I completed the campaign and most of the side objectives and it was alright and hits that level of quality Rockstar games are known for both in the writing and polish of the gameplay, but not beyond that. Most crime open worlds have you start as a low member and work your way up the ladder of respect and power before you can take down your enemies, but this starts with established criminals who are already doing pretty well for themselves, and it never gets to a satisfying conclusion. The game's own ending basically admits that.

Rockstar wants to have its cake and eat it too with an engaging, detailed story rivaling TV, movies, and books in terms of quality, but still allow for the creative destruction of the open world, and has not found a happy medium. The other games I've played by them is GTA IV and both Red Dead Redemptions, and just like in those games it was fun enough to follow the story and the rigid instructions and shooting galleries, but so much time is taken up by commutes and cutscenes that I slowly lose interest.

The actual gameplay of driving, shooting, and cops and robbers works fine enough, but there's hardly any real challenge or danger that the game has that can't be easily avoided. And then there's a million small minigames that are used contextually and then never again. I love me some container crane operating.

I don't play a lot of games on my PC, and the problems I had with this show why with it slowing down a lot and some difficulty with adjusting to using a mouse for looking around. That's not the games fault, but did leave an imprint.

I've played a lot of story games in the mold of visual novels and this is my first proper walking simulator, which was fine gameplay-wise or lack thereof. The story was nice and Henry and Delilah worked well with each other, but something felt missing there and when the game got into being a thriller, it felt destined for anticlimax which it was. I'm not sure what it is compared to other story games, even ones with a realistic, mundane tone, but this didn't pull me in like those.

It's worth noting that I got this at Christmas in 2021, started it, then I'm pretty sure I had a glitch during a chase where the enemy car wouldn't slow down, and the rain effect was intense enough that it was hard to even drive. So I put it down for two years and then picked it back up right before this past Christmas, and got back into it. I had the occasional crash on my Xbox Series X, which is disappointing but it was never too bad.

As to the actual game, I think this is better than Arkham City. Origins doesn't really count, and Asylum I think is the better design, but for this kind of the game in the open-world, this handles things better. I like how the villains and story or woven-together as specific kinds of missions that lead into combat or predator style, and that there are a lot of pairs between the villains and Batman's allies. It feels very cohesive and that everyone has their own thing going on. And then it ending with the major villains locked up together in the same cell in GCPD also feels like an nice accomplishment.

Arkham Knights tanks and outposts and the armored Batmobile are the major gameplay additions and I think they actually work pretty well in adding to the main gameplay in content and variety. It's at the right level of easy to learn, difficult to master with the tougher challenges the game throws at you. Tacked-on? Sure, but they put the effort it to make it all work, and I wanted to 100% it more than the other games.

The plot is ok, but suffers like most open world games, where you have a large world and can't make a significant change to it for the sake of the story. Scarecrow in particular feels very cut-down and ineffectual here.