This run is on normal difficulty with the Catwoman DLC. I definitely worked on this longer than I would have liked, but hey it made the run better. The DLC probably accounted for like 20 min of the run, also including that one cutscene where batman gets gassed that you can't skip with the DLC, and the earlier starting player input as Catwoman vs Bruce Wayne. Gotta thank Robosparkle and jeremysaint for a lot of strategy, and SDA for giving me a place to post videos other than youtube.

The run begins pretty good. I would always get so frustrated sliding as Bruce Wayne when climbing the ace building, so I just said screw it and opted not to, and I actually found that I somehow go faster without sliding than when I climbed up the building sliding perfectly. Weird. Two-Face fight went great too. Sometimes he'll have his gavel out, and when that happens I know I'm screwed, cus it's gonna take him up to like 10 seconds to shoot me. Which absolutely blows when I have a perfect fight and I have to just stand there waiting to get shot.

In the church I don't grapple up to safety and just stand there when I throw the gas. You'd think one of the bullets would hit him. Gas pellets apparently turn Batman into the martian manhunter. This skip doesn't really save as many seconds as you'd think, but it's definitely faster and easier so I do it. I also get the riddler trophy here to unlock all the physical challenges for experience as the run goes on.

Nothing really significant happens for awhile. I go through the steel mill pretty fast. I kinda had a hard time opening up Joker's office and that cost me a couple seconds. Catwoman episode 2 went awesome. I don't think I even got hit in the ivy fight besides one of her spores. How dare her.

My favorite part of the run - tracking down and beating the crap out of Penguin. GCPD predator went great. It's funny that you can roll over to the right and the 2nd guy will just run right by you. Jammers went as planned with skipping as many thugs as possible. All the game wants you to do is destroy the jammers so that's what I do. Over time I've gotten pretty good at the museum gladiator pit so I owned pretty hard in that fight. I think I get hit by the titan though. I always love to do the multi-takedown as the titan is charging and jump straight over him like a move straight out of the matrix. My timing was way off this time though. The remote batarang segment right after was also hilarious since I finish the titan at the electric fence. I had to almost blindly guide the batarang. In the next room I glide over the ice because who wants to see Batman walk slowly. This was a skip I was so proud to find on my own, but then I saw Robosparkle do it in a video like a day later, and I got a little more depressed than I should have. Museum predator went really good. If you take out the first two dudes fast enough then you can take out the third guy before he even sees you. Then I just pull everyone else off the 2nd story. Batman doesn't kill but one of those guys had to have died. I mean cmon. Diving head first 25+ feet up would kill a guy. Penguin/Grundy fight went good too. I somehow manage to knock out all grundys life circles before the electricity cuts out and thats the best I've ever done. I also dive straight into all of Penguin's missile launches. I get hit in this run, but I swear this usually works risk free.

Thanks to a random youtube video I found, I use the line launcher to escape the environment in the subway and re-enter in the last room of the then currently loaded portion of the game. Apparently a lot of people know of this glitch, but the tricky part was finding a way to get back in the game.

Fighting those stupid ninjas was always the part of my run that made me want to break my TV. So I literally spent days just fighting those women over and over and finally found a perfect way of beating them is to just beat down one, and slam the other. It's super easy and takes maybe 2 seconds. For the first fight with three ninjas I usually try to do blade dodge takedown, multi-takedown, then take out the last girl. The Demon Trials also go well. I leave the pillars as fast as I can while still being able to grapple to the next stage. Fighting Ra's was pretty epic, since I get extremely lucky in the last part where three shots all hit Ra's right after the other. I also multi-takedown after every double counter vs. the sand dudes, and I find this to work every time.

Rescuing Quincy Sharp was disappointing to me. I always want to take out all 5 guys at once, but hardly ever can. It's still fast though. I actually do take out all the guys at once in my new game plus run.

