Review: Batman Arkham Knight

The Arkham games have been one of my favorite series to crop up over the last decade. Arkham Asylum marked the first time I thought a 3D superhero game was great and as a massive fan of both superheroes and Batman in particular it was an awesome and unexpected treat. Things are a little different now, expectations have been high for each Arkham game since Asylum and developer Rocksteady has made a big deal about ending this great series with a bang. And while there certainly were some bangs, I couldn’t help but hear a lot of whimpers too.

            When Arkham Asylum came out six years ago it was a special game. The main reason for this was that Rocksteady had managed to design systems around all of Batman’s greatest aspects – his fighting, sneaking and detective skills – and blend them together in a way that made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. That whole was Batman, and because of it we as fans got to feel like one of the greatest and most beloved fictional characters of all time. In Arkham Knight Rocksteady tried to incorporate one last aspect of being Batman into the experience. That aspect was the Batmobile. Regrettably, that aspect is Arkham Knight’s greatest weakness. If Rocksteady had simply treated the Batmobile as just another gadget – factoring it into a few new puzzles – which you could also use to get around the city faster then things would have been fine. Instead they make you spend about half the game inside the Batmobile, usually engaging in tank battles that have nothing to do with what it means to be Batman. Even when you aren’t in tank battles you are doing things like chasing armored vehicles and firing homing missiles at them or using it to breakdown walls, something we’ve already done and sometimes still do with the explosive gel gadget. Pretty much the only times you are using the Batmobile to solve puzzles in new and interesting ways are in some of the Riddler challenges, but most of those are just race tracks. The game is called Batman, not Batmobile, and whenever you are in the Batmobile you don’t feel like Batman. Instead you feel like a weird rocket propelled tank.

            When you actually are playing as Batman there's a few interesting new additions to gameplay, basically one for each gameplay pillar: combat, stealth and puzzle solving. First and foremost is the Fear Takedown system, which allows you to take out a group of unsuspecting enemies (up to five with upgrades) with great speed and ease. It allows for stealth sections to include more enemies and offers up a great way to enter into big fights, if you can approach unseen. The way the camera speeds up, whips around and then slows just to speed up again after you select your next target was really uncomfortable to look at the first handful of times. Eventually, I did get used to it. Another addition is the ability to pick up weapons like a bat or steel pipe that enemies drop and use it against them. It works just like the Shock Gloves from Arkham Origins, meaning it lets you damage anyone – whether they have armor or stun batons or riot shields – just like if they were the basic enemy type. The weapons break quickly though, so it isn’t nearly as overpowered as the Shock Gloves were. It can come in handy, but I found myself almost never making use of this feature as it isn’t needed to win the fights. Besides, when was the last time you saw Batman use a Baseball bat against a criminal? He’s not Casey Jones. For the investigative sections of gameplay, Detective Mode offers nothing new. However, there is an interesting new type of puzzle in the game. It involves you searching through footage from a group of cameras in order to track and locate a piece of information. Unfortunately, you only get to do this type of puzzle twice. There is one last gameplay addition, and it is the one that was the most surprising and intriguing: tag team combat.

            The Arkham campaigns have always been single player only and Arkham Knight is no different. So, to have two heroes like Batman & Nightwing fight a group of enemies together you control one while the AI controls the other until you press the Left Bumper and instantly swap control with the AI. There is also a meter that you can build up in order to perform a dual takedown that will instantly neutralize anyone you are fighting, and switch your control over to the other character. Despite the simplicity of the tag controls you never fight with more than one ally, even though there are a total of three in the game. While it is undoubtedly cool to fight with Nightwing or Catwoman or Robin alongside Batman, the characters don’t feel that different. Their animations are different, but the combat is the same except for the fact that none of them have useful gadgets. It’s not surprising though, why make a bunch of unique quick-fire gadgets for such brief and infrequent team-up fights? Heck, there is only one section in the main quest line where it occurs. Aside from Catwoman climbing on walls for brief parts of Riddler challenges you never explore what makes these other heroes unique. It would have been nice if you could choose to do side quests as them simply for the heck of it, but since you can’t they end up being a flashy inclusion for a few fights and nothing more.

