Man, Arkham Knight was a mixed, mixed bag. Various aspects of it have me disappointed, impressed, frustrated and happy. I am a HUGE Batman fan, so the Arkham series has had a special place in my heart for Rocksteady for making not just a good game, but a real Batman experience. There is a distinction between those two terms that drive how I view the franchise. So let me first give an overview of my experience with the games:
I considerd Arkham Asylum was a guaranteed failure in the making, bastardizing the franchise for a quick cash grab...until I played it and fell in love. It was a love letter to Batman and Batman fans AND a good game at the same time. Now, I use the word 'good' specifically, because I would have said it was great before. But the truth is much of it is outdated. The infamously awful bosses are just one part. There are criticisms of the gameplay being a rhythmic masher that I disagree with, but I feel it can be fairly said about Asylum, as this was the time before you could use gadgets and before the stun button had a real function (Though, in fairness, Batman's gameplay here was the first of it's kind, so roughness is to be expected). It's puzzles were adequate, but not especially refined. So I have to say that much of it's greatness comes not from any one particularly great mechanic, but how they came together in a package. Batman fights in an impactful, but quasi-realistic fashion, using all sorts of gadgets to solve puzzles, and exists in this dark, surreal world of colorful and insane villains. It was merely a good game, but a fantastic Batman experience. The love of the Batman mythos is present in every facet of this creation. There is a LOT that they simply didn't have to do. They didn't have to give each character their own small death screen for when you died. They didn't have to give interview tapes and expansions on the backstory that is filled with comic book history. They didn't have to give attention to villains that don't even appear in the story, but they do. That's, at it's core, what makes Asylum great, because it's just a condensed experience and appreciation for Batman.
Then Arkham City came out and essentially did everything better. The love and craft of the story were still there, but now you had a much larger everything to work with. Your arsenal was expanded and now you could bring them into the fight, which made the combat far more multilayered and complex than it was before. They improved the gliding, and the improved manueverability helped deepen the game further in terms of how you planned things out nad how you approached a situation. And the love that was present in Asylum was still there, lovingly paying attention to all the small details of the character. The only major criticism I have of it is the story, which takes a very disappointing turn about halfway through, and I greatly disapprove how they handled the Ra's al Ghul plot (It kind of astounds me they don't give a reason why he considers Batman to be a worthier successor over his own daughter, or explore how Talia feels about that arrangement) in particular, and Batman acting like a dick for no reason was also dumb. I feel many of you would say the real flaw of Arkham City is the sandbox overworld that 'wrecked' the pacing, but this simply isn't true. For one, Asylum had it's own pacing issues, it was just such a shorter game that most people don't remember that the game literally stops and pushes busywork on you for no reason halfway through. For another, the world was designed to be relatively small for the amount of content that was condensed in any given area, which I felt they did very well. The atmosphere was still strong too, with various recognizable buildings and landmarks that often were signatured by various supervillains, giving the whole world a very unique feel. For me, this is the best arkham game thus far.
Arkham Origins is somewhat of a black sheep for me, and I don't feel it's particularly useful discussing it in too much depth. Origins was okay, the worst Arkham game for me, but still decent, mostly redeemed by the best storyline and acting in the franchise. So, with all that said: Arkham Knight. I feel there are 2 main parts to discuss, the story and the gameplay and the Batman experience.
Playing as Batman on it's most basic level is a further refinement of what we got in Arkham, though it is in the way of disempowerment for balance purposes. Batman is given smoother and faster attack animations, with more combat options on the table, more enemy types to fight against, and just a general smoother experience. I feel if I went back to play City right now, it might not be hard to get back into because it'd be a simpler experience, but much of the ferocity and satisfaction of the new one would be lost. So Batman got upgraded as he typically does, and playing him on a basic level is as satisfying as always. I feel your milage may vary in how much you like the changes they made to the gadgets. For me, for whatever reason, it was very difficult to get used to, especially the explosive gel which used to be my best friend, is now just a small dust cloud that gets in enemies eyes. Probably for the better in terms of balance, but still. The big improvements I felt were the predator sections, where you got a great deal more options with the fear multitake downs and voice synthesizer and hacking device that lets you fuck with enemies, which is how I always like to do things. That said, I'm taken back by how they copied everything from Asylum. The voice synthesizer is the only new gadget you get, and while they did rework how a lot of them worked (especially the hacking device), I had expected atleast 4 actually new gadgets, even if they fulfilled a similar purpose as some gadgets before. This is a worrying lack of creativity on Rocksteady's part, tbh, who are usually great at mixing things up. Still, the base gameplay is as satisfying as ever, just lacking in how they shook things up this time around.
