Walkthrough

Almost nothing in Arkham City's side content is blocked by skill. It is blocked by story progress. Markers do not exist until a specific campaign beat fires, some of them fire on triggers the game never explains, and a couple of entrances close permanently once you move past them.

So this page is ordered by the beat that unlocks each stage, and its job is to answer whether you can do a thing yet, not to retell the campaign. It covers the five missions and access problems we walk in full rather than the whole main story.

How Arkham City gates its side content

Three kinds of gate turn up across these five pages. There is the named story beat, which is clean: finish X and Y appears. There is the soft trigger, which is not: two stages of Shot in the Dark and two of Identity Theft have no stated threshold at all, and the instruction is effectively to keep playing until something happens. And there is the permanent access change, which only affects the Steel Mill but affects it four separate times.

The unlock timeline, beat by beat

This grid is the thing worth bookmarking. Each of these gates currently sits in the intro paragraph of a different article, and putting them in campaign order turns five separate mission pages into one progression clock.

Read the right-hand column and you get the one genuine point of no return in this bucket. Every collectible inside the Steel Mill still exists after the story moves on, but two of the three ways in do not.

The kit you need before you start

Two rows there matter more than the rest. The Cryptographic Sequencer is what gets you out of three different rooms at three different mission endings, so a run without it stalls at the finish line rather than the start. And Heart of Ice wants Freeze Blast, Batclaw and Explosive Gel used in that exact order on one wall, which is the only place in the bucket where three gadgets chain together.

Watcher in the Wings

The odd one out, because it needs neither combat nor detective work. It is a spotting mission. Someone has been watching you since the campaign began, and confronting him four times is the whole objective.

There are four sightings and you can do them in any order, but each has its own beat behind it. Park Row is a hotel rooftop you look across to from the Solomon Wayne Courthouse roof, standing on its southern lip above the main entrance, and it goes live once Catwoman is rescued. The Industrial District one is up on the Ferris Wheel in that district's eastern corner, reachable with the Grapple Gun from its base, and it needs the Steel Mill mission finished. The Bowery one is on the tallest rooftop, northeast of the subway entrance, and it needs Quincy Sharp interrogated. The Amusement Mile one is on the roof west of the GCPD next to the Gotham City Olympus building, and it needs Vicki Vale rescued.

Each confrontation ends with Azrael vanishing into smoke and leaving a symbol to scan, which drops a marker on your map. With all four scanned, take the sigil to the Batcomputer and rotate it until its four points line up with the four places you found him. That reveals a fifth location: a large symbol on the wall at the southeastern corner of the church in Amusement Mile. Scanning that gets you an actual conversation rather than a fight.

Two things worth knowing before you start. The Catch achievement wants a Remote Control Batarang thrown at him at all four sightings before you confront him, which makes it impossible to clean up afterwards. And you can see the Watcher during the Jack Ryder rescue and at various other points without any of it counting, so spotting him is not the same as unlocking anything. Our Watcher in the Wings guide has the exact vantage point for each.

Shot in the Dark

Three crime scenes, then a stash hunt, then the only hard timer in this bucket. The first scene is handed to you as soon as you first leave the Steel Mill. The second and third are the problem: neither has a stated requirement, and the actual instruction is to keep playing until you hear a gunshot, at which point the map highlights the area it came from.

The end of it is a race. Deadshot's PDA, hacked with the Cryptographic Sequencer, lists his remaining targets as Batman, Bruce Wayne and Jack Ryder, and only the third can actually be saved. Depending on your difficulty setting you have two or three minutes to reach him in a Bowery alleyway, and grappling into the air repeatedly to hold speed is the difference between making it and not.

That third crime scene is also where the Forensic Expert achievement fires, which is another one you cannot pick up later. Our Shot in the Dark guide has each scan target, and the fight that ends it is covered in our bosses guide.

Identity Theft

Someone is murdering people and cutting off their faces, bandaging the heads afterwards as a signature. The killer is Thomas Elliot, better known as Hush, a childhood friend of Bruce Wayne with a long grudge against the family.