On normal you only have to use 5 takedowns on Mr. Freeze. My route is glide -> jump -> REC -> disrupter -> silent. Feel free to challenge this theory but I do not see there being a faster way to beat this guy on normal, mostly because my route allows Mr. Freeze practically zero downtime between getting hit and being invulnerable right after being hit.

Rescuing Vicki Vale went as planned. Though after she says "newscopter" I'm very tempted to just leave her to die.

Steel mill the 2nd time went good. The predator outside got a little sloppy, but it was still fast enough. I also thank god batman didn't decide to fall into the water during this run. The predator part could have gone faster, but I was satisfied with it in the end. I remember the Joker brawl going well too.

For catwoman ep 3, it took some time to perfect a route to the sewers that was fast, since it's way harder to get around as Catwoman compared to Batman. I definitely get a little risky when getting the key cards, but it almost always pays off. Predator part went good too. For the fight at the end, throwing spikes definitely helps me get started since I can usually take out the armored guy initially. Then all I have to do is decide to rescue Batman. Personally, I think it would have been hilarious if I would have just walked the other direction, triggered the bad ending credits and then turned that run in. I would have gotten like 1:35!

Protocol 10 is where everything can go to hell, especially the helicopters. I'm not sure if my route is the fastest, but it's the fastest one I've perfected. I figure a faster one would get the 6th helicopter closer to the entrance. I used to get my butt whooped repeatedly in the combat part after Hugo's emmy award winning speech, but then I iced the gunman and that helped soooo much. After that I just use the spam batarangs/multi-takedowns tactic, and REC the armored guys and this fight usually doesn't last longer than 30 seconds. I didn't time the fight in this run so don't kill me if it's longer. I think the fastest I've ever done this fight was maybe 25 secs. For the last two predators, one is very much planned, one is very much not planned. I usually get through this part of the run without any problems. I skip a lot of the portions of the tower when climbing to the top as well.

Snipers went awesome. You can either take them out or disarm them. Using the gun disrupter never worked for me. Clayface fight probably has some people scratching their heads. If you hadn't already guessed, I get hit intentionally. I do this because clayface attacks in spans of 2 or 3, but if you get hit he just stops at one. In this run I actually miss the bombs when he rolls one time and almost another. This cost me some time for sure.

Catwoman ep 4 went good. It's absurd how fast the thugs get during this part of the run on normal difficulty, so I'm pretty sure I get hit a couple times. The two-face part at the end is extremely easy to pull off on normal. I have without a doubt never died here on normal. And I've beaten this game so many times that I don't like to say as to spare me the embarrassment. I also lost count months ago.

In conclusion, I would like to conclude my comments by saying that I think this is a good run with few mistakes. It's definitely not perfect but hopefully it's entertaining. Enjoy.

So this is my Batman Arkham City New Game Plus speed run. This was so much fun to do since you can just kick ass from the start and really be creative with all the gadgets/upgrades. The only downside is a huge one in that you have to set up your game to do the new game plus run. My definition of this run is to just have whatever upgrades/gadgets you need to beat the game. You don't have to have all of them, and the Free Flow Focus upgrade actually hurts you imo, since it slows down time. In this run I have all the upgrades except free flow focus, the line launch tightrope, and Catwoman's special combat moves. This run is extremely similar to my run on Normal difficulty, and I definitely got a lot of strategy from Robosparkle, jeremysaint, and also a youtube video showing me the subway escape environment glitch. So thanks to all those guys.

This is actually only my 3rd attempt at a new game plus run, although I have attempted a run on Normal much more than that (lost count) so that helped a lot obviously. I decided to submit this only after three runs since for one thing I didn't die, and also because it's just so ridiculously time consuming to set up a game for new game plus.

