Part 1: Intensive Treatment part II
As the player makes his way through the smiley face door, a cutscene begins and Batman encounters the Joker standing on top of a metal cage hanging above a pit. In the brief cutscene Batman attempts to stop the Joker before a dis-proportioned monster climbs out of the cell. This is the first time players are shown how to defeat a "Titan": mutated inmates that have grown to grotesque sizes due to Joker's "experiments". Naturally, Joker isn't much of a chemist, so this battle is short, as the titan only has a few moves that a steady hand and quick eye will be able to counter. When the beast roars, you can quick throw a batarang to it's face by tapping the left trigger (LT) this will stun it and throw the battle into slow motion long enough for you to evade (double tap the "A" button) it's charge attack following the roar. It will seem a little distraught, swinging it's arms violently and grasping it's face. It may try to throw a dead guard at you but another batarang to the face when it charges will finish it off.
I originally was let down, as I didn't even break a sweat on this big, scary boss-fight. But in the cutscene the titan appears to suffer either a heart-attack or a stroke and swiftly expires, while Joker makes a mental note to use stronger test patients. Obviously, it wasn't supposed to be so easy. Slight tension follows as Joker gives Batman a chance to "end it all" and knock him off the cell into the pit below. Batman, of course, won't, and Joker laughs at his predictability. We are returned to the game and then literally three more steps into a guard box and we get another cutscene. Here, Frank Boles, a guard we met earlier, kidnaps Commissioner Gordon. We are then instructed by Batman to return him to the place where Joker first escaped and set up a crime scene. This is done by pressing the left button (LB) to take you into "Detective mode." This puts you into a sort of "see-everything" mode. The world goes blue, usable items and objects turn a sort of amber copper colour, you are able to track the heart rates, locations (since everybody shows up as a skeleton visable through solid walls and objects) and conditions of everyone and evidence is pointed out with little pop-up boxes. This adds a great "CSI" element to the game. Setting up a crime scene switches the perspective to first-person and key pieces of evidence in the crime scene are able to be scanned. One such instance is where you scan a flask belonging to Frank Boles and follow the trail alcohol in the air.
Following this trail with take you to the elevator you once rode earlier, only this time, Harley Quinn is there to send it plummeting down to crush you. She fails, and now you must grapple and shimmy your way to the top. Nothing new is learned here, but there is a sort of amusing commentary by the Joker and Harley over the loud-speaker. Once you get to the top, you're going to need to fend off a few thugs before finding both doors locked. However, breaking into a vent on the wall will deliver you to the right path. Here we find Our next little tutorial: dealing with thugs with firearms. These men appear as all-red in detective mode and can't be approached directly, or else they'd merely shoot you down before you could prime a batarang. Instead, you must negotiate over and around them via the many gargoyles that little the ceilings. You can drop down silently from them and approach them from behind, holding RT to crouch. pressing "Y" when prompted will perform a "silent takedown" which basically removes them without alerting anyone who's not looking. Do this three times (or beat up the last guy if you're cheeky) and you can continue following Franky's trail.
Well, not completely. Batman doesn't have the proper tools to open security-locked doors (yet) so you have to sneak him into the small room to the door's right, and silently send another hapless thug to dreamland. After that, Joker makes a joke about your pointy ears and you must climb into another vent on the walls. Good thing Arkham's not bat-proof. Here we are dumped into our first "silent predator" area. This is not a tutorial, but the point where the game just sits back, kicks up it's feet and lets you go nuts. All three henchmen are armed, and you have an obscene amount of options to take them out. Another option is to take out maybe two and just screw around with the last guy, but there's only two waves of thugs, and once they're gone, a guard comes to free you. You exchange a few words, and them proceed down a back hallway, a few vents, and eventually emerge into the open world of Arkham Island, which I will cover next.
That's all for today, stay tuned. Hopefully I can wrap the rest of the chapters up a lot quicker. Maybe just summaries instead of play-by plays, but I want to stay in-depth. Check back, because there's a lot more to this game.
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