Batman: Arkham Knight - Review
A decade after Batman: Arkham Asylum came out for the PS3 and XBOX 360, I finally played the last game in the Batman Arkham trilogy series. I had a blast with Arkham Asylum, to the point that it was the first game I went through the trouble of getting 100% of the trophies. I also had a great time with the sequel, Arkham City, which was a noteworthy expansion upon the original game’s mechanics and storyline. I skipped Arkham Origins, which apparently had little to do with the other games, and instead held out for Arkham Knight. However, I still ended up waiting a few years after it was released to play it, due to the blowback that the game got for its performance issues on PC. So, now that I recently upgraded my system to handle whatever nonsense the game was known for, I finally gave it a shot and saw the Arkham series to its conclusion.
The Short of It
What I’ve Played
Story to its conclusion
100% Side-missions completed
No DLC content
60% of AR Missions
Pros
The more thoughtful puzzles and minigames still manage to evoke the sense of “eureka” when playing detective
Voice acting is still well done, with Mark Hamill’s Joker being the highlight
Story is willing to go to some dark places
New gadgets and abilities added on to Batman’s already extensive kit are interesting and fun to use
Batmobile is fun to drive and use to solve puzzles
Subtle and not-so-subtle use of Joker and the creeping madness is well done
Stealth segments are still a highlight
Cons
Combat is the only portion of the gameplay that hasn’t seen much of an improvement and is a bit stale; combat with Batmobile gets old quickly
Use of villains, other than Scarecrow, feels a bit empty in comparison to previous games
Still some performance hiccups
Number of collectibles is still ridiculous
The Rest of It
Story
At the end of Arkham City, the Joker finally passed away from the toxin that had been injected into him in Arkham Asylum. Batman had been able to seemingly kill off the disease in himself after Joker had injected him with some of his blood, but was unable to provide the cure to his nemesis. However, It wasn’t just the toxin that Batman had to worry about. Apparently, this toxin mixed with Joker’s blood created something of a new “Joker disease” that slowly changes people into the Joker who have any of his blood in their system. Obviously, this is a concern for the Dark Knight, as visions of the Joker begin to pop up and taunt him at every turn.
Sound ridiculous? It is, but it’s a comic book superhero story, so why not? While Batman is trying to develop a cure for himself before he loses his mind and succumbs to the disease, Gotham City is taken over and held hostage by Scarecrow with the threat of a new fear toxin he’s developed. The city is evacuated and now only the criminals remain, similar to how Arkham City functioned. In addition to Scarecrow’s threats and all the henchmen of the usual suspects—like Penguin, Two-face, and Riddler—a new militia force shows up in the city as well under the banner of the Arkham Knight. It’s a mystery to Batman who he is, but anyone who knows some of Batman’s stories, has played the Injustice games, or has watched the animated Batman movies will be able to figure it out pretty quickly.
With the city overrun with criminals, militia forces, and fear toxin threats, it’s up to Batman to clean up the streets, stop the impending doom of Gotham, and try to fix his own health issues in a single night. It’s essentially Arkham City all over again with a bigger map. That’s not exactly complaint. I enjoyed Arkham City, and while I agree with most fans that the story of Arkham Asylum was probably the most tightly woven experience due to the setting and writing, I like the dark places Arkham Knight goes.
Scarecrow was always a favorite of mine because of how dark and creepy things could get with him as a villain, and the developers seemed to agree. Characters die in this game. Some of which you may have no attachment to, and some characters that have been somewhat important in the previous games. Not only do they die, but it’s usually a violent end that is only hidden by a brief cutaway from the camera to ensure the game keeps its Teen rating. With the dark tone, the dark visions that Batman sees, and even the representation of Scarecrow being rather gruesome, this is definitely the darkest the series has gotten.
That being said, I can’t say I felt very engaged by the stories that weren’t about Scarecrow/Joker. This was the first of the Arkham games where the main storyline was actually the most interesting and the side stories felt somewhat dull. I was rarely compelled to see the side missions to their conclusion outside of my usual obsessive-compulsive desire to complete a game. In the previous games, there was a bit more mystery to the stories, or just more detail to the villains involved. Even the serial killer mystery side-mission was a bit flat, doing little more than just rinsing and repeating the same steps over and over until a final confrontation. I think everything about how the main story played out was great and well-crafted, but the utilization of the other villains and the way the other side-missions came together was something of a tedious letdown.
Speaking of tedious, why did they feel they needed to make you collect 243 Riddler trophies before you could resolve his storyline? Who felt it was necessary to pad out the experience that much and make you do so much extra crap??? Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Gameplay
If you’ve played the other Arkham games, then you’ll be quite familiar with how Arkham Knight works. As the Dark Knight, your type of activities vary from hand-to-hand combat with groups of enemies, to gliding around the rooftops of buildings with your grappling hooks and cape, to stealthily navigating enclosed environments and taking out armed guards like a ninja. Unlike how some sequels might take away a lot of the upgrades and enhancements you had earned in previous games, a majority of the gadgets and abilities from the last two adventures are still in Batman’s kit, and can be upgraded even further. In addition to these familiar gameplay methods, the Batmobile has been added to the list to provide another format of fun and excitement.