The structure mirrors Shot in the Dark closely enough that people confuse the two: three bodies, each scanned with the Evidence Scanner, each pointing at the next lead. Victim one is east of the subway station, and scanning the bandaged head then the blood stains lets Batman track a trail to a political prisoner who insists the killer is Bruce Wayne. Victim two lies in a Park Row alley just southeast of the Solomon Wayne Courthouse, and the fingerprints on the tool beside him also come back as Bruce Wayne's. Victim three is over by the Restricted Area, in an alley to the southeast of the Ace Chemicals Building, and the bleach trail there leads to an inmate who admits he was told to dispose of the body.

The hideout is an apartment to the east of the courthouse. An audio journal on the table names Elliot, then Hush appears in person wearing a face he has assembled out of skin grafts taken from his victims, and it is Bruce Wayne's. He leaves, and you hack the control panel to get out. Our Identity Theft guide has all three scan orders.

Heart of Ice

The shortest of the four and the most gadget-dependent. Beating Mr. Freeze drops a large search circle on the Industrial District, and Nora is in the top left of it, on a boat under the bridge that connects Amusement Mile to the Industrial District, beside the red North Gotham Docks neon sign.

The wall in front of the boat is the whole puzzle. Freeze Blast the water to make a platform, jump on, Batclaw the metal rings to pull yourself in, then blow the wall with Explosive Gel. Detective Mode marks structurally weak walls in purple, which is how you confirm you are aiming at the right one. Inside Storage Warehouse 5B there is a vent that puts you beneath the thugs, and there are armoured and shielded ones in that group, so the takedown from below is worth setting up rather than rushing.

Nora is alive in a container to the right, and the door out needs the Cryptographic Sequencer with the password FROZENBAIT. Then it is back to the Forensic Lab on the GCPD's bottom floor to tell Freeze. Our Nora Fries guide has the full route.

Getting into the Steel Mill, four different ways

The Sionis Steel Mill sits in the southwestern corner of the map, directly under the Industrial District, and it is the single most common navigation complaint in this game, because the entrance you used last time is usually gone.

The first way in is the big chimney with the skulls, during the early mission tracking the Joker's radio signal. Reach the high tower with lights and Alfred tells you the chimneys are an option; grapple the chimney edge and Batman glides down into the Waste Exchange.

The second time you go back as Batman, after rescuing Vicki Vale, that chimney no longer works. Oracle marks a second entrance on the south side leading into Cooling Tunnel B, and the approach is guarded: two snipers sit on the Industrial District drawbridge, so circling around the mill rather than heading straight south avoids walking into both of them. You also have to have beaten Mr. Freeze before this trip.

As Catwoman, and again in Harley Quinn's Revenge, both of those are permanently disabled and the only route left is the hole torn open during the Joker boss fight, by the main entrance east of the river, which leads straight into Joker's Office. It is easy to miss because it is on fire. Climb the platform, circle the destroyed chimney, turn back to face its front, head for the flames, climb the fence, drop through the destroyed roof and go through the gap. In the DLC, Robin starts inside the mill and Batman starts in Amusement Mile with a waypoint that unhelpfully points at the ruined chimney, and this is the entrance he needs. If it helps to place it, it is the same spot where Protocol 10 began. Our Steel Mill entrance guide covers all four.

When a mission refuses to trigger

Every one of these is a real note from our own mission pages, and collecting them in one place is genuinely useful, because the fix is almost never to keep searching.

The pattern across the Watcher rows is worth naming: in all three cases the prerequisite is met and the spawn simply does not happen, and a restart fixes it. If you have done the beat and he is not there, do not go looking for a different rooftop.

Where to go next

The two fights that bookend these missions, Mr. Freeze at the start of Heart of Ice and Deadshot at the end of Shot in the Dark, are in our bosses guide. The trophies and breakables hidden inside these same buildings are in our collectibles guide, which matters most for the Steel Mill given how its entrances behave. And the Detective Mode and freeflow techniques all of these missions quietly assume are covered in our mechanics guide.