Nothing like messaging your editor at the last minute to tell her that you have yet to beat a certain game only to end up rage quitting out of boredom and skipping straight to the end, right, “Batman: Arkham Knight?”
There isn’t really much of a real-life story between me and the Batman: Arkham games. So, let’s use a bit of metaphor to make this interesting.
Playing through the three main “Arkham” games is like raising a kid without the hard work. In it’s early years as “Arkham Asylum,” I was the proud owner of a copy with the exclusive Joker challenge maps and played it endlessly while cherishing every moment. Then, “Arkham City” brought the series to it’s college years, full of events and fun times. It was a masterpiece!
Now, here we are with “Arkham Knight.” The game has graduated with a degree in “badass-ery” and is doing nothing but sitting in my apartment while I play the role of the middle-aged, irritated parent, saying, “Arkham Knight, are you still here? Get off your bum and go do something with your life!” To which, Arkham Knight replies with an incoherent noise, a belch, and passes out from the alcoholism.
Depressing picture, ain’t it? Well, that’s what the series has come to with it’s installment of “Batman: Arkham Knight.” As with any Triple A game, I always have a hunch when these games turn out disasterous or bland, and “Arkham Knight” is no different. It’s like reliving the Star Wars prequels a hundred times over, where I am the Yoda to the game industry’s million-man army of Anakin Skywalkers.
A dark side, I sense in you.
Back in June 2015, this game had a very disappointing launch, releasing with bugs in the animation, lagging in the “frames per second” department, and a very catastrophic release on the PC. It was so bad that Warner Bros. Interactive pulled the game’s purchase links online and had to refund all of their PC customers just so they could go back and try to fix everything, which they failed to do completely. Sure, the bugs aren’t as bad as they were on Day One, but they are still there in some way, shape, or form, even on the console versions.
But, enough of the history. Let’s get to the review.
“Batman: Arkham Knight” is the final chapter in the “Arkham” series brought to you by Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady Studios. On Halloween night, when Jonathan Crane (aka “Scarecrow”) informs the citizens of Gotham City about his plans to unleash a deadly toxin, everyone panics and the people of Gotham are forced to evacuate. It is up to Batman to stop Scarecrow while facing against a militia led by the not-so-mysterious, but very douche “Arkham Knight.” Along the way, the Dark Knight will come across numerous foes and adversaries, including Poison Ivy, Riddler, Catwoman, Penguin, Two-Face, Firefly, Harley Quinn, Deathstroke, Hush, and two other villains that nobody knows nor will ever care about (Pyg and Deacon Blackfire).
The game plays similar to the other two Arkham games. You either have to beat a gang of thugs senseless using your fists and gadgets while using the “free-flow” combat system Warner Bros is so obsessed about or you have to takedown armed enemies in a stealthy manner. What’s new to this system is the “FEAR” mechanic. This special ability will allow you to instantly takedown a small group of thugs, depending on how close you are to them and how close they are together.
While the FEAR mechanic is the biggest improvement, the main focus Rocksteady had in this game was the introduction of the Batmobile. It may not be used as heavily as I had feared (with the exception of the 243 riddles scattered across Gotham), I still could have gone through this game without it, especially since the boss fights between you, Deathstroke, and the Arkham Knight force you to use the clunker are incredibly boring and easy to pull off. And it’s no joke that I call this a clunker. Really, the Batmobile handles like [explicit word I cannot use]! It’s like Rocksteady made the Batmobile all slippy-slidey just to give the illusion that a lot is going on when there clearly isn’t.
In the paragraph above, I mention there are 243 riddles. You read that correctly. Rocksteady has planted over 200 of these things and they are either really, really easy or really, really, hard. It all depends on how many clues they want to give you in order for you to figure out what gadgets need to be used in each puzzle. Even when I solved them on my own, I didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment. It was a sigh of relief and a groan of agony as moved from puzzle to puzzle. The first 50