First off, the hand-to-hand combat. When Arkham Asylum first came out, the combat was a revelation. It was a simple format that allowed less-advanced players to button mash through most of it if they wanted, while still providing special moves and mobility tools to give players variety if they chose to fully engage with it. At the time, it was an amazing feat in game design to have developed a fun way to allow players to take on multiple enemies at once without feeling stiff and stilted like something from Assassin’s Creed. It was so amazing, it’s been copied again and again in other superhero and character-action games. As the Arkham games have gone on, they’ve gotten a bit more complicated by adding different enemy types and situations that require more finesse to the methods in which you eliminate your foes. This certainly provides a challenge, but with Arkham Knight, I don’t feel enough is introduced into the mix to make it feel very new or fresh. There’s one or two new enemy situations to deal with, and they’re not very fun to dispatch anyway. If you were already getting tired of the combat, Arkham Knight does not do much to change the momentum of the experience.
As a fan of stealth games, I was always more engaged with the stealth mechanics in the Arkham games. Moving around from vantage point to vantage point, scanning the situation, planning your attack, and executing the plan as you knockout armed guards, one by one, always felt great. And unlike most stealth games, the Arkham games gave you tools to quickly get out of sticky situations and back into the stealth mode if you screwed up somewhere. I’m probably a little biased in this department, but I still think the stealth parts in this are great. Not too many new gadgets or takedown methods are added, which is a little disappointing, but the planning and execution side of it still feels great. The biggest new feature they’ve added to this mechanic is the fear-takedown. You can also do this move in combat when the combat sequence hasn’t started, but it’s most useful in the stealth sections. When you’ve silently knocked out a guard, your Fear gauge is filled and you can use this to quickly target and knockout multiple guards without risk of being injured. It’s a satisfying method of taking out 3 or more at a time by jumping from one to another as they panic and shoot their guns everywhere in futile despair.
In between the fights and the stealth sequences, a majority of your time will be spent exploring Gotham City, either soaring through the air or driving in the Batmobile. There’s always been a bit of an open-world aspect to the Arkham games, but Arkham City was the first to let you just go from one of the map to the other by gliding about and site-seeing. Arkham Knight does the same with a much larger map, for better or worse. Now, instead of a single district within a city, you have multiple islands that match in size and scope to the previous game’s map. It makes it feel more like an actual city to have it be so big with the various landmarks, districts, and buildings to explore. However, it doesn’t really add much in terms of the gameplay design. If anything it’s probably part of the reason why so many of the side-missions feel so monotonous. The bigger the map, the more you have to fill it with stuff to do. If you can’t think of enough unique things with which to fill the giant map, you either have to repeat a lot of the tasks or risk having empty sections. Arkham Knight goes with the former.
This, I think, is why so many people who have played these games seemed to enjoy Arkham Asylum the best. Even though the combat and stealth mechanics have been, arguably, improved in the sequels and have become more engaging and complex, the overall experience of each game has not necessarily gotten better. Game design often calls for sequels to be bigger and better than before, rightfully so. However, going too ‘big’ has the risk of becoming a bloated and shallow experience. I enjoyed Arkham City because I felt that the game explored more of Batman’s villains in detail and added enough variety to keep it interesting. Arkham Knight is still enjoyable as well, but it’s clear that the map was too big for this game with the amount of repetitive tasks that take place from start to finish. It’s got lots of side-tasks like militia checkpoints to clear, watch towers to disable, bombs to destroy, Riddler trophies to find, etc. These side tasks slightly vary in difficulty from one to the other, but the overall gameplay experience is never different enough to justify how many times you have to repeat the process. I’m a completionist when I have the time to be one, so I went through the trouble of finishing all these quests, but I was definitely grumbling by the end, which is not what you want.
When it came down to the Arkham Knight gameplay experience, I was more engaged when there was a story behind the mission itself, or if it was a stealth segment. All of the tedious tasks of hunting down checkpoints and fighting off groups of guys became a grind before I was halfway through the game. Riddler trophies, which were once interesting things to look for—either physically, or through creative puzzle mechanics—became a chore in Arkham City and only became more of a tedious obligation in this game with the needlessly high amount of trophies there were to find. The process of finding all of them in the massive map was not fun. The only ones I found fun were when there was a puzzle involved. In Arkham Asylum, the ones that had actual riddles attached were creative methods of making you admire the surroundings while trying to use your brain to solve the puzzle. In Arkham Knight, I just looked for things that seemed slightly out of place from the rest of the environment and was able to solve it 80% of the time with just that method, making it far less interesting or engaging than before.