I think the run went very well with few mistakes. Some of the combat sequences were a little sloppy like the fight against Mr. Hammer's twin in the museum. I also make a mistake at the church entrance fighting those three dudes. I usually just glide boost and take out two of them instantly. Most of the predator portions went ok, with a LOT of improvisation since my plans beforehand failed probably half the time. My plan for the steel mill predator at the beginning of the game went to crap, and the first lost city predator also went way differently than planned. Although that one ended pretty awesome. I use the same combat strategy as I do on my normal run, and because of that none of the combat parts are really anymore difficult than on normal. Especially since rocksteady thinks for some reason inserting more armored dudes makes it harder, when it actually makes combat (and predator) easier since you can just REC them to the ground. Non-armored guys are way harder to take down especially in predator.

One of the most different parts of the game from my normal run was Mr. Freeze. Not a lot of planning went to this. It was pretty much, use the first 3 takedowns from my normal run, somehow get the next 4 takedowns, then use line launch, gun disrupter, and silent takedown to finish. And honestly I think it went pretty well, but you can be the judge. It can definitely be done faster.

I'm not even gonna try and be humble and say that the most awesome part of my run was interrogating quincy sharp. I took out all 5 guys at once using the glide boost and it's hard to target that guy. If you target anyone else you get maybe 2-3 guys. That's probably the second time I've done that ever, out of over a 100 tries. On the glide I mean though. I suppose if you set yourself on a building and targeted from there you could do it, but that would take longer. I'm sure other people could be better than me at this. I'm just glad I put it out there, because I haven't seen anyone else do this.

The hardest part of this run were all the Catwoman episodes, since she is just weaker in general and she doesn't have the multi-takedown in combat. The most ridiculous part of this run is that the hardest part imo is the very last minute where you take out Two-Face as Catwoman. I died here the first two attempts at this run, and figured maybe I'll drop some spikes and see if that works, and apparently it helped, but I think I didn't die mostly because I just hit him faster.

Anyway, this run is FAR from perfect. It was just meant to get things going. I hope other people attempt this run because it's the best category. Batman already has all his shit. Now beat the game as fast as you can.

Batman: Arkham City Speedrun Notes:

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Twitter: @RoboSparkle

 

Hi, I'm RoboSparkle, and welcome to my Arkham City Run. This run took a long time and a lot of retries to get right, as the main difficulty with my category is getting through without dying, which makes some of the strats even more surprising in retrospect. Also it turns out there were a lot of areas that needed to be refined for speed, even where the actual gameplay looked like it flowed seamlessly. This made it quite tough when looking for improvements because a lot of the time, a part of the run would be quite slow without actually looking slow! Even though there is still at least a minute that can be shaved off this run, and a couple of those errors are cringeworthy, overall I'm happy with this for now considering it's taken me nearly 2 years to get to this point!

Arkham City is still may favourite game ever, and you could argue I've not optimised the game enough if I don't hate its guts, but I would argue that I haven't killed my love for the best game ever, so there.

Before we begin, I should point out that Arkham City is an incredibly broken, glitchy game. But only if you go out of your way to break it. If you play nice, it works fine!

Differences in Difficulties

In Hard Mode, enemies have twice as much health as in normal and deal twice as much damage. They are also more aggressive in combat so they attack quicker, your window to counter is smaller and you have reduced priority. What I mean is that in a Normal mode run you can almost always attack a guy who is telegraphing an attack and you'll hit first. In hard mode, unless you are in Freeflow Focus or very lucky, it's already too late by that point! This means that all of the early-game enemies have to be taken out using an instant takedown (either Combo Takedown, Ground Takedown or Beat Down).

Differences in Versions

Firstly, as far as I've been able to test, every glitch and route that can be used on Xbox, PS3 or PC can be used on the other two. There is one exception in the museum as Batman. When grapnelling to the scaffold from the ice, you need to use a Grapnel Boost if you are on PC otherwise you'll be dunked into the water and eaten by the shark.

The only other difference is load times. PC has the fastest load times (duh!) followed by Xbox and then PS3. The old run is on PS3 and this is on Xbox so I enjoy a slight advantage, but it is less than a minute over the course of the run.

