This epic journey had to end at some point. For the last month or so I spent my time catching up on the Batman: Arkham series, which are considered by many to be some of the best superhero games ever made. Arkham Asylum helped set up the basics and its two sequels took that formula and put it on a grander scale. These games got bigger, more ambitious, and pushed the tech they ran on to their limits. Rocksteady Studios, the developers on the Arkham series, could have lost focus as they made more ginormous worlds. However, instead they delivered consistently top of the line quality and games that felt more different than the last. The Arkham series depending on who you are may just be one of the top video game franchises of all time. Top of the line tone and atmosphere, incredible encounters, good sense of progression, a memorable story, and one of the most faithful adaptations of the Dark Knight. The Batman: Arkham series as a whole is pretty darn incredible and I’m so glad I took the time to finally play these games. Yet, there’s a reason why I said Arkham is one of the best video game franchises “depending on who you are.” Which brings us to the third and final entry to the Arkham series. I know Arkham Origins also exists, but that one wasn’t made by Rocksteady and was a prequel spin-off. Batman: Arkham Knight, the divisive conclusion. You either love it or you hate it, and we’ll explain why people hate it.
There was a lot of hype surrounding Arkham Knight. Ever since it was first revealed, Rocksteady made it clear that this would be the end of Batman. This would conclude all the work they have done since 2009 and wrap their universe up in a neatly tied bow. This would be the final entry to the Arkham storyline and it’s either their fans take it or leave it. They originally planned for the game to be released in 2014 as that year it was the 75th anniversary of Batman. One of the most legendary comic book superheroes was turning 75 years old and what better way to pay respect to him by releasing the end to a series of games you based off him. Unfortunately they delayed the game to 2015 due to how ambitious the project was.The next generation consoles for the time, Playstation 4 and Xbox One, were on the rise and Rocksteady made a promise to go and demonstrate what they could do with the new tech. Create actual next gen experiences rather than more of what came before. Man, did they deliver as when gameplay for Arkham Knight was revealed it looked way more advanced than some of its contemporaries. Despite coming out in 2015, Batman: Arkham Knight looks far ahead of its time and feels like a product that would have been made today rather than eight years ago. The story was adding up to be a big bang as Batman would face all the villains he ever knew up to that point. You weren’t restricted to the confines of an asylum or facility, but rather the streets of Gotham. You had a whole city to run around in and that was probably the most promising part about Arkham Knight. The batmobile would be a major element and tool players would utilize throughout, and everyone wanted to get their hands on one of Batman’s iconic utilities. Everything was adding up.
Then launch day happens. Batman: Arkham Knight was one of the fastest selling games of 2015 alongside The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Fallout 4. It’s Batman, everyone knows who Batman is, and of course it was the “epic conclusion.” For Playstation 4 and Xbox One, Arkham Knight ran incredibly well. Rocksteady managed to take another technical leap forward and show what the new hardware could do. That wasn’t the case with the PC version though, as it was packed with numerous bugs and the technical stability was as good as a hamster with asthma running on a treadmill set at the speed of fifty miles per hour. The PC launch of Arkham Knight was a disaster, but at least the console versions were up and running. Sadly, not everyone who was hyped with Arkham Knight was pleased with what they finally played. The Batmobile, one of the corporal parts of the game, turned out to be more annoying than everyone thought. It felt extremely out of place even for a Batman game, and everyone could agree that at some point it stopped being fun. The story had a strong premise and got more engaging with time, but certain plot points got messy and this disappointed those who were incredibly wrapped in the narratives from before. There was more content than ever, but this overwhelmed some players and what made it worse was that to actually end the game you have to do practically everything. About five percent of those who played Arkham Knight on PS4 got the true ending, and that really shows how many people lost motivation. These are the key reasons why Arkham Knight is so divisive, and I don’t blame them. The Batmobile is not fun, certain reveals don’t work, and it sucks the true ending requires so much busy work. However, going back it's not that bad.
In fact, in my opinion Arkham Knight is a lot better than what a majority of players remember it being and it might be my favorite one in this series. It’s not perfect, but looking back at it now after all the patches and extra Rocksteady did to make the game better it feels more like that epic conclusion they wanted back in 2015. Arkham Knight is amazingly underestimated and I today want to show you my defense of this game. Today we'll be talking about Batman: Arkham Knight and why it deserves your attention.