Essentially, Arkham Knight’s gameplay feels stale. If you haven’t played the other Arkham games, you might not have the same sort of experience, but even then, you might still feel the tedium a bit by the end. The Batmobile, while a fun car that lets you fly around the streets and smash through parked cars, concrete walls, structural columns, and random looting criminals without consequence, is not enough of a new mechanic to add much flavor to the experience. The combat sequences in the car get old pretty quick, even with all the upgrades you get for it. There were plenty of scenarios in the main storyline that required you use tank mode and zip around blowing up the various unmanned drone tanks and helicopters. These sequences all felt like they went on a bit too long. Then you had to do it all again and again if you wanted to complete 100% of the side missions. Ultimately, I preferred just driving the thing instead of fighting with it. But don’t forget: you can glide through the city pretty well already. So, the Batmobile doesn’t completely justify its existence as a method of transportation either. The main thing I appreciated with it was how it added another layer to the Riddler puzzles, and the races that you did for the Riddler with it were rather unique, but those were few and far between in comparison to the boring combat sequences.
Presentation
The Arkham games have always looked pretty good for their respected platforms at the time of their initial release. Arkham Knight was a big title to come out for the PS4 and XboxOne, making the jump to new platforms. At the time, the graphics were a showstopper. Ironically enough, the show would stutter and stop a lot on the PC release, which was quite the controversy at the time. What’s worse was that after the game was pulled from digital stores to “fix it,” apparently not much fixing was done because it simply couldn’t be done. The performance on PC was reportedly terrible and the reputation was enough for me not to bother playing it until I either got it on a console or I upgraded my PC to deal with the possible issues. I’m not much of a stickler for frame rates, but I still noticed hitches in performance despite having a graphics card and CPU that was more than capable of handling it. It wasn’t enough to ruin my experience, but keep that in mind if you’re still planning on playing it for yourself.
Outside of the performance controversy and legacy, Arkham Knight looks pretty good. You can tell from small, subtle details how this was a game released at the start of the PS4/XOne generation with how some details are extremely well-done, while others still have a look to them that hearkens back to to previous generation of animations. For example, the textures are all high quality, there’s great interaction with small objects in the air and rain, and individual details on a character’s face are extremely polished, but the way people move in conversations is stiffly awkward and unnatural, and the eyes of the characters lack enough detail and subtle movement to make them seem alive. All that aside, the movement of Batman in combat is great, the way columns collapse and crap explodes when you run through it with the Batmobile is fantastic and satisfying to look at, and the world is immensely detailed.
Arkham Knight concept art
Gotham City is a vibrant and colorful backdrop to a game that is noticeably grim in tone. The Art-Deco style the city is known for is very prominent throughout and adds a great deal of personality to the setting. While there are certainly some textures and qualities you can see repeated from block to block, there are also numerous stores and buildings that have their own unique details and purposes. It makes the city feel “lived in” and fun to explore, if not solely for the purpose of searching for comic references.
The sound is pretty stellar as well. The noises of the Batmobile are satisfying to listen to, in addition to the various other sound effects. Music is pretty typical of the Arkham series with notes of the Danny Elfman score everyone knows from 1989. It’s nothing too amazing, but it doesn’t get in the way either. The voice acting is where the game really shines, with Scarecrow and Joker being the stars of the show. You hear both of these characters the most, besides Batman, and it’s always a good time. John Noble’s Scarecrow channels an Orson Welles tone and cadence that makes him sound that much more knowledgeable and sinister than previous versions of the villain. Mark Hamill reprises his role as the Joker, rather, the insane visual manifestations of the Joker inside Batman’s head. Of course, it’s amazingly great. In fact, it’s probably my favorite thing about Arkham Knight.
If there is anything that I would say this game does better than most other games I’ve played, it’s how the Joker and madness is used. As soon as the Joker starts showing up, the quality of the game goes up exponentially. Not just because Mark Hamill is great as the voice and how the sound of the Joker’s laugh is layered over every word he says, but in how the Joker and madness is used. As the game progresses, Batman starts to slowly lose his grip on reality. This is a concept attempted by many game developers and filmmakers alike, and it rarely ever succeeds in a substantial way. I don’t want to oversell Arkham Knight’s attempt, but I think they did a great job at using subtlety to their advantage.
The Joker isn’t alive, but you’ll frequently see him standing on a rooftop, lounging about waiting for a chance to talk to Batman. Sometimes he’ll be there suddenly behind you for no reason, sometimes you’ll see him in the distance. If you the spin the camera around to the point that he’s no longer in view, there’s a good chance he won’t be there when you look back. As you get further and further into the story, the Joker get’s even more prominent in Batman’s mind and other things start happening. He’ll jump scare you at some points when you grapple up to a rooftop. He’ll be a random thug in a crowd of looters who comes to attack you. The billboards around the city start changing to a Joker-themed style, which also revert back to the original poster if you do the same thing with the camera and look away for only a moment. This is a trick that works extremely well in horror games and it makes me salivate at the very idea that the developers at Rocksteady make a horror game someday.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
The Arkham saga comes to a conclusion in Batman: Arkham Knight. It’s a fun, dark story that goes some interesting places and really shines with its clever and subtle use of madness and the Joker. Overall, I enjoyed my time with it. However, there are still some performance issues to be had if you don’t have the components necessary to play it on your computer. The gameplay, while still mostly satisfying, gets a bit stale and tiresome by the end. I’ve been a fan of these games since Arkham Asylum, but I’m somewhat glad to see it finished so the developers can have the opportunity to possibly wow us again with a fresh start in something completely different.
