The villains’ plans are as ludicrously far-fetched as ever, but there are some surprisingly human, poignant moments in there-particularly between Batman and Barbara Gordon-that just about make up for the otherwise hoary, predictable comic book story. But I did like seeing weakness in Batman, and rare cracks in his armour.
In terms of pacing and writing quality, this is probably the least successful entry in the series so far. I still don’t know why they named the entire game after such a weak pantomime villain. And when you finally get the chance to fight him, about ten hours into the story, it’s a stealth tank battle. He spends the whole game barking into your radio about how Gotham is his city now, and how you’ll never stop him, as you effortlessly destroy every single wave of useless, dopey drones he throws at you. He’s horribly miscast, sounding less like an intimidating, mysterious nemesis, and more like a dumb surfer. It’s a shame the Arkham Knight is such a comically bad villain.
It’s in the story where best moments and set-pieces are found. But there’s also a lot of pretty generic filler, including destroying watchtowers and clearing each of the city’s three islands of the Arkham Knight’s forces.
There are some superb self-contained stories like hunting down a sadistic serial killer and stopping Two-Face from cleaning out Gotham’s banks. The moment-to-moment play is tight and well-designed, which only highlights just how poor the Batmobile stuff is.īeing an open-world game, there’s a lot to do outside of the main story-which, as you might expect, varies wildly in quality. And when stealth isn’t an option, the big-scale fist-fights are great fun too, thanks to the series’ trademark counter-based, rhythmic combat. It’s here that Rocksteady’s systemic design really shines, and Batman’s graceful, precise movement makes swinging and skulking around its complex, detailed environments a pleasure. Playing with these and the environment, discovering interesting ways to clear the room, is easily the best part of the game. Batman's utility belt is fat with gadgets-some new, some old-to experiment with. Hacking remote-control drones to turn on their allies and replicating the Knight’s voice to order his men around are just a few of the new ways to creatively clear a room of bad guys.
Hanging in the rafters and picking off enemies as they quake in fear is as brilliantly satisfying as it’s always been-and now there are even more ways to mess with them.
The predator sections, which have always been the highlight of the series for me, are more fun than ever. Stupid car aside, this is a very decent Arkham game. I’ve never felt less like Batman, and groaned whenever the Arkham Knight sent yet another wave of his dumb drones in for me to halfheartedly destroy. And when you start having to use stealth to take out certain heavily-armoured drones-sneaking up behind them and firing at an exposed weak spot-you wonder what was going through the developers’ heads when they designed this stuff. But there are so many of them that fatigue quickly sets in. For more information about the game's performance issues, see our port report.
There are significant exceptions, however, especially if you're running Windows 10. For many machines the updated port runs much better than it did four months ago.