What Batman: Arkham fans are afraid of? Getting a bad game in the series. They will have to fight through their fears.
Rocksteady have been making every next Batman: Arkham entry bigger than the one before. Asylum was a wonderful “compact” game in a relatively smalle “metroidvania”-ish world, which allowed for every system, every batman gadget to have its place. City evolved the basics, but put them in a new perspective with a much larger more typical “open world” with far fewer closed locations. Origins, from a different developer, tried to put the “Batman routine day” feel into the formula of the City. And Knight attempts to make things even bigger. And all of the existing systems can no longer support this concept on their own, so Rocksteady add a new one – batmobile. Which becomes the most intriguing and the most damaging element of the game.
Let’s start with the good – the game looks amazing. Most of the familiar voice actors return and almost every single system and feature from the previous games is better than ever before. Even the batmobile at the start of the game feels amazing. Three completely new districts of Gotham are the world in this entry, and they’re all bigger and taller than anything from the City. Visually the game is also years ahead of the previous entries and the amount of destruction (mostly seen when riding in the car) and little amazing details is astonishing. Fights have lots of new features, like temporarily using environment or enemy weapons and the flow of combat was made to be even more fluid than it was before. And many new elements were added to the stealth sections a well, where both Batman and the enemies can do far more than they could even in Origins. Enemies have new types too, with the most annoying addition being a medic class who can revive enemies in the middle of a fight or a stealth segment.
On the other hand, some of these new things are frustrating, not just varied. The medics, for example, can electrify teammates, which requires gadget use to defuse, and that means that we get even more things to consider during the fight. So the “free flow combat” is often far less “free flow” than it wants to be as you can get a really good combo going before pressing a direction to attack and having Batman fly into a blocking or electrifying enemy who was completely off-screen at the time (or better yet, wasn’t even in the direction you were pushing), leading to you losing the combo and, even worse, getting hit. Sure, gadgets are often even more useful in a fight and the prioritization for hits seems to be designed in a way, where this shouldn’t happen often. But it still does. But this is not even the most annoying thing about the game – what really sucks is that stealth, fights, cool gadget usage and backtracking aren’t even as much of a focus in this game as they used to be before. Sure, I’m not at 100% completion at the moment of me writing this, but from what I’ve seen about the stuff I’ve not completed yet, it doesn’t have all of the cool skill variety that used to be the focus in Batman: Arkham games.
And that’s because we have batmobile now. After this game I’m actually surprised Batman was able to accomplish anything before, without having access to this wonder car. The concept for it is great, even if it takes some getting used to, – it’s a mix of a fast car and a tank with the modes switch by holding a button. As a tank, batmobile can shoot an automatic gun and a cannon, use special moves and even quick-strafe as you’re fighting drone tanks and helicopters. And that’s basically the problem – the first few times you get in the car combat, it’s really fun. But then it happens again and again and again and again, always with the same basic enemies and same basic things you can do. Even during the stealth batmobile sections (and yes, we get those too), your options are so boringly limited you don’t expect this to become “a thing” later in the game. Yet it always does, lacking in variety every other system in the game has, yet taking up vast majority of the game time. It’s basically as if a (somewhat less boring) turret section became the most used game mechanic in a Batman: Arkham title, it’s this bizarre.
The rest of the game suffers from it. We get our hacking tool, the thing that used to be one of the most memorable gadgets in previous entries, around the middle of the game. Then we use it for one section and then barely ever use it again apart from the optional missions and the Riddler’s challenges. It’s so obvious that the developers simply remembered that they had this tool on Batman’s belt that people expect to see and had to quickly scramble a location based around it, but couldn’t figure out a way to naturally add it elsewhere. Due to this, even the skills upgrade system, that’s finally really well designed, is mostly useless – you upgrade the car first, then your suit for stealth and combat and upgrading gadgets is just a thing to put skill points into later.
Even the story is surprisingly weak and silly. After the surprisingly good story of Arkham City, the story in Knight is just stupid. All the big “twists” are obvious from the very beginning, despite all characters looking shocked when those get revealed. And the tone is so… off most of the time. While the scenes are still wonderfully “shot”, they rarely seem to work the way they’re intended to. Characters die, the city is being destroyed a war is happening and Batman continues to press that this is his last act, yet none of this feels impactful. The fact that the game is happening during Halloween would be easily forgotten if not for some occasional character barks that remind you about this, which is weird, since the Christmas theme of Origins was so well delivered.
Oh right, and the PC port – you already heard about how bad it is. It really is. I did finish the game (and Harley’s DLC that was part of the pre-order worked absolutely fine) and didn’t have that many problems with it, especially in more closed locations. But as soon as you need to ride or glide across the whole city, everything falls apart. Sure, there’s a lot happening on screen and the game is clearly visually demanding, but it’s also clear that the port is broken. To the point where the game is no longer sold and will return on sale only when the biggest bugs are fixed. Let’s see how it goes and whenever this will mean the free season pass like it happened with AC: Unity…
Overall, Batman: Arkham Knight is quite disappointing. Parts of the whole are wonderful – if one were to remake the previous entries with these, we’d get even better games than we had. But when combined, Arkham Knight is a somewhat annoying mess to go through. It’s still a good entry in a wonderful Batman: Arkham series. But it’s also the worst one among the mainline.
P.S. Screenshots added in 2021, from the most up to date version of the game on a far superior hardware to what I had in 2015.