Game #892: Batman - Arkham Knight

  A successful movie trilogy and a successful videogame trilogy? Batman was on a roll!

 Few franchises can claim to have a successful trilogy, but even fewer licensed games can claim that. With Batman: Arkham Knight now the caped crusader can lay claim to that too. Arkham City was a tough act to follow, and while Arkham Knight falls short of its potential, it's still a bonafide winner.

 The game picks up shortly after Arkham City, starting off with the Joker's corpse's incineration. I thought killing off Joker in Arkham City was brilliant, and I hoped they wouldn't go full comic book and revive him... but they managed to shoe-horn him into the game anyways. While the game's main villains are The Scarecrow and the 'new' Arkham Knight, Batman will be joined by a hallucinated Joker throughout 80% of the entire game. While it's not a terrible concept, it undermines Arkham City's powerful ending as well as the new main villains, because it's Joker who'll you'll be seeing most of the time, as he makes appearances as you traverse this bit of Gotham City. Oh, and Arkham Knight is exactly who you think it is, which isn't a spoiler by now, and I'm personally mad about it, because even though anyone with a passing knowledge of Batman guessed who he was, Rocksteady promised that it wasn't him. It was. And I believed them.

 Those gripes with the plot aside, I'll commend it for being quite dark. This story features a tired, worn and furious Batman, who's fighting both his enemies as well as himself. Barbara and Tim Drake play bigger parts in this plot, which I liked, but as a HUGE Nightwing fan I can't say I approve of making Barbara and Tim a thing. Speaking of Nightwing, he gets a voiced role too, albeit only on Sidemissions. Both him and Catwoman share the dishonor of being relegated to side content, and being damsels in distress for Batman to rescue, which, y'know, not cool.

 One of my few issues with Arkham City was how most side content wasn't marked on the map... and that's a thing here too, which is quite annoying. I somehow managed to finish everything without a guide, but sometimes it just feels as if you are stumbling onto stuff, which isn't my idea of fun. I still can't believe I noticed Azrael was on top of a statue on an island, which I just happened to fly by just that one time because I don't know. I don't think this is good game design, and the fact that they haven't changed it yet is quite disappointing. The side content itself is very disappointing, as most of it is made up of repetitive sequences. The Penguin/Nightwing side mission has you tagging a van, knocking on the door which triggers the exact same animation of the thugs opening the door to Batman and getting scared every single time, having to evade them then chasing them to a battle arena. The Firefly sidemission is made up of finding a burning building and then chasing FireFly on the Batmobile 3 times. Or rescue 16 firefighters from mobs of enemies. Or clear about 10 enemy checkpoints. Or defuse about 12 bombs by fighting waves of enemies. It's quite dull to be honest. The base game has no bonus content, and while there are about 63 challenges, you can only use Batman. Catwoman, Robin, Azrael and Nightwing can only be played very briefly on very short segments. 

 The Riddler's challenges return, and there are 243 of them, which is fine, would be a decent extra like in previous games.... except that the ending of the game is locked behind this collectathon. Not even a bonus 'True Ending', but the game's only ending is locked behind this busywork. What were they thinking? What a baffling, dumb decision.

 Arkham's gameplay was polished to a sheen with Arkham City, so for this installment it was mostly about tweaking things. Batman retains his move repertoire from the previous game from the get go, but early in the game Batman gets a new suit, and with it, new variations on the things he can do. Now you can counter with a throw, perform a three-enemy take down(Which can be upgraded up to five enemies), that allows you to target different enemies as you take them down, and the Triple Boost Grapple, which lets you soar through the skies faster than ever before. There are a few new tools too, and a few new enemies to contend with, like charging enemies that must be taken down with a batarang, to make things harder. I can't really fault them for this approach, the previous game was excellent, so they went with a rather safe choice of adding small variations on top of what worked.

 And then there's the Batmobile. Your mileage may vary on this one. I thought it was alright. My biggest issue were the controls, they were a bit hard to grasp. I kept entering Battle Mode when I meant to drift. That aside, I eventually learned to like the Battle sequences against drones, they aren't particularly exciting or creative, but they were somewhat fun. On the other hand, races were a mess because you're expected to go fast, but the Batmobile just doesn't turn or drift very well. To add to the hilarity, there's a checkpoint before a Drill boss battle that behaved very randomly. Sometimes it spawned me behind the drill, which forced me to kill myself by driving onto the drills, other times it'd respawn me with the drill on top, instantly killing me and reloading, and other times it respawned me correctly. 

 The good news is that at a core level, Batman: Arkham Knight is very fun. Combat is fun, albeit a bit less precise than before, stealthily taking down enemies is still satisfying, and moving around the city is fun. That said, it's a shame most of the side content is so repetitive, that they were afraid of letting go of the Joker which crippled what they could've done with the new villains, and hiding the ending behind busywork was just dumb. In some ways, it's the weakest Arkham game Rocksteady made, but it's still a really good game, and a decent send off to one of the best licensed videogame series ever made.

 7.5