Arkham City Post #15: Pre-Steel Mill Adventures

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT!

Part 14: Down the Rabbit Hole

But Oracle was right: I should focus on my primary objective of confronting Joker in the Steel Mill and securing the cure for good.  I was hearing radio chatter from Joker and his thugs that was simultaneously encouraging and disheartening: Joker sounded fully healthy, which meant the cure had apparently worked.  That was good news for me, if I could ever get my hands on it... and provided he didn't drink it all himself.  He had to have saved some for me, right?  Sure we're arch-enemies, but there's no way he could let me die, right?  Unless I was taken down by his army of thugs, who seemed to be revitalized by their boss's sudden recovery.

Their revitalization might also be due to their advanced weaponry: thermal vision equipped sniper rifles, which essentially turned the whole city into one massive predator challenge!  In order to put off dealing with this irritating heightened security, I decided to try to cross some side missions off my list as opposed to adding more on.  The idea being that these would provide me with some welcome w00tz - and in one case, a cool gadget upgrade, allowing me to use the disruptor to detonate a nearby mine.  (This was courtesy of the undercover cops locked barricaded inside the Iceberg Lounge; good for them for staying industrious!)  Not only that, but it would be infinitely less satisfying to enter my final showdown with the Joker with so many loose ends.

Firstly I decided to tackle the Riddler's challenges, seeing as I had left those hostages in the lurch for quite some time now.  Nygma wouldn't give me the location of his next hostage unless I had solved a requisite amount of his riddles, but luckily I was pretty diligent about solving any that I came across during my travels.  Riddler had set up many elaborate death traps from which I had to rescue the hostages: electrified floors, rotating blades, a life-sized Three-card Monte-style gimmick with a hidden hostage substituted for the money card (I used my Detective Mode to thwart Nygma's attempt to cheat at that one).  My personal favorite was when I used my Line Launcher to snag a hostage, who was hanging over a deadly drop, then crashed through a window to safety.  But determining the location of Riddler himself required solving nearly all the riddles on the map, so I let that be till later.

Zsasz was next on my list: it wasn't hard to isolate the location of his hideout after having the Bat Computer trace the calls he was making to various payphones across the city.  The hardest part of that whole mission was resisting the urge to hang up on the bastard once I had found his phone.  You see, the time necessary for the computer to trace his calls necessitated listening to Zsasz's twisted ramblings on the other side of the phone.  But it was all worth it to sneak into where he thought he was be secure, knock his scarred ass out, and lock him in a cage where he belonged.

Deadshot would have been harder to track were it not for a series of stupid mistakes he made that led me right to him.  The evidence I was able to gather from both a tripod he left at one of the crime scenes and the impression his body made in the snow as he laid prone to take a shot led me to a PDA he left behind where he evidently thought it would be secure.  From that I was able to determine his next target's location and confront the assassin in the act.  It seemed almost too easy, and for a minute I was worried that he was setting a trap for me; but the ease in which I bested him in our one-on-one showdown put my fears to rest.

As for the Identity Thief and the Watcher in the Wings, it was just a matter of scouring the city and keeping my eyes open for sightings.  Analyzing the third victim of the chilling serial killer led me to his hideout, where the killer trapped me and revealed his identity: famed surgeon Tommy Elliot.  Rebranded as "Hush," Elliot had used pieces of the faces he had surgically removed to graft himself a new face: that of Bruce Wayne.  It still didn't explain the fingerprints though...  After meeting the mysterious figure three more times and scanning the symbol he left behind, I was able to overlay their locations onto a map of Arkham City, leading me to his final meeting place: the Church.  He revealed himself as Azrael, a member of the Sacred Order of St. Dumas.  He delivered a chilling prophecy of doom, the meaning of which remains unclear.  We'll just have to see how things play out: I wasn't about to alter my whole mission based on the arcane ramblings of a mysterious figure with a flair for the dramatic.

Now I was finally ready to enter the Steel Mill via the back door... when what should I come across but the last Titan container!  Now I had to go back and check on Bane, right?  As it happened, rather than destroy the Titan containers as he had promised to do, Bane had gathered them all to his hideout in the Krank Co. toys factory.  This attracted a squad of TYGER guards who were interested in confiscating the Titan for themselves.  Bane and I teamed up to take them all out, but it turns out that fighting alongside Bane is very similar to fighting against Bane, as you still have to dodge his blind charges and avoid his reckless swings and ground-pounds.  In the end, though, I ended up fighting against Bane as well, as he had never intended to destroy his share of the Titan containers anyway.  Turns out he just wanted to control the entire supply.  But I used my wits to trap him in a cage (which must have been much stronger than it looked to contain the muscly beast), after which I proceeded to take care of the Titan containers myself.  And now, with my side mission checklist truly complete, I was ready to press on.

Part 16: Confronting Joker in the Steel Mill