The theatre/movie studio is excellent, start to finish. So is the zeppelin; these parts of the game feel just like the best moments of Asylum and City. My biggest complaint with Arkham Knight is that there just aren't enough sections that reach this level of quality.
I'm not against the idea of switching things up with the Batmobile. I think that thing controls perfectly, looks awesome, and I love the stuff it can do. I loved using it for puzzle solving and doing all that crazy stuff with the power winch, powersliding across rooftops and exploding out the top of it straight into a glide. Unfortunately, so much of your time in the Batmobile is spent strafing around a circular arena blowing up wave after wave of drones, which I found utterly tedious after the first few instances. I mean, races, stealth bits with cobra tanks, power winching down walls, driving on the ceiling in tunnels, that stuff is all awesome and all used sparingly, but drone shootouts happen ALL THE TIME. There are just too fucking many tank battles, and that style of gameplay is not sufficiently varied or enjoyable enough to match the kind of quality I've come to expect from Rocksteady's games.
If the number of tank battles was halved or quartered I would think much more highly of the game, but I still wouldn't put it on the level of Asylum or City. The extremely dull and repetitive side missions are a real shame, as is the lack of any decent bossfights. I felt that relegating Batman's rogue's gallery to side missions rather than giving them major roles in the story was a missed opportunity, especially given all that pre-release talk of all the villains having teamed up in the Joker's absence. Even the design of the few Metroidvania/dungeon areas is a bit lacking compared to the first two games. When you revisited the Steel Mill or the Museum in Arkham City it was to use your new gadgets to find new areas and take different paths; when you revisit the Zeppelin in AK it's to... go back into the same predator area you did last time, then walk straight back out the way you came in.
I think Arkham Knight's a fine game. People should play it; there's a lot of wonderful stuff in there. It's just not going to be one of my favourite games that I replay every few months like Asylum and City were.