Title Screen.

Yes there is a bit of a visual glitch here that I've included. Basically the title screen is supposed to show Batman crouching, ready to pounce. However, if you press A/Start before the screen comes up, then Batman isn't there and sort of rushes up while the saves are loading like he forgot his cue! There's no effect on the game though.

Catwoman 1:

This fight took SO long to optimise for its length and therefore causes a LOT of resets. Having said that, a reset here costs 10 seconds so it's not so bad – that is, until you spend about 20 minutes on Resetwoman. This is slower than the current run because I have to do instant finishers on all the enemies. One thing to bear in mind is that the final guy in ANY combat situation has his health reduced to minimum and therefore one strike will take him out.

Bruce Wayne:

Switching to 1st person mode means moving ever-so-slightly quicker through the game's opening sequence. When you are processed you need the thugs to attack you quickly so you can take perform your extra powerful counter-takedown thing that only Bruce Wayne can perform and only while he's shackled up! I try and show off a few visual things here too like Ryder clipping in and out of you, Shadow Dancing and Azrael.

Arkham City Pinball is a fun pastime – while you ideally want to beat the fight in one combo, I still did this very quickly so I let the whiff slide. Once done I can KO Penguin (or not... it makes no difference to the time) have a quick Bruceman Shuffle and climb up the ACE building. You can slide through both crawl spaces but the second one comes with a risk of falling off the edge so I don't go for it anymore.

Two-Face's Courthouse

The first glide went well, although I had too much speed on the approach and Batman decided to hug the wall. The 1st minor Sequence break is in the court house - you are meant to climb a nearby ladder, where you'll get a tutorial on silent takedowns on the armed thug. However, by diving through the window you skip that bit and start the fight, but the gunner will take pot shots as and when he feels like it. He's what I call a "combat gunner" in that, like the other attackers, he'll take his time and not do much damage with his gun, although it does break your combo even if he shoots you while in the middle of an instant takedown. This fight went pretty much perfectly.

(Side Note: Protocol Ten will NOT begin in 10 hours - that's a lie. It's more like 1 hour 15-ish)

Leaving the courthouse, you'll see the second instance of Grapnel-cancelling - this is where you start Grapnelling up to a point and before you get there, you press B to cancel and then start gliding. It has quite a lot of uses but mainly when grappling to gargoyles or to the side of things (or if I grapple to the wrong thing). Interestingly, sometimes Batman likes to Batarang a camera off-screen instead of the thug standing next to him...

The Church

I want to manipulate Harley to standing on a particular corner of the red carpet so she has the least distance to walk before we start the next bit (if she finishes closer to the door, she walks backward to the trigger first). The next sequence break is one I discovered and one of my favourites - you are supposed to grapple to a gargoyle and get a tutorial on predator mode. However it's faster to NOT grapple and instead wait for the smoke to disappear and take the invisible wall with it. Once I've taken out the first two guards it's time for the hostage takers - there are two tutorials which explain silent ledge takedowns and weak wall takedowns so I need to not look at either of them while on a gargoyle to avoid activating them. There is a risk that you will get shot by the first two guards but it happens rarely.

While climbing up the Bell Tower we have the first and last appearance of The Riddler....'s voice. I get that trophy because it's literally on the way up. The reason for this is partially for the 200 Exp but also because it allows me to win Exp for completing certain challenges during the game which I would do anyway (e.g. 5 Batclaw Slams, doing a takedown from a smoke bomb, trip 3 enemies, etc.). All this means that a 5-second detour nets me enough Exp over the course of the game for an extra upgrade and is definitely worth the time.

Grapnel Boost

On the way to the Steel Mill, I use another Grapnel-cancel to fly further and faster, and I take a couple of minutes out to collect the Grapnel Boost. Although it's a side mission, this is totally worth it, since by far the fastest way to travel is by boosting (it's a shame Batman doesn't keep the speed once he's launched up after the boost), but also it gives me enough Exp to get an extra upgrade, which is very important for cutting out a huge amount of time in the Steel Mill.