Story
Nine months have passed since the events of Arkham City. To quickly sum it up, Batman snuck into Arkham City to figure out what was going on. He faced a lot of familiar faces, but one thing he found was the Joker dying from the side effects of Titan. Joker’s blood became intoxicated, but as one final trick he injects Batman with his blood. He threatened him saying if he isn’t able to manufacture a cure by the end of the night Batman would die. Thankfully, Batman does find a cure but an epic throwdown happens between him and the clown. Batman injects himself before the last minute strikes and smashes the vile before an enraged Joker can grab it. The Joker soon breathes his last breath and Batman walks out of Arkham City. Ashamed he did the one thing he promised to never do, kill someone. The rest of Gotham is relieved though, as the number one criminal and killer in the city is dead and they’ll never have to face the terror of him ever again. That is until Halloween night, when another familiar face shows up to inflict fear in the people. A nightmare for the eyes and mind.
That night at a fancy dinner, everyone inside it went crazy. Killing each other, and the survivors who are still crazy claim everything around them was a burning hellscape full of monsters. The populace doesn’t understand what fully went down, but midway through a news broadcast it is then revealed what happened. Scarecrow, a sinister figure of fear, unveiled his new toxin in the diner that night. He states the rest of Gotham will taste his new formula of Fear Gas soon, and everyone will know what it feels like to face their worst nightmares. All the citizens of Gotham are ordered to evacuate, and the only ones that are left behind are criminals who want to cause havoc in the now empty streets of Gotham. The GCPD are struggling to face off against all the thugs and major criminals who now rule the streets, and they are unaware of when Scarecrow will unleash Fear Gas across Gotham. This puts everything into the hands of the Dark Knight. Batman makes his way to the Gotham Police Department to discuss what to do next. The police commissioner James Gordon plans to locate where Scarecrow is hiding and where he is possibly concocting more fear Gas. This then leads the two of them to the Ace Chemical Plant where the stitched together mischief has taken control alongside a highly trained militia he hired to take care of Batman. This private militia is equipped with high tech weaponry and they are led by a masked figure named the Arkham Knight. Batman is unable to identify who the Arkham Knight is, but the Arkham Knight claims he will suffer for everything he failed to do and protect.
Batman tries to deactivate an explosive within the plant as Fear Gas is slowly released, but just before he can do so he is then startled by a ghost of the past. The Joker, or what is a hallucination of him, has come to haunt Batman for killing him months before. Batman escapes Ace Chemical after a small explosion, but Scarecrow has more Fear Gas brewing somewhere else. Things get much worse when one of Batman’s close friends, Oracle, who is secretly Jim Gordon’s daughter, gets kidnapped by the Arkham Knight and Jim Gordon is told by Batman. Jim is furious that he let Batman recruit his daughter and get kidnapped, and he stops working with Batman so he can find his daughter. Tim Drake, otherwise the new Robin, tries to help Batman on his journey but Batman doesn’t want to reveal what happened to Oracle as Tim really loves her. Batman must deal with the militia, the Joker inside his head, find out who the Arkham Knight is, take him down, and stop Scarecrow before he can unleash Fear Gas across Gotham. All the while crime lords like Two-Face, The Penguin, and many more are running around as well. It’s gonna be a long night, and slowly Batman will be undone.
Gameplay
If you have played any of the two previous Arkham games then you’ll feel right at home here in Arkham Knight, but one of the big significant changes is that it’s open world. Arkham City went for a small easy to navigate sandbox, but Arkham Knight went full on open world. Like this is at least three times the size of Arkham City and there’s a lot more verticality and hidden secrets this time around. You explore each, get to where you need to be, and fight waves of enemies along the way. The combat is what you come to expect from the Arkham series. Free flow combat that gives you a variety of combos and takedowns to use. Keep the pressure up on baddies and you can build a combo meter, and when it’s charged you can perform an instant takedown. You also have a ground takedown, but that’s more risky and leaves you open for attack. Sometimes you’ll be offered the chance to stealth takedown enemies. Hide above or below them, and then sneak attack when they aren’t looking. One new mechanic this time around is the Fear Takedown, and I absolutely love this addition to Arkham Knight. If a bunch of enemies are bundled up you can then perform a Fear Takedown. You take down one enemy, the closest one next to them, and then the next closest one until the Fear Takedown is out of energy. It’s quick and extremely useful when you use it at the right time, but the downside is that it’s loud and alerts other enemies in the vicinity. You either use it for when there’s only a few enemies remaining, or you are confident that you can get back into hiding before enemies home in on your position. It’s an improvement over the group takedown in Arkham City where you can only take down two at once only if they are standing next to each other, which usually is situational.