The Batmobile has been the biggest draw and controversial piece of the product ever since it was first announced. Having played it myself, I find myself arriving at the ambivalent conclusion of "It's fantastic and I wish I had seen it less" Make no mistake, the Batmobile works very well within the game world. I'm honestly impressed with how they made it a lightning fast tank. It's satisfying to drive, it's fast, it's very useful, and highly versatile. You can use it to race, fight, solve puzzles, and even sneak(!). That last one I actually think is absurd in terms of the context in the world, but it's a testament to how much effort they put into making this a well integrated part of the world. Yet it simply wasn't enough. I've had a lot of difficulty pinpointing exactly why that is, because I don't want it to simply be erased from the game, because it IS a good addition with more depth than I was expecting. However, think of your average on foot fight encounter, and you realize that you have a wealth of options between sneaking, fighting, using gadgets, using environment, and all the depth and intricacies everything that offers. With the Batmobile, you're options are significantly more limited and that's what kills it. Despite it having more depth than you'd expect it to, it's significantly less deep than playing as Batman on foot. Offensively, you can shoot one of two guns or ram enemies. Every drone has essentially one directive "Spot and shoot", which they do the same way regardless of what you do. The only distinction in fighting them is the enemy types and the environment, which you can use to hide from enemy fire sometimes. There were times where I was all for a chase scene or drone fight and those were fun, but there were a lot more times where I wanted to just have the section be done and over with. Overall, I actually think I have more negative feelings on the Batmobile than positive. Rocksteady was clearly proud of it's efforts here, and they should be, but the vehicle is simply over emphasized and a drag to the experience too often. There are also some encounters with this that are, putting it plainly, not well designed. One AR mission had me in a circle where one hit killed me instantly, and I felt how I did was pure luck, because my scores could vary from lasting under a minute to getting 5 minutes (of the 6 required to get 3 stars) without doing anything notably differently. I fucking HATE the heat seeking missile drones so damn much too. Not to mention the physics of the thing seemed a little inconsistent to me. The Cobra drones were by far the worst designed enemy for it. They are extremely annoying to approach, the distraction upgrade I had worked maybe 50% of the time, and the lockon feature the Batmobile has is the most frustrating thing in the game, both against Cobras and the APC's. If they turn 45 degrees, you can lose your whole shot, even though you don't need to lock on because you're looking right at the point you want to shoot. Very very bad design regarding that.
Now, the world itself. To be clear, when I say 'the game world', I don't mean just the environment, but how you interact with it. Now, going back to the City issue of pacing, as I explained, I feel City is paced perfectly and the complaints of the game world being too large and full of filler simply don't ring true. Knight, however, is too large and full of filler. Arkham City was designed around 1 mode of transportation and they place the size of the city so that even end to end, it only takes you a few minutes to fly there without any hiccups. Knight, on the other hand, has that nettling Batmobile problem, so they have to make it large enough for that AND make it glide-able, which they only partially suceeded. Driving the Batmobile through the city is fun when I feel like doing just that, but I usually prefer to glide my way through, which takes just enough for me to start thinking "Are we there yet" before arriving, even with the fully upgraded grapple launcher. I'd get there faster in the car, but I don't like having to navigate around buildings and pillars when I can just fly over them instead, especially when there's plenty of stuff up top I could miss. But then that leaves me just sitting back and holding X as batman gently descends down ever so slowly. It's not a perfect fit for either, which slightly damages how you move through the city. But as far as pacing goes, it's the side mission design is...bad. Now, let me put up a disclaimer that I burned through the game in 3 8+ hour long sessions, so the main missions and the side missions kind of blur into one another for me at this point. However, even so, the side missions themselves are worthy of criticism. THey vary the degree to which they mix things up, but they are far too repetitive and far too many of them. Between the checkpoints, the explosive devices, APC chases, and watch towers, there are like 80 missions of doing 4 things. The APC chases are infuriating in particular because I didn't notice any significant gameplay design variation in any of them, while all the others shook it up a bit, but not enough. And I've already mentioned how the Batmobile doesn't have enough depth and