PixlBit

I would have loved to come in here saying that I finished up El Shaddai, but I did not.  It has been fairly difficult to pull my attention away from Arkham Origins:  Blackgate.  I did finish that game up last night though.  Now that I have one less distraction, I will hopefully be able to focus on El Shaddai. 

Before I jump back into El Shaddai I tried out a couple more Vita games, Sine Mora and Dragon's Crown.  I did not spend much time with them, just enough to whet my appetite.  I finished up the first 2 stages of Sine Mora and am not quite sure how I feel about the game.  It does not feel all that special, just a regular old shoot'em up.  Shmup just sounds silly when you say it out loud and actually makes me feel like a schmuck.  I have no idea what is going on in the story, but that is okay.  I tend to use shoot'em ups as palate cleanser.  I play a couple of levels, and then move onto the next big game that I wanted to play.  I only played through the tutorial in Dragon's Crown.   All that I can say with confidence is that the game is gorgeous.

Now I will return to the topic of Blackgate.  To begin, I spent about 12.5 hours with the game over the course of two playthroughs.  I will get back to why two playthroughs later, also I played it on the Vita.  Most importantly, I have not played a Batman game since Asylum back in 2009 or 2010.

Things that I enjoyed...

1.  I liked the feel of the combat.  Batman felt powerful and I could almost feel the crunch of bones as I punched the enemies.

2.  I liked the exploration.  I am always a sucker for games that use SotN and Metroid as inspiration though. 

3.  I liked most of the boss fights.  The majority of the required the use of your gadgets and require you to think.  Sometimes its nice to do something other than pummeling you enemies into submission.  The boss fights also felt tense.

 Things that I didn't like as much...

1.  I hit a glitch at the 7 hour mark on my first playthrough.  This required me to restart the entire game.  They are lucky that I was enjoying myself enough that I did not mind.

2.  The map is really weird.  It works once you know how to read it, but they made it an overhead map which was a really odd choice since the maps are as vertical as they are horizontal.

3.  The final boss.  I just had trouble with this one, so I did not really like it.

On a personal level, I would probably rate this game around 4 stars.  If I am taking out some of my bias towards the Metroid style of gameplay I would say that it is a solid 3.5 stars.

There are a couple of things that I would like to suggest.  They may make your experience a little better.  Find all of the Blackest Night suit pieces and use it on the final boss.  Also, there is the apparent glitch that required me to restart the game.  It has to do with the Penguin's level.  You need to follow the elevator down before exiting the Cell Block.  That fixed the problem that I had in my initial playthrough.