            You can’t even use Robin, Catwoman & Nightwing in any of the game’s AR challenges. The AR challenges are Arkham Knights lack luster replacement for Challenge Maps. The biggest problem with the AR challenges is that there are so few of them, especially in terms of ones that feature Batman’s combat and stealth. Out of the twenty-three challenges, fifteen of them feature the Batmobile. The other eight are split up evenly between combat and stealth missions. Of those four combat missions: two feature Batman, one features Azrael, and one is a tag battle with Batman & Nightwing. There is no good reason why you can’t choose to get a little more out of these four short combat challenges by playing as your choice of: Batman, Catwoman, Nightwing, Robin or Azrael. Especially when Azrael is literally just a reskinned Batman, right down to every animation and gadget. In the story they explain it by saying Azrael has been studying Batman to become his replacement.

            The AR challenges aren’t the only part of the game that feel like an after thought. The game only has a few boss fights and none of them are all that good. Although, to be honest, I never did the Riddler boss fight because it was locked away behind 243 tedious and annoying Riddler trophies. Quite frankly, I don’t have high hopes for that boss fight based on the others in the game. Even if it was the best boss fight in the entire series, I would rather it didn’t exist than have to spend all those hours getting those trophies to play it. Ironically, what’s even worse than the lack of boss fights is the large quantity of repetitive and recycled side quests. Almost every side quest is comprised of just asking you to do the same thing again and again, often to a ridiculous extent. For instance, the Firefly side missions ask you to follow Firefly around in the Batmobile until a meter builds up and Batman automatically jumps out and grabs him. Each time it starts and ends with identical cutscenes; except for the last one, which features Batman arresting Firefly. Then there are side quests like taking control of twenty-one guard towers or rescuing sixteen firefighters – each of which is surrounded by a group of thugs for you to beat up. As soon as you have completed the first part of any sidequest you have basically done all it has to offer, with the ten Riddler Trials being the only real exception. The worst part was after completing 64 specific villain-less side tasks a boss battle is unlocked that is just a copy of a boss fight from the main quest with a new villain subbing in. The side missions feel like a lazy attempt to pad time.

            Arkham Knight’s greatest strength is its presentation. The graphics in Arkham Knight are stunning; the nearly constant rain falling and sliding down Batman’s costume – most notably his mask and cape – coupled with the illumination provided by things like bright neon signs make for some great visual touches. However, there are points where particles other than rain are falling and some of them have the jarring tendency to move right through characters. The game’s presentation values don’t stop there though. The way the game plays with how it stages and presents moments in the story by doing things like changing the environment as you pan your camera is great. It also works wonders for all of Batman’s hallucinating in the game. The open world nature of Arkham Knight can break the flow of the narrative as you go off and do less pressing tasks when story wise you should be continuing with the main quest. It’s not as bad as it was in Arkham City though, and things like billboards changing randomly as you go around the city as well as other hallucinations keep the main narrative present in your mind.

In fact the way they present the story visually is so masterful that it manages to largely hide how ridiculously flawed the story of the game is and how poorly some of the major characters where represented. To prevent spoiling anything I won’t go into too much detail, but the story of the Arkham Knight for instance was really predictable. They never presented any red herrings or misdirects for who the Arkham Knight might be, despite it being a big mystery to the world’s greatest detective for almost the entire game. There is also another massive story thread that for me was the highlight of the game, but is founded on a complete misunderstanding of an integral character. I found myself having to try and over look how stupid the set up was and the fact that there was a much better way to do it, simply because they did get to some cool stuff with it – all of which still could have been done if they had set it up properly. The story was somewhat uneven in terms of delivering emotionally, but the performances were a huge step up from the phoned in disaster that was Arkham City. Arkham Knight’s story did seem like it was delivering a good sense of closure for the series; right up until it spoiled that by saying I can’t unlock the ending until I do more side missions and then that I can’t unlock the “true ending” until I do all side missions, including finding all the Riddler trophies. I watched the “true ending” online and wasn’t at all impressed.

            Arkham Knight had the potential to be the best Batman game yet and ended up being the worst major entry in the Arkham series. This occurred because the game fell short in everyway outside of its presentation. The story has some great moments – due far more to the way the game presents the scenes than to the story itself –, but overall was horribly mishandled. The boss fights are lacking in quantity and quality, the side missions are hugely repetitive, there are too few AR challenges, fighting as a team is an under utilized feature and lastly, you are left wanting more time as Batman – as well as other heroes – since you spend so much of the game as the Batmobile. Arkham Knight is still a good game, but perhaps if Rocksteady hadn’t focused so much on making their next generation vision of Gotham look so amazing they could have filled that gorgeous city with fun things to do. Also maybe they could have kept their lead writer from Asylum & City or hired the lead from Origins so the story made sense. At the end of the day it’s what’s under the mask that matters most, even on new hardware.

Score: 3/5