This particular section is probably what's going to lead to me not replaying this game. I've replayed Asylum and City every few months since those games came out, absolutely love'em, but all this tank shit in Knight is just too much. I actually love most of the Batmobile stuff, really enjoyed the Riddler challenges with it, love calling it in while I'm on the run and powersliding around corners at top speed and ejecting out of it like a mile into the air, but the arena tank battles just aren't fun after a certain point. You have to do it like twenty times in the main story alone, and then another twenty in side missions, and the first instance of it is exactly the same as the last except by the end you're facing way more enemies and more frustrating enemy types.
I finished the game last night and I'm honestly pretty disappointed, after being such a huge fan of Rocksteady's first two. That same magic is still there in a lot of places, and I love the ways they've updated all facets of Batmanning. AK is unquestionably an Asylum-to-City-sized leap, not just 'we made City again' like Origins was. But the endless tank battles are just such a drag, and the lack of any really good, unique bossfights like Mr Freeze's is a real shame. The side missions feel like Ubisoft-style mindless tasks to repeat over and over; chase a truck, fight some guys, tail a van, rescue a dude, do another tank battle. There are so few lengthy in-door areas in the vein of Asylum and City, and you keep revisiting the same ones over and over; it feels like they ran out of time or money at a certain point and just decided to pad the game out with more tank battles. Gotham itself just doesn't have that dense, tightly-designed feel, because it's intended to be blasted through at afterburner-speed, and all the streets are wide enough for impromptu tank skirmishes.
And, goddamn, why do all the character models still look awful? It was something I forgave in the first two games because I loved everything else about them so much, but after Origins' fantastic Batman model, Arkham Knight's cast just looks shitty. For all their specular-highlighting, depth-of-field, chromatic-aberration, particle-effects-out-the-ass graphics Batman still stands like a robot just like he did in 2009.
