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News NEW and Upcoming Games Batman: Arkham City Escape - Updated Release Date
 

Batman: Arkham City Escape - Updated Release Date Hot

ubarose Written by ubarose     July 07, 2012     1196     

Game Information

Game Name
Batman: Arkham City Escape
MSRP $
45.00

Publisher Information

Publisher
Cryptozoic

Release Schedule Information

Status
Announced
Expected Release Date
2013 Q1
Expected Ship Date
2013 March

Batman: Arkham City Escape is a two-player game that pits Batman against all of his greatest foes as they try to escape Arkham!

In this game, one player represents Batman, and the other player represents one of forty villains from the rogues gallery that Batman has fought in the past, with each villain having abilities exclusive to that character. The player controlling the Arkham inmates earns victory points by helping the villains escape Arkham, while the Batman player gains points by apprehending his rivals before they make it out of the city, and by saving iconic allies by utilizing special gadgets from his utility belt. The first player to earn ten victory points wins!

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Comments (10)
  • 2012-07-08 04:08:21 | avatarStormcow

    Could be great. Could be a Knizia trick taking game.

  • 2012-07-08 09:29:17 | avatarSuperflyTNT

    OK, it's got Batman. And that's all we know. Beware the John Carter Syndrome....you get all pumped up and then get all fucked off when it's not everything it should've been.

    Here's the one thing that scares me away almost immediately: the use of the phrase Victory Points in a Batman game. How about "The first player to beat the Joker's kidneys in until he's pissing blood for the rest of his natural life wins" or something? Batman doesn't keep little VP chits in his utility belt, he carries a supply of whoop-ass.

  • 2012-07-08 15:55:00 | avatarclockwirk

    It's 2 player. One plays Batman, the other controls the villains. "First player to beat up Joker" doesn't really work. This sounds better than some "every player is batman" bullshit.

  • 2012-07-08 22:47:23 | avatarbfkiller

    I'm guessing some villains would be worth more per escape/capture, thus the use of VPs.

  • 2012-07-09 03:16:32 | avatarfanaka66

    My first thought was that this was going to be a simple 2-player card game, but at $45 MSRP it better be a lot more.

  • 2012-07-09 15:51:58 | avatarMichael Barnes

    Oh, who cares if they call them "victory points". That's a nomenclature issue. Just call them "batpoints" if you so prefer.

    I've never understood the apparent allergy that some people have to victory points. It's a measure of success in executing a game's rules, strategy, or storyline. It has nothing to do with Eurogames or any particular genre. The term victory point was being used as far back into the 1960s and 1970s in wargames.

    Complaining about "victory points" is like being upset that they call them "dice" and "cards" instead of some bullshit thematic terms.

    I guess Cryptozooic has the DC license since they're doing a deckbuilder too. They've got their work cut out for them since there's NEVER been a good DC game. This could be a good one...or it could be crap.

    Hopefully a Green Lantern Corp adventure game is in the works.

  • 2012-07-09 16:43:20 | avatardragonstout

    There was a discussion a few months ago about Victory Points. The problem isn't victory points per se, the problem is VPs when it's just used to count up how well you did at the end of a game from a number of possible sources, which results in "the winner of the game" feeling disconnected from the rest of the game and decreases drama during the majority of the game. VPs work GREAT in Twilight Imperium, for example, because they don't feel like that at all: they are a very small number of difficult, concrete goals. I did not feel like they worked as well in Eclipse, especially the super-lame choice you have to make with the exploration chips between the reward and the 2 VPs.

    "First player to earn 10 VPs", as in this game (and Settlers and Twilight Imperium), does NOT have that bad VP feeling, because you can feel the competition and drama the whole time; and if the goal is only 10 VPs, I would assume you're not getting VPs thrown at you every turn (another annoying frequent VP-related feature which drains the drama out of the game: winning because I got 11 VPs on average each turn vs. my friend's 10 VPs on average each turn is not fun, see: Small World).

  • 2012-07-09 17:01:42 | avatarMichael Barnes

    Yes, I recall that. The TL;DR version is that VPs need to correspond to specfic goals and that much I agree with. It's when it's something like Princes of Florence where everything you do results in x, x+1, x+2 victory points that it starts to get to be a problem.

    I disagree about Small World. The competition there is turn to turn and it can be dramatic...and it's also a light, fairly abstract hour long game, so it's hard to get ill about it there.

  • 2012-07-09 19:08:43 | avatardragonstout

    This probably isn't the best place to talk about Small World, but while there's obviously competition in that you're attacking each other's dudes, the turn-to-turn VPs that you add up to determine who wins detract from the competition for me, because every damn thing you do gets you VP, and you're basically working hard to consistently get a couple bonus VP on top of your standard 8 or so each turn, just like Princes of Florence. To me, it's unsatisfying, but that's partly due to the entire concept of the game, that of rising and falling nations, which naturally creates a disconnect between what I did earlier vs. what I'm doing now; that disconnect is a similar disconnect I feel when I add up VPs at the end that I might have earned early on and never affected the game since.

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