Enemies come in a variety of flavors such as basic goons, men armed with bats, men with guns, big old brutes, shielded enemies, bladed enemies, enemies wielding electric batons, and some new ones like fully electrified foes and the medic. You have brutes wielding blades and shields now. The medic is the best new addition to the enemy line-up as he can resurrect fallen foes and at times apply an electric force field to allies. If you try punching an electrified foe you’ll take a bit of damage, and this forces you to use a gadget that fires an electric ball and both stuns and removes the forcefield. In fact, you’ll be using a lot of special moves and takedowns for certain baddies in this game more so than the previous games. Use a batarang against a foe charging at you to instantly knock them out. Grab a dropped weapon and start pummeling other enemies with it. Break armed men’s rifles or pounce on a bloke standing there with a shield. It’s the same combat from before, but I feel it’s a little more refined in Arkham Knight. Since the game went full on open world it means you have a lot more space to work with, and there are less times when the game forces you into a corner or the camera starts spinning around like crazy.
There’s a lot more side activities in Arkham Knight as well as secrets to be uncovered. However, the extra content in Arkham Knight is rather really fun and offers fun tales outside the main plot. Not all of the side content will be available from the start and you’ll have to grind through the main plot to get more, but at least they didn’t make it all available at once and overwhelm the player. I always felt like they introduced new activities at the right time, and when I felt like I had nothing else to do the game always put a point of interest nearby. You can stop Two-Face’s men from robbing banks, locate Penguin’s weapon caches, play detective and investigate these mutilated bodies scattered around Gotham. Save captured firemen or have these chase sequences with a doofess named Firefly. Help free Catwoman by participating in Riddler’s trials. Some of which are race tracks with changing mechanisms and platforms, and the others are fun focusing around interesting gimmicks. Hunt down the Manbat, disarm some bombs, and of course climb some towers like in traditional open worlds. Some missions let you play as other characters like Catwoman and Nightwing, and at times you’ll face off against some awesome bosses. All can be captured and put behind bars, which is what you’ll have to do to lower the crime rate.
You can glide around to get to where you need to go, and a minor change that actually makes a huge difference in Arkham Knight is being able to launch yourself out of a grapple. Maintaining your gliding movement and staying in the air longer. I also love this addition, because back in Arkham City you could only zip up to a rooftop, have to run off, continue gliding, and then zip back to a rooftop to repeat the process again. It wasn’t terrible, but it did provide inconveniences and got annoying after a while. Then you have the most notable difference. The big one. Now it’s time to address the elephant in the room, the Batmobile. Made to help you easily get around the streets of Gotham even though gliding was already a reliable option. You can drive and drift at full speed, but then you have these awesome chase sequences where you tail a runaway car and lock missiles onto them. Blowing them up until they are nothing but scraps. That’s fun, but then you have the tank sections. Moments where you have to transform the Batmobile into a tank and basically play a shooter. The Batmobile, much like Batman, has a limited amount of health and when it’s out it blows up along with Batman. You shoot other tanks until they are down, and if you shoot enough without taking damage you fill up a meter to unleash a barrage of homing missiles. You may think the tank sections sound cool, but trust me they get old and repetitive real quickly. I didn’t buy a Batman just so I can smash toy cars around. Besides that, it’s an Arkham game. Same old same old, but yet again what worked last time is still here and better than ever. Hopefully you can lock each villain up behind bars and survive a long night.
Thoughts
I don’t think everyone is probably going to agree with my opinions of Batman: Arkham Knight, and that’s fair. People who were distraught by the disastrous PC launch have the absolute right to be disappointed, because this game cost sixty dollars originally and was the end to a trilogy they were extremely hyped up for. People who were disappointed by the story of the game also have the right to be disappointed, because everything leading up to Arkham Knight was spectacular. I also think people were disappointed because Batman was part of their childhood or growing up. Much like me and Soulsborne, it’s justifiable to have emotional attachment to a property because it may serve as comfort during stressful periods in your life. I also failed to mention the amount of pre-order content and season pass that came with Arkham Knight. How some of the missions that came with the DLC were more interesting than the main game, and it made it look like they butchered some bits of Arkham Knight and repackaged it to make more money later. All of this retrospectively is worth getting angry at, but looking back at the game now after eight years. Now that the game is in a working state for all consoles and they stopped adding content for it. I believe looking at what Batman: Arkham Knight is itself is amazing. It made a lot of refinements for the series, and personally has one of the best stories out of this entire trilogy. Yes, I said it.
