![]() ![]() This way, players discover weak points in walls that they can blow through (only once they attain the gadget that lets them do so, of course). If there’s a clue, it’ll show up in a different color or as an icon. But to find the really hidden stuff, they need to touch the screen with their thumbs-literally touch the part of the Blackgate environment about which they’re curious and they’ll scan it. In the Vita version of this new game, players can tap the screen to toggle it on or off. That concept was already borrowed by the Arkham series and presented as a blue-toned “detective vision” view of the world that players could toggle on or off. In the Metroid Prime games, players had to use a variety of visual filters to scan their environment, spot clues, discover enemy weak points and learn lore. ( Blackgate also sounds very good, too and makes great use of audio cues to signal the location of some collectibles as well as to distinguish some parts of the prison from others.) Thankfully, at least, the game’s graphics look very good technically, particularly on the Vita, which is what I played the game on. ![]() The Armature artists do their best, especially when they play with a sense of scale and zoom the camera in and out for certain rooms, but the trappings of this game limit how much their skills can shine. Here his team at Armature has to make dingy cell after dingy cell and concrete hallway after concrete hallway. ![]() Pity the art director of the magnificent Metroid Primes whose team at Retro was unleashed to draw unique, memorable, fantastic sci-fi chamber after sci-fi chamber, space-cavern after space station. Unfortunately for Blackgate, Arkham Asylum did it first and did it with a more interesting cast of rogues in a more interesting-looking place. The game’s set-up isn’t that far a leap from Arkham Asylum’s which trapped Batman on an island facility filled with Gotham’s most deranged criminals. Let me show you how the game looks and works: The result is a game that has the visual depth of a 3D game world but also the focused linear movement that allows each step to feel purposeful and directed as if, in a sense, our hero is smart enough to know where he needs to go and where he shouldn’t. The world revolves around his linear movement. The player may be making Batman run to the right of the screen through a hallway, but if the game’s designers decided that the hallway Batman is in will sharply elbow to the left, then running right will bring Batman down that curving hallway with the hallway seeming to swivel below Batman's feet. Blackgate is “2.5D”, which means it’s mostly played as a side-scroller, with the player moving left, right, up and down (a la the original pre- Prime Metroid games) though this action happens in a game world that is still rendered in three dimensions. The other Batman games, including Origins, are all big three-dimensional adventures controlled from behind Batman’s back. ![]()
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