even swoop back upward to a certain extent. Some of the trickier Riddler Trophies require you to execute such stunts. There’s an “AR Training” side-quest consisting entirely of difficult swoops requiring precise timing. It’s one of the first side-quests you get, and it’s the most difficult thing in the game — so much so that I still haven’t finished it.

But most flight isn’t difficult. The main reason you use it is that soaring above the rooftops is the fastest and easiest way to get around town, keeping landmarks in view while passing over the heads of patrolling goons. You get used to doing this as a matter of course. And that gives Protocol 10 extra impact. Spoilers ahoy.

Protocol 10, it turns out, is simply an authorization to use extreme force against the inmates, essentially going to war against them, in the event that Arkham City becomes impossible to control otherwise. As I’ve already noted, the whole place is positively engineered to get out of control; it turns out that Hugo Strange was even secretly supplying the prisoners with guns to accelerate the process. Now, throughout the story, there have been occasional helicopters patrolling the skies above the city. (You can even grapple up to them to hitch a ride on their landing gear if you want, but there’s no way to control where they go.) Batman listens in on their radio chatter, and whenever a helicopter catches sight of him, it announces this fact using disquieting verbiage like “We have visual on the target” and “Target lost”. When Protocol 10 is activated, suddenly there are a lot more helicopters, firing missiles at anyone on the streets — and at Batman, if they spot him. Suddenly, the safest and easiest away around the city is fraught with danger. It’s a neat narrative gimmick, letting you come to rely on a convenience and then suddenly not letting you take it for granted any more as a way of letting you know that things have gotten serious. It isn’t even really about a spike in difficulty — that radio chatter effectively trains you in how to avoid being seen by helicopters long before you have any reason to do so. Rather, it’s about the removal of the sense of safety.