Arkham City

Well that was disappointing.
I loved Arkham Asylum and City is more of the same, but bigger and better - so what went wrong?

It's difficult to pin it down; where Asylum was gripping and addictive, I found City in equal parts tedious and frustrating.

I think my main issue stems from the more open nature of the game world and the inevitable side-quests that came with.
In some games, side-quests make sense. For as single-minded a character as Batman to be constantly distracted from his urgent and vital mission by (in some cases) trivial side-quests seemed out-of-character and just served to break the tension of the narrative.
This came to a slightly ridiculous head towards the end of the game. The story has Batman being forced (with strong encouragement by Alfred) to delay rescuing <spoiler> in order to <spoiler>
With missiles flying and time of the essence, I found time to complete two major side-quests and at least 3 unnecessary small battles.

I appreciate there's market pressure to provide variety, optional extras, mini-games and multi-player. There are always complaints on forums about games being "too linear" and then there's the need to fill up the "achievements" roster. I have my own thoughts on that, which probably deserve a post of their own, but I definitely felt it wasn't done in an appropriate way here.
How much agency do you expect when you're playing the Batman anyway?

As for the frustration, there were just too many battles with large numbers of heavily armed and armoured opponents. When enemies need a special combo to defeat and you're surrounded by regular minions it was very easy to get swamped. Again, in a game there has to be an element of risk - it can't be TOO easy, but it should take something special to beat the Batman - the approach here turned Arkham City and far too much of a stealth game.

And since when could Batman fly? OK - he couldn't quite, but the dive/glad mechanic was pretty damn close...

At the end of the day, Arkham City is a very good game. Excellent graphics, outstanding voice-acting and all the right ingredients for a 9.0+ AAA game.
But for me it just didn't quite work and didn't feel like Batman.

Skyrim

Well... I guess I liked it. I mean, I played it for (at least) 120 hours so I must have liked it, right?

I didn't like the way it kind of forced you to take on all the evil missions as well as the good ones. Role-playing went out of the window quite quickly and it was just a game.

There were certainly some great moments, but there did seem like an awful lot of random-quest type filler. I mean hours and hours of it. I suppose completely open-world games just don't suit me - I like a bit more focus and direction, a more carefully paced story and, frankly, something a bit shorter!

Now I come to think of it, the actual combat was pretty weak too...

Obviously this is far too late to be a useful review for anyone - if you're going to play it, you already have. But then, I'm just writing these posts for me, not anyone else - I'd have to write much better articles if that was the intent :-D

So yeah. I liked it. Good game. Glad I played it. Glad it's finished!