These two upgrades go towards the Bat Swarm move (meh) and the Multi-Ground Takedown, and Holy Abusable Weapon Batman is it ever good! From now on my tactics for taking enemies out in combat is:
Knock a bunch of them down
MULTI-BATARANG TAKEDOWN
30 GOTO 10
The first fight of the Steel Mill along can add as much as a minute to my run without this attack, that's how awesome it is.

Steel Mill

Once I've done a bit of platforming and vent crawling I have the first fight of the Steel Mill. This went exceptionally well. It could be faster without the smoke bomb but it helps to keep Joker's thugs off my back for the most part.

Once those guys are down I have the next sequence break. You are supposed to open a hatch and climb onto things that are definitely NOT gargoyles and silently take down the three guards. My preferred method is to dive through the window (the one that Batman says you definitely should NOT dive through) but only AFTER quick-batarang-ing the patrolling guard. The other two have never killed me (occasionally they shoot but more often do not see me at all somehow!). I switch on Detective Mode as I'm doing the double takedown because it causes Batman to warn me that the doorway is covered and I need to find another route, apparently...

Next it's time to move on to what I consider the first "real" predator section. I believe my route through here is pretty much optimised and I can't see any improvements that can be made. On Normal/Easy mode you can just rush the last room and not bother with the smoke but on Hard the guards will kill you. Batman Leaned Thundershock!

When playing with the hook/magnets thing, I should be able to knock down the door in one swing as long as I get my rhythm of attract/repel correct. I haven't found a consistent setup for this yet so I two cycle this time. Despite the fact that Batman is being ambushed, I can use a sneak attack to insta-KO two of the thugs! This is the best this fight has ever gone!

A quick note on Lieutenants: If they are the only enemy left, their health drops dramatically, therefore I always save this one until last, although I do occasionally use him to build up my combo meter to allow faster access to the multi-takedown move.

Catwoman 2

The route getting to her apartment, the fight and then the route to Ivy's lair is very optimised. I lose a little time here as I have to hang out on the road sign anyway to wait for the thug to get out of the way (and destroy a camera during the wait) but sometimes the trigger to whip over to Ivy will not appear L

The next fight had a couple of issues on the second floor as Catwoman couldn't counter the two guys that attacked her but the rest went swimmingly. The setup on the top floor is about a week old at time of writing – basically Ivy's blast can one-shot all of her goons but it's luck as to whether it hits them. With that setup I can surround Catwoman with burly men who will all get taken out by that blast, thanks to the use of sharp pointy things.

GCPD

The glide went pretty well here. There are a bunch of guards outside the GCPD but you don't have to take any of them out. On hard mode you do need to smoke them if you want to not die though, and if you slide through one of the guards in front of the shutter, you'll always make it through. No issues with this bit at all. I normally get a bit of exp from doing the “cause one goon to fire his gun in the air and surprise another" award but missed it here so I was a little low on exp.

This route is VERY consistent on hard and only fails when I fail it. Sometimes I'll get shot but Batman can tank a shotgun shell to the chest, even on hard mode! Also – Batflapping.

Route to the Museum

The route I use to get to the Museum Grapnel-boosts as often as possible to speed things up. Since I didn't have enough experience for both Critical Strikes and 5x Combo I do this fight without. It doesn't cost much (if any) time as I always have to wait for the last thug to arrive to the fray from round the corner.

Once in the museum you are supposed to get a tutorial on dealing with knife guys, but you can interrupt it by attacking the thug before it finishes loading. My preferred method is a Batclaw Slam, which helps in making sure you finish the fight near the window where you discover Penguin's shiny new jammer hardware

Jammers

The first two jammers can actually be taken out in either order and it takes about the same amount of time. The predator jammer is incredibly dangerous and I've lost more than a few runs to it, but the only risky part is sneaking up to the double takedown. Once that's done I can happy take out the disruptor (dropping a smoke between terminals 2 and 3) and never get hit.