variation to warrant several dozen of the same style fights I get in the main campaign anyway. I wouldn't have cared if they didn't have THAT many of them, but the amount they had was ridiculous, with no real gain except upgrade points. The Penguin side missions plays out essentially the same way every mission you take other than enemy placement. Same with the Twoface mission. The Manbat mission isn't even a fight of any kind, its just a matter if you happen to spot it. But if you think City was just as bad, let me disprove that by pointing out how the Riddler missions were spaced out between the two. With City, you're incentivized to keep collecting trophies because that will unlock the next big riddler puzzle. The number of trophies is overwhelming, but not if you are only collecting them to get to the next Riddler sequence, which is essentially just rewarding you for what your doing in small chunks. You do this on and off with the main campaign, and you will be able to get more trophies as you get more gadgets, which lets you get the next chunk. I've collected all the riddler trophies in City twice because of this. In Knight, you have no incentive at all to collect them other than general completionist tendencies. The riddle side mission is about whether you can get to his headquarters where he's holding catwoman. I try to do side missions as they become available, so at 15% of the game, I had 2 of the big riddler sequences done, then I had to wait until I got mroe than 50% of the game before I could do the next one and finish it, at which point riddler just goes "Okay, now find the rest of the trophies to fight me!" currently have 70 something of over 230 trophies. I'm less than 1/3 and I've been collecting them as I went along. Now, having beaten the game, I have no inclination to get these things. This is bad pacing, first giving me no small incentives through the campaign and just dumping this huge one on me for a relatively small reward (capturing Riddler).
I should note that I didn't find the repetitive nature to be the case in the main campaign, which mixed things up well as it went along from what I remember. Well, other htan the Batmobile sections, but I already said that was an mechanical issue. What I'm disappointed by is the lack of real boss fights. Even boss fights weren't boss fights. At the end of the military missions, Deathstroke is in a cheap knock off of the tank the Arkham Knight used, rather than a boss fight in his own way. The Manbat isn't a fight at all, two face and penguin weren't different from average goons, you don't fight firefly, just chase him around, Hush is a QTE....You might be saying that these are all side missions, ubt the main mission doesn't have us fighting Arkham Knight proper either. The climax of his fight is an elaborate predator sequence where he uses a sniper. The only boss fight that really appears is vehicular ones, unfortunately, and big Al in the Harley Quinn section.
Story-wise, I'm not really that happy with it, but that's par for course with the arkham series, which I feel drops the ball story wise in every game. Still, this failure is unique in that it's based in lack of good character motivation. They have Scarecrow taking on the role of Joker, but the issue with that is that Scarecrow isn't insane the same way that Joker was. I didn't get why Scarecrow was doing what he was doing. He seemed to have a point to prove to Batman, but it's never really clear what that is. He's just obsessed with fear, going on rants that flat out contradict what is going on. He's pissed off that Batman doesn't know what fear is while insisting that he's afraid within while also ranting about how he's going to make Batman fear more. Fear fear fear, christ. There's nothing more to it, really. And the Arkham Knight is the same, being a bundle of angry rants that can one moment respect Batman while the next saying he's weak and an old man. I feel there needs to be some law made out to stop character motivations from being displaced anger. Literally every character is blames everything on Batman regardless of where responsibility truly lies. Scarecrow blames Batman for making his villains, Arkham Knight blames Batman for what
did, Jim Gordon blames Batman for Barbara being kidnapped, Batman blames himself for Barbara dying from Scarecrows fear toxin. I'm sure somewhere outthere is a villain origin story where a guy tripped over a rock and blamed Batman for it. It's such an annoying story telling mechanic at this point because it makes the conflict artificial since the reasons for why the two characters are in conflict are misguided and wrong. Every character has some variant of this kind asinine motivation where they seem barely in touch with reality. Some of these are intentional, obviously, like Joker blaming Batman for intentionally dropping the cure, but once you see deathstroke being simultaneously offended and respectful at batman beating him, you realize that this isn't dependent on the stability of the character but simply the writer seemingly incapable of finding motivation for a character than "They blame batman for [fill in the blank]", regardless of how little sense it actually makes.
