Control Asylum

Yep, another post in which I will complain about the controls of Batman. In this case, this is one particular fight that just ticked me off. It's a fight with inmates while going after Killer Croc, so that's enough said about that.

You need to stealth around in a different way than the usual 'sit on the gargoyles' because reasons. What this means is that you don't have the usual hiding spots, and indeed can be spotted quite easily. And they have guns, so you need to sneak and not get caught or you die. A lot. As I did.

First problem: damn geometry. Often I tried to jump away, or over the fence, but I couldn't. Partly because it detected a corner I'm sure I was missing, but also because the controls. To run, you use Space. To climb things, you use Space. If you are near a fence, and run up to it, you will continue to run into it until you've stopped and repressed Space so that Batman then climbs. This means nothing is fluid, and you get trapped too easily and shot.

Another problem is animation. Quite a few times I got locked into an animation and then got shot. No I-frames here, Indeed, you can take full damage and not be able to do anything about it because you are opening a grate, or putting someone down, or anything.

Problem three is the time to get back to the fight. When you die, you have an animation from a bad guy while the game reloads from the checkpoint, which you could skip after a point. Then you need to travel back to the fight, have a cut scene (which fortunately you can skip) and then open the door and (for me at least) give them a minute to get into position so you don't die immediately when you go through (although given randomness, sometimes I still did). All that means it's some time between death and reattempt. Annoying.

It just got to the point of letting myself die rather than try to deal with this crap. I did EVENTUALLY get past that fight, so it's on with the story, but this just exemplifies that this is otherwise a good game, but there are a few spots where you just hit a brick wall because of some stupid combination of mechanics and stop having fun.

[END]