The third jammer has an OOB which looks complicated but essentially involves gliding and climbing up to a ceiling which is just a texture. I then glide under the city to the trigger for the Subway and from there glide to the Subway Terminal where the ceiling doesn't exist... In this game you can only trigger one area from an adjacent one (i.e. you can't go straight to the Subway Terminal from the Bowery). I messed up my quick setup for this, so had to go to a more consistent backup.

The fight on the way back into the Museum can be skipped although it's very tricky and depends on getting there quickly and with no-one on the floor seeing you as they spawn. I thought I had it but I didn't. It's not too bad as the fight should take <10 seconds but I got hit.

Museum

Once I'm back in the Museum and I've put the password in I need to glide past the T-Rex. This is important in order to skip the tutorial teaching me how to take out armour guys (it's wrong anyway because it tells you to do a beatdown when you should be using Thundershock!) To a certain extent it doesn't matter how long I take because the police officer only gets up a certain time after you distract the guard attacking him so I alert them as soon as possible.

The explosive gel I put there in the gladiator pit is for the TITAN thug, because exploding is far quicker than twirling my cape at them. I use a smoke here too to disorient my attackers and make the fight run far quicker. The fight started amazingly badly but continued well so I was happy with this overall. The post-fight went well as I got to the hacking bit before the conversation with Barbara started.

Diving through the gel saves time compared to stunning yourself, and I got both of them so was pretty happy here. The ice bit has a number of little sequence breaks I found. I guess this supposed to be an analogue for Croc's Lair from the first game, but you can slide across the ice without penalty. It's tough to do because if you start running (which you need to do to slide) then the ice instantly breaks but you can keep the speed you get from gliding and use that to slide instead. Also all momentum is cancelled when you "meet Tiny" anyway so that doesn't matter so much. The other big sequence break I discovered is using the grapnel boost to avoid most of the ice section, most of the annoying raft-batclaw-drag thing, and especially beating down the shark! It is possible, with careful jumping, to glide across without the boost, but there's no point.

I free Mr. Freeze first because if you save the cops first then you have to revisit that room anyway. After sliding across the ice I can release the grapnel early so I don't have to hang off the platform and then fall down like in this run but it's very risky and I lost two runs to it so I use the safe strats now.

The Predator room here is probably the nadir of the entire run. Somehow I got seen setting up the double ledge takedown and had to move to backup strats which I haven't had to do in so long that I'd nearly forgotten them. On the other hand I saw a very odd takedown occur on the first guard which I've never seen before, and I got a successful Shoryuken Glitch against the Pingu.

Penguin/Grundy

The Grundy fight is tough to do very quickly - in phase 1 the reason I use the REC gun is it stops the plates from restoring him sooner. You can gel the plates while they are active but it requires very precise positioning which is tough to do, I miss one of these in the final part of the fight.

Sliding at Penguin afterwards is unashamedly stolen from DarthKnight's run. I use the ultra-stun on Penguin as it's quicker than a beatdown.

Robin Skip

Once I scan the blood I start the conversation with Oracle before I boost to the exit because I have to wait for her to stop bitching about Talia before I'm allowed to exit. Next is a recent discovery where you can skip following the blood trail, chasing the ninja and meeting Robin, by going OOB and just heading to the next area. I still get the Line Launcher because the game gives it to me.