One thing I never really understood is why it became the 'arkham' series. The first game was based on a comic that takes place in the Arkham Asylum, which the first game did as well. Arkham City, on the other hand, was more based on the No Man's Land story arc that had Gotham ruined and abandoned. From there, I never felt Arkham City actually made sense, but I was willing to role with it. Arkham Origins had nothing to do with Arkham whatsoever and now Arkham Knight has no reason to not be called
That's the big problem, I feel, it saves most of the development for the last part of the storyline, and only Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight are the major players of the storyline. I had big issues with Arkham City, but one thing I respected was how they went about giving each villain their own agency in the game. Twoface, Penguin, Joker, Strange, and Ra's were all out to get something on their own, and that was cool to see, even if it wasn't as well executed as it could have been. Here, the only major players are the aforementioned two, and everyone else comes off a bit like fanservice. Still, on the other hand, the Joker was a complete delight beginning to end. While he had the best storyline in Origins, his jokes here are better than anywhere else. I died during the song part.
I should also mention that the believability of the world has been forever abandoned. I thought Arkham City was absurdly impossible, and it is, but the premise of the story of AK is that: Most citizens of Gotham City have left and yet Scarecrow wants to unleash his gas. Obstensively, the only people in the city are the thugs working for him, and they're all basically enthusiastic about the whole thing happening, seemingly aware of the two individual facts that the gas is going to drive everyone in gotham crazy and that they're the only ones in gotham, but unable to put them together. The fact that this is basically allowed by the government isn't handwaved away as the government being influenced by other large forces like Ra's organization did in City. And then there is the Batmobile. They try to keep Batman's no kill rule, so they have the thing being able to plow through concrete, yet when apparently thugs survive getting hit and shot by the thing. They try to justify it by saying it electricutes thugs before they get hit by it, and use 'nonlethal rounds', but they also have me firing MISSILES into ordinary cares, or just crashing into them. And for some reason, every drone you fight is unmanned...somehow. Hell, if the Arkham Knight knows about Batman's rule, he should just do what he did with the suicide vest guy (who strangely only appears once when it could have made an interesting gmae mechanic for predator sections. Weird.) and man the drones, so Batman can't do anything to them. It's just...impossible for me to take and believe that Batman's freakin war machine can reliably cause no deaths, even with comic book logic involved. I also don't fully believe that no one would care about the hundreds of thousands be's doing in damages every time he decides he wants to literally drive though a parking lot. Again, I fully acknowledge that the series has given little heed to believability of the world, but this is on another level.
So did I enjoy the game? Despite all my bitching, I did, actually, yes. But I no longer feel like Batman the same way I did with the other two games. I'm usually on the side that says Batman should be realistic, but in videogames, I appreciate the games more when they embrace the comic book craziness. Fighting thugs that allied themselves to a villain is far more interesting than fighting these militia guys. And the Batmobile has unfortunately turned a good portion of the game into a type of third person shooter, which isn't something I ever really saw Batman doing. The lack of other villains playing a major part made the city feel devoid of the typical atmosphere that was present in Asylum and City. Not completely, maybe, but enough that I felt I was in "Generic American City" way too often, rather than in Gotham where the crazy run wild. And I think that's the crux of why I don't feel as hot about this one as I did others. It's the opposite of what Asylum accomplished, being a really good game, but not as good a Batman experience.
I considerd Arkham Asylum was a guaranteed failure in the making, bastardizing the franchise for a quick cash grab...until I played it and fell in love. It was a love letter to Batman and Batman fans AND a good game at the same time. Now, I use the word 'good' specifically, because I would have said it was great before. But the truth is much of it is outdated. The infamously awful bosses are just one part. There are criticisms of the gameplay being a rhythmic masher that I disagree with, but I feel it can be fairly said about Asylum, as this was the time before you could use gadgets and before the stun button had a real function (Though, in fairness, Batman's gameplay here was the first of it's kind, so roughness is to be expected). It's puzzles were adequate, but not especially refined. So I have to say that much of it's greatness comes not from any one particularly great mechanic, but how they came together in a package. Batman fights in an impactful, but quasi-realistic fashion, using all sorts of gadgets to solve puzzles, and exists in this dark, surreal world of colorful and insane villains. It was merely a good game, but a fantastic Batman experience. The love of the Batman mythos is present in every facet of this creation. There is a LOT that they simply didn't have to do. They didn't have to give each character their own small death screen for when you died. They didn't have to give interview tapes and expansions on the backstory that is filled with comic book history. They didn't have to give attention to villains that don't even appear in the story, but they do. That's, at it's core, what makes Asylum great, because it's just a condensed experience and appreciation for Batman.