I know a lot of fans are divided on the story of Arkham Knight, but I think this is close to being a perfect Batman story. I won’t spoil too much, but I will dive into a couple key plot points so skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers. Okay, so the Joker is inside of Batman’s head and throughout the entire game he is taunting him for his failures. If Scarecrow and Gotham’s approaching doom wasn’t enough then how about the ghost of a person you killed. This man is constantly making a fool out of you, or tempting you to go beyond your limit. Bruce goes crazier and crazier as Joker pushes him to act more violently towards his enemies. Use more painful tricks and measures to get what he needs. Batman sees everyone around him become in danger. Barbara gets kidnapped, Tim is risking his life to help Bruce, and reminders of what happened to the previous Robin. Jason Todd, who suffered a terrible fate without Bruce knowing. You kinda have this thought in your head of, “What if Bruce never met these people?” What if they went on with their daily lives while meeting Bruce. Would they have been better people? Would they not be in danger if they weren't associated with a superhero and all his crazy villains. The game never brings this up, but that was a thought that bounced around in my head for a bit. Does Bruce regret bringing these people into his life? Not that they are a pain to deal with, but because he is to blame for their current lives and suffering. Things get worse, and worse, and worse until soon he snaps. He loses himself and becomes that monster he feared years ago. Those monsters that followed him into an alleyway and blew a bullet between his parents. This monster who resorted to pure violence and hatred to get what he wanted. He’s broken and lost Not actually dying, but career wise. His time has come and it’s time for him to end. For the Batman to end. To do so he must become fearless and with that accept the end of his legacy. This is truly the story of how Batman died one faithful night.
Well there’s one plot reveal that doesn’t land, but I don’t want to dive too deep into it. On the gameplay side of things it’s really good. Combat is the same as before, but I’m starting to come to terms with it. I feel like performing actions are more responsive this time and more encounters are fair. I mean the problem of making some encounters difficult by throwing a ton of enemies at you is still prevalent, but the game doesn’t feel as janky as before. Almost every ability feels great to perform and it’s much easier to keep control of a crowd and maintain your combo meter. The camera still sucks though as it constantly spins around and the game gets confused on what enemy you want to hit next. The open world is a lot bigger now, but they made use of everything on hand. Not a single space of the map feels wasted, and as I mentioned I had fun doing every activity this game offered me. In fact, I ended up doing more than ninety percent of the game’s content and that’s a lot to be honest. A lot of the boss fights on the side are fun to fight and they even throw in some villains you may not know unless you are an avid Batman fan. It’s fun! I had fun doing everything even though it was a grind. It’s called “providing good content.” I will say though the Riddler mysteries and trophies suck, and that’s the number one reason a majority of players like me stopped pursuing the true ending. There are 243 Riddler related mysteries to be solved, and if they cut the requirement down to half maybe even less than one hundred then a lot of players would have kept doing them. That’s when Arkham Knight felt unfocused, but that’s a very small proportion of the game compared to everything else. Every quest besides Riddler’s pure bullsh*t is amazing and I felt encouraged to do practically all of it.
Graphically this game still looks great. It looks a lot better than I remember it being. Have 2015 titles always looked this good? That was when Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, and Metal Gear Solid 5 came out and while they still look good today thanks to good art direction and usage of color they don’t look as good as current titles. Arkham Knight looks like it came out in 2017 or 2018 to me. The lighting, detailing, textures, physics, etc. It looks gorgeous and it was nice soaking in the atmosphere of Gotham. Now I could ramble on about how terrible the Batmobile is, the terrible controls, and how out of place the tank section feels but just about everyone who has reviewed this game has talked about it already. The performances are still outstanding and there’s a lot of memorable moments. I’m really happy with Arkham Knight. It’s one of the better open world games I’ve played and it may just be one of my favorite game releases from 2015. I strongly recommend checking Batman: Arkham Knight out at some point, and if you were someone who was displeased with the original state then give it a whirl again. In the end I am going to give Batman: Arkham Knight a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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