The next bit is the biggest skip in the game, which is a sort of joint discovery between me and darthknight. Interestingly, if you enter a door from the wrong side (the OOB side) then the game deposits you on the wrong side of the door and loads the next section, so I then wind up OOB in "Collapsed Streets" In order to get back in bounds, just drop into the water and the game deposits me in-bounds again. It is technically possible to skip the next two fights although if you do this as well as Robin Skip then you get trapped in Wonder City because... comic books? Therefore I have to choose one and as well as Robin Skip being VERY safe to do in comparison it's also 7 seconds faster

The checkpoint restart after I enter the predator room is to make the Robin Skip work. It's tough to explain, but there's a cutscene coming up where Batman hallucinates his parents. Unless I do a restart sometime after entering that door, that scene won't happen and I'll be trapped in Wonder City until I restart.

My route in the next room is not only very fast but very consistent - occasionally I get shot by that last thug if he makes it up the stairs quickly, but this is pretty rare, and it only makes Batman angrier. While waiting for the nurse to stand up I partake in a bit of Bat-Vandalism and Bat-Slides

Wonder City

I believe my route for scanning guardians is pretty optimal. The rule is that to start scanning you need to be close and looking at them. To keep scanning you need to be looking at them - distance doesn't matter, and you can even have small objects between them. Oh, and you don't need to clear out any enemies to scan them. So I mostly ignore the ninjas; technically you can fight them, but the camera stops being a team player if you do. Normal (blue) counters are safe to do, but otherwise I only use redirects. This... didn't go as well as it usually does. For some reason the last room is ninja-proof.

When I'm following Talia to the Trials, the next cutscene starts when Talia hits the trigger. As long as I don't dawdle I can pretty much do whatever (fun fact: Talia is a witch and her feet don't actually touch the floor)

The glide trials went well, you have to time these carefully because if you go too soon, not only is it harder to get to the next section but if Ra's hasn't arrived then you won't be able to get there. I think I got there early enough without being risky or wasting time...

The Ra's fight was mixed, time-wise. Freeflow focus is used here to speed up the 20-sand-clones fight as it gives you ridiculous priority and makes it easier to hit ninjas. I did have to do a lot of dodging and had really bad luck on both of the "giant sand golem" sections, which was frustrating.

Saving Sharpie

Next glitch! If you exit through the "wrong" exit then you can use the Line Launcher to get on top of the Riddler trophy, which allows you to gel the breakable ceiling and escape to a partially-loaded Processing Center. Thanks, Edward! From there you can glide under the city and grapnel up, heading straight to Mayor Sharp and his new best friends.

Mr. Freeze

This run could have died here as I detonated the wall half a second too early but I recovered using a new takedown that I've never tried before and wasn't certain would even work. It worked out in the end though and I only lost 5 seconds on this section compared to my previous PB.

Steel Mill

Vicky Vale went as standard. While waiting for her to stop going on and on about nearly dying or some crap I decide to vandalise some cameras. The route to the Steel Mill and the predator section was basically as fast as they can go.

Very happy with my path through the Steel Mill for the most part, used the Line Launcher to save time, although lost a small amount of time in the fight by getting hit in the fight, but that one is tough to do quickly and kinda relies on having the right thugs attack you.

My usual strat for the predator room went well, although calling it a strategy would be very generous. Basically I Knockout Smash the first guy, gel the next three and hope I knock 2-3 of them off the ledge and then take it from there, usually Batclawing everyone off of ledges but in this case that only happened once. The fight was mixed. I got hit but it doesn't seem to have cost much time (except for the runaway mine cart hits!) I take out Mr. Hammer as soon as he appears because trying to do a fight with both him and a TITAN thug is absolute hell. I should have mentioned previously that in the Titan fights, I take them out last so that Batman does a takedown on them. If there are any inmates left standing, Batman will ride the Titan instead. I lost 8 seconds on this compared to my PB which had a God-like Steel Mill 2 so I'm not too worried about this!

Catwoman 3

Pathing to the vault was mostly ok although I missed a long whip as the area hadn't loaded yet (you can see the loading symbol in the bottom left – frustrating!) You'll see the first instances of an odd quirk of armoured guys – if you attack them while they're rising then you can strike like a normal enemy.