Then Arkham City came out and essentially did everything better. The love and craft of the story were still there, but now you had a much larger everything to work with. Your arsenal was expanded and now you could bring them into the fight, which made the combat far more multilayered and complex than it was before. They improved the gliding, and the improved manueverability helped deepen the game further in terms of how you planned things out nad how you approached a situation. And the love that was present in Asylum was still there, lovingly paying attention to all the small details of the character. The only major criticism I have of it is the story, which takes a very disappointing turn about halfway through, and I greatly disapprove how they handled the Ra's al Ghul plot (It kind of astounds me they don't give a reason why he considers Batman to be a worthier successor over his own daughter, or explore how Talia feels about that arrangement) in particular, and Batman acting like a dick for no reason was also dumb. I feel many of you would say the real flaw of Arkham City is the sandbox overworld that 'wrecked' the pacing, but this simply isn't true. For one, Asylum had it's own pacing issues, it was just such a shorter game that most people don't remember that the game literally stops and pushes busywork on you for no reason halfway through. For another, the world was designed to be relatively small for the amount of content that was condensed in any given area, which I felt they did very well. The atmosphere was still strong too, with various recognizable buildings and landmarks that often were signatured by various supervillains, giving the whole world a very unique feel. For me, this is the best arkham game thus far.
Arkham Origins is somewhat of a black sheep for me, and I don't feel it's particularly useful discussing it in too much depth. Origins was okay, the worst Arkham game for me, but still decent, mostly redeemed by the best storyline and acting in the franchise. So, with all that said: Arkham Knight. I feel there are 2 main parts to discuss, the story and the gameplay and the Batman experience.
Playing as Batman on it's most basic level is a further refinement of what we got in Arkham, though it is in the way of disempowerment for balance purposes. Batman is given smoother and faster attack animations, with more combat options on the table, more enemy types to fight against, and just a general smoother experience. I feel if I went back to play City right now, it might not be hard to get back into because it'd be a simpler experience, but much of the ferocity and satisfaction of the new one would be lost. So Batman got upgraded as he typically does, and playing him on a basic level is as satisfying as always. I feel your milage may vary in how much you like the changes they made to the gadgets. For me, for whatever reason, it was very difficult to get used to, especially the explosive gel which used to be my best friend, is now just a small dust cloud that gets in enemies eyes. Probably for the better in terms of balance, but still. The big improvements I felt were the predator sections, where you got a great deal more options with the fear multitake downs and voice synthesizer and hacking device that lets you fuck with enemies, which is how I always like to do things. That said, I'm taken back by how they copied everything from Asylum. The voice synthesizer is the only new gadget you get, and while they did rework how a lot of them worked (especially the hacking device), I had expected atleast 4 actually new gadgets, even if they fulfilled a similar purpose as some gadgets before. This is a worrying lack of creativity on Rocksteady's part, tbh, who are usually great at mixing things up. Still, the base gameplay is as satisfying as ever, just lacking in how they shook things up this time around.
The Batmobile has been the biggest draw and controversial piece of the product ever since it was first announced. Having played it myself, I find myself arriving at the ambivalent conclusion of "It's fantastic and I wish I had seen it less" Make no mistake, the Batmobile works very well within the game world. I'm honestly impressed with how they made it a lightning fast tank. It's satisfying to drive, it's fast, it's very useful, and highly versatile. You can use it to race, fight, solve puzzles, and even sneak(!). That last one I actually think is absurd in terms of the context in the world, but it's a testament to how much effort they put into making this a well integrated part of the world. Yet it simply wasn't enough. I've had a lot of difficulty pinpointing exactly why that is, because I don't want it to simply be erased from the game, because it IS a good addition with more depth than I was expecting. However, think of your average on foot fight encounter, and you realize that you have a wealth of options between sneaking, fighting, using gadgets, using environment, and all the depth and intricacies everything that offers. With the Batmobile, you're options are significantly more limited and that's what kills it. Despite it having more depth than you'd expect it to, it's significantly less deep than playing as Batman on foot. Offensively, you can shoot one of two guns or ram enemies. Every drone has essentially one directive "Spot and shoot", which they do the same way regardless of what you do. The only distinction in fighting them is the enemy types and the environment, which you can use to hide from enemy fire sometimes. There were times where I was all for a chase scene or drone fight and those were fun, but there were a lot more times where I wanted to just have the section be done and over with. Overall, I actually think I have more negative feelings on the Batmobile than positive. Rocksteady was clearly proud of it's efforts here, and they should be, but the vehicle is simply over emphasized and a drag to the experience too often. There are also some encounters with this that are, putting it plainly, not well designed. One AR mission had me in a circle where one hit killed me instantly, and I felt how I did was pure luck, because my scores could vary from lasting under a minute to getting 5 minutes (of the 6 required to get 3 stars) without doing anything notably differently. I fucking HATE the heat seeking missile drones so damn much too. Not to mention the physics of the thing seemed a little inconsistent to me. The Cobra drones were by far the worst designed enemy for it. They are extremely annoying to approach, the distraction upgrade I had worked maybe 50% of the time, and the lockon feature the Batmobile has is the most frustrating thing in the game, both against Cobras and the APC's. If they turn 45 degrees, you can lose your whole shot, even though you don't need to lock on because you're looking right at the point you want to shoot. Very very bad design regarding that.
