This review contains spoilers

Arkham Knight isn't a terrible game in isolation, but in relation to its predecessors it's awfully disappointing (this seems to be a bit of a pattern with Batman trilogies, now that I think of it).

In retrospect, the bizarre marketing push before release that the Arkham Knight was a new character should have been a warning sign that the series had lost its way. When trailers hit, lots of people immediately guessed that this was going to be an Arkhamverse take on Jason Todd's Red Hood, and Rocksteady then proceeded to spend a ton of energy publicly insisting it was a brand new character. Which of course it wasn't. Which would have been fine! Neither of the earlier Rocksteady Arkham games had introduced major new characters: they earned their excellent reputations on interpretations of existing Batman lore, why should this one be any different? So why spend so much energy insisting you're doing something new when everybody is pretty sure you're lying and will know you're lying after they play the game? All it accomplished, in the end, was showing how unsure of themselves Rocksteady were. I don't know if there had been critical team changes or internal upheaval, but the confidence that imbued Asylum & City was gone, and it was clear Rocksteady didn't really believe in their own product anymore.

Mechanically, the game is solid, which is unsurprising given its lineage. Combat is still satisfying, and some of the iterations add welcome complications and variety (e.g. medics, being able to grab melee weapons). It's everything else that is a let down.

The story has a good basic structure & plot beats, but Paul Dini is badly missed here: the new writers don't have the same sense of rhythm, dialogue, and character nuance that Dini did and much of the storytelling here is just ham-fisted. You can see what the writers were aiming for, but they flubbed the execution and didn't earn the pay-off. On the plus side, keeping Joker around could have easily come off as awkward fan-service but was generally well done. The performances are also more mixed than previous entries: Conroy & Hamill are great, as always, but you can kind of tell they find the material as sub-par as I do. I'm also not crazy about either main antagonist. John Noble is basically doing a Vincent Price imitation for Scarecrow, and it doesn't work for me. It's not creepy, unnerving, or insane. It's too controlled, too cultured. And the Arkham Knight himself is gratingly one-note: whiny and petulant more than threatening.

Many of the more negative game-design trends that have come to dominate so many AAA games were also really starting to leak in here. The side missions in previous Arkham games were generally great, well-written little mini Batman stories (excepting the annoying Riddler trophy hunts), and if they weren't your thing you were perfectly welcome to ignore them. The side missions in Arkham Knight, by contrast, includes a lot of anonymous-feeling copy-paste open world content (the milita APCs, checkpoints, etc.). Chasing pay phones to hunt down Victor Zsasz in Arkham City may not have been the most compelling gameplay but at least there was a mildly interesting Zsasz story to carry you along. Here, hunting down APCs & explosive devices and what-not is not only mechanically boring, there's no story reward for putting in the effort. Even Penguin & Two-Face, who were so well used previously, feel under-utilized in their own side missions.

To be fair, it's not all bad. The Man-Bat & "Perfect Crime" missions are well done story-drips, and it's nice to get resolution to the Hush story after Arkham City. But the ratio of good to annoying seems completely reversed from previous games.

Worse, you are required to complete a certain amount of the missions to get the game's ending, and 100% of it to get the full ending, including the absurdly excessive Riddler tasks. Arkham Asylum & City felt constructed to serve the player: if you find the missions fun in their own right, great. Not a fan, that's fine too, you don't have to play them. But Arkham Knight wants the player to serve its own needs. It's so un-confident in its own playability that it insists you do a certain amount of these generic tasks to see the ending.

Speaking of the ending: WTF? I get that Rocksteady was probably caught between a rock and a hard place here, a bit. On the one hand, it's their trilogy and they want to end it definitively on a bang. On the other hand, it's WB's franchise and I'm sure they didn't want to close themselves off from possible sequels. But the result is just a vague mess without any real closure. And the extra ending you get for slogging through all the side missions doesn't help matters.

Then, of course, there's the Batmobile. Unlike some other critics of the game, I don't completely hate the Batmobile here. It's kind of fun, it's just way over used. If it was primarily another mode of transport around the map, it'd be a fun addition to the Arkham series, but it's just forced on you way too much and really takes you out of the feeling of "being Batman". Asylum & City really did immerse you in the feeling of "being Batman": detecting, fighting, brooding. I have never felt less like Batman in an Arkham game than when fighting off hordes of drones in a tank. The Batmobile is a cool part of Batman's world, but there's a reason none of the Batman movies have spent a quarter of their screen time with Batman in his car.

Arkham Asylum & City were both excellent Batman stories that happened to also be very good action-adventure games. Arkham Knight is a pretty run-of-the-mill open world game that happens to be a so-so Batman story.

P.S. Some of the design elements in this one are also weird, right? Does Batman look a little... bug-eyed to anyone else?

Reviewed on Jan 21, 2023


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