Card-collecting went well, this is pretty much the fastest way I've found of doing this and it still has downtime as you have to wait for guard 1 to get past guards 2 and 3 before pickpocketing them. The predator section gave me good luck as sometimes the two guards by the door join the hunt, at which point I may as well checkpoint restart and get a better guard configuration. I should also point out that a Double Takedown, despite being quick and sounding loud, actually counts as a silent takedown and will not cause an alert!

Scanning Copters

The master code is always in the 6th helicopter. This route could have gone smoother but overall I'm happy with this bit and I finished reasonably close to the next OOB area. I also didn't get seen by any of the copters either which is a nice bonus, but not so important because I have a smoke bomb still and the helicopters cannot shoot you if you are gliding. I also get a few upgrades – 2 armours for the upcoming room and the Batclaw for later.

This OOB glide is pretty precise, you have to enter the gap in the fence at an angle shallow enough that you don't hit the wall but not so shallow that you hit the fence. Once there you can use the Line Launcher to get you near to a part of the wall where the water stops existing and I can glide through the sewers to the collapsed streets, skipping Strange's speech and the fight.

The predator section was interesting. Normally I land on those first two guards and summon the rest of the guards to my location. Risky but swift. This could have gone better but it could also have gone far worse, so I'm happy with this as I started hacking the console just before Strange finished his speech.

Wonder Tower

You can skip the fight (and the hacking section) by simply gliding off the tower. You can get all the way round in one glide, and by using the grapnel boost and dive bombs you can skip most of the actual climb. With a clever use of a grapnel boost and good gliding you can also miss out on opening the maintenance hatch which also skips an interesting trigger. As a result not only do the guards turn invisible when I have detective mode on but they cannot see me at all, which makes clearing the room easier. That route is only a day old and this was the first run that uses it was I wasn't confident enough to do the entire room blind with Batman not looking at half the guys when he took them down. Swag-less strats worked though!

Joker's Snipers

This route is sort of a double discovery by me and darthknight. I told him that you could use the firearm jammer and the batclaw disarm to make this section easier. What I didn't know (and what darthknight thought I meant) is that you can literally remove the snipers from the fight by yanking their guns off the platform and leaving them where they stand - you only actually need to knock out the last two! So darthknight came up with a route that disarmed a bunch of the snipers and I refined that to the route you see here that disarms all of them except four.

Clayface

Tactics are pretty standard here - toss Freeze grenades and dodge - you can get hit by some of his attacks so he uses the boulder attack quicker (which costs half his health) but in this case it doesn't matter because he uses it quickly enough anyway. Phase three went really well, I saved a small amount of time by letting Clayface's miniatures hit me so I don't get into Freeflow Focus which would cost time.

Catwoman 4

Couple of issues at the start getting caught on an antenna and a brain-fart entering the wrong grate. Also I failed to skip the fight outside the museum somehow, which was VERY annoying.

Inside the museum went very well, I lost my combo at the end of the fight which was sloppy, skipped the Gladiator pit and used a Water Warp to skip some of the ceiling crawl. My strategies for the Two-Face fight are very consistent – I use a guard downstairs to distract his goons and then attack while he's vulnerable. I got rocketed though and as a result I lost my nerve and got an (unnecessary) armour upgrade for Selena before finishing Two-Face off. His guys didn't get close!

All in all I'm happy with the run, I feel that the parts that went badly (Museum predator, Ra's, Museum fight skip, Wonder City Guardians) were balanced with the parts that went brilliantly (re-entering the Steel Mill, Wonder Tower, both Wonder City predator sections) and while there are technically enough errors to shave maybe 1-2 minutes off the run using an identical route (and a secret Bat-Technique known as "being less crap"), trying to do that AND keep everything else go as well as it did AND not die is going to take a while. Considering how long this took me already I think it's time to move on to another game (Arkham Asylum has just had around 12 minutes of skips found for it!)

Also, if you did make it all the way through these comments then congratulations on your dedication to reading!