Now, the world itself. To be clear, when I say 'the game world', I don't mean just the environment, but how you interact with it. Now, going back to the City issue of pacing, as I explained, I feel City is paced perfectly and the complaints of the game world being too large and full of filler simply don't ring true. Knight, however, is too large and full of filler. Arkham City was designed around 1 mode of transportation and they place the size of the city so that even end to end, it only takes you a few minutes to fly there without any hiccups. Knight, on the other hand, has that nettling Batmobile problem, so they have to make it large enough for that AND make it glide-able, which they only partially suceeded. Driving the Batmobile through the city is fun when I feel like doing just that, but I usually prefer to glide my way through, which takes just enough for me to start thinking "Are we there yet" before arriving, even with the fully upgraded grapple launcher. I'd get there faster in the car, but I don't like having to navigate around buildings and pillars when I can just fly over them instead, especially when there's plenty of stuff up top I could miss. But then that leaves me just sitting back and holding X as batman gently descends down ever so slowly. It's not a perfect fit for either, which slightly damages how you move through the city. But as far as pacing goes, it's the side mission design is...bad. Now, let me put up a disclaimer that I burned through the game in 3 8+ hour long sessions, so the main missions and the side missions kind of blur into one another for me at this point. However, even so, the side missions themselves are worthy of criticism. THey vary the degree to which they mix things up, but they are far too repetitive and far too many of them. Between the checkpoints, the explosive devices, APC chases, and watch towers, there are like 80 missions of doing 4 things. The APC chases are infuriating in particular because I didn't notice any significant gameplay design variation in any of them, while all the others shook it up a bit, but not enough. And I've already mentioned how the Batmobile doesn't have enough depth and variation to warrant several dozen of the same style fights I get in the main campaign anyway. I wouldn't have cared if they didn't have THAT many of them, but the amount they had was ridiculous, with no real gain except upgrade points. The Penguin side missions plays out essentially the same way every mission you take other than enemy placement. Same with the Twoface mission. The Manbat mission isn't even a fight of any kind, its just a matter if you happen to spot it. But if you think City was just as bad, let me disprove that by pointing out how the Riddler missions were spaced out between the two. With City, you're incentivized to keep collecting trophies because that will unlock the next big riddler puzzle. The number of trophies is overwhelming, but not if you are only collecting them to get to the next Riddler sequence, which is essentially just rewarding you for what your doing in small chunks. You do this on and off with the main campaign, and you will be able to get more trophies as you get more gadgets, which lets you get the next chunk. I've collected all the riddler trophies in City twice because of this. In Knight, you have no incentive at all to collect them other than general completionist tendencies. The riddle side mission is about whether you can get to his headquarters where he's holding catwoman. I try to do side missions as they become available, so at 15% of the game, I had 2 of the big riddler sequences done, then I had to wait until I got mroe than 50% of the game before I could do the next one and finish it, at which point riddler just goes "Okay, now find the rest of the trophies to fight me!" currently have 70 something of over 230 trophies. I'm less than 1/3 and I've been collecting them as I went along. Now, having beaten the game, I have no inclination to get these things. This is bad pacing, first giving me no small incentives through the campaign and just dumping this huge one on me for a relatively small reward (capturing Riddler).
I should note that I didn't find the repetitive nature to be the case in the main campaign, which mixed things up well as it went along from what I remember. Well, other htan the Batmobile sections, but I already said that was an mechanical issue. What I'm disappointed by is the lack of real boss fights. Even boss fights weren't boss fights. At the end of the military missions, Deathstroke is in a cheap knock off of the tank the Arkham Knight used, rather than a boss fight in his own way. The Manbat isn't a fight at all, two face and penguin weren't different from average goons, you don't fight firefly, just chase him around, Hush is a QTE....You might be saying that these are all side missions, ubt the main mission doesn't have us fighting Arkham Knight proper either. The climax of his fight is an elaborate predator sequence where he uses a sniper. The only boss fight that really appears is vehicular ones, unfortunately, and big Al in the Harley Quinn section.
Story-wise, I'm not really that happy with it, but that's par for course with the arkham series, which I feel drops the ball story wise in every game. Still, this failure is unique in that it's based in lack of good character motivation. They have Scarecrow taking on the role of Joker, but the issue with that is that Scarecrow isn't insane the same way that Joker was. I didn't get why Scarecrow was doing what he was doing. He seemed to have a point to prove to Batman, but it's never really clear what that is. He's just obsessed with fear, going on rants that flat out contradict what is going on. He's pissed off that Batman doesn't know what fear is while insisting that he's afraid within while also ranting about how he's going to make Batman fear more. Fear fear fear, christ. There's nothing more to it, really. And the Arkham Knight is the same, being a bundle of angry rants that can one moment respect Batman while the next saying he's weak and an old man. I feel there needs to be some law made out to stop character motivations from being displaced anger. Literally every character is blames everything on Batman regardless of where responsibility truly lies. Scarecrow blames Batman for making his villains, Arkham Knight blames Batman for what
the Joker
One thing I never really understood is why it became the 'arkham' series. The first game was based on a comic that takes place in the Arkham Asylum, which the first game did as well. Arkham City, on the other hand, was more based on the No Man's Land story arc that had Gotham ruined and abandoned. From there, I never felt Arkham City actually made sense, but I was willing to role with it. Arkham Origins had nothing to do with Arkham whatsoever and now Arkham Knight has no reason to not be called
"Red Hood" except for the fact that if they had gone with that, fans would have instantly known who he was and what motivation he had. Which would have been better, in my mind, because the story would have played out better if Batman had to actively struggle against fighting his former sidekick than him finding about it in the last piece of the game.
I should also mention that the believability of the world has been forever abandoned. I thought Arkham City was absurdly impossible, and it is, but the premise of the story of AK is that: Most citizens of Gotham City have left and yet Scarecrow wants to unleash his gas. Obstensively, the only people in the city are the thugs working for him, and they're all basically enthusiastic about the whole thing happening, seemingly aware of the two individual facts that the gas is going to drive everyone in gotham crazy and that they're the only ones in gotham, but unable to put them together. The fact that this is basically allowed by the government isn't handwaved away as the government being influenced by other large forces like Ra's organization did in City. And then there is the Batmobile. They try to keep Batman's no kill rule, so they have the thing being able to plow through concrete, yet when apparently thugs survive getting hit and shot by the thing. They try to justify it by saying it electricutes thugs before they get hit by it, and use 'nonlethal rounds', but they also have me firing MISSILES into ordinary cares, or just crashing into them. And for some reason, every drone you fight is unmanned...somehow. Hell, if the Arkham Knight knows about Batman's rule, he should just do what he did with the suicide vest guy (who strangely only appears once when it could have made an interesting gmae mechanic for predator sections. Weird.) and man the drones, so Batman can't do anything to them. It's just...impossible for me to take and believe that Batman's freakin war machine can reliably cause no deaths, even with comic book logic involved. I also don't fully believe that no one would care about the hundreds of thousands be's doing in damages every time he decides he wants to literally drive though a parking lot. Again, I fully acknowledge that the series has given little heed to believability of the world, but this is on another level.
So did I enjoy the game? Despite all my bitching, I did, actually, yes. But I no longer feel like Batman the same way I did with the other two games. I'm usually on the side that says Batman should be realistic, but in videogames, I appreciate the games more when they embrace the comic book craziness. Fighting thugs that allied themselves to a villain is far more interesting than fighting these militia guys. And the Batmobile has unfortunately turned a good portion of the game into a type of third person shooter, which isn't something I ever really saw Batman doing. The lack of other villains playing a major part made the city feel devoid of the typical atmosphere that was present in Asylum and City. Not completely, maybe, but enough that I felt I was in "Generic American City" way too often, rather than in Gotham where the crazy run wild. And I think that's the crux of why I don't feel as hot about this one as I did others. It's the opposite of what Asylum accomplished, being a really good game, but not as good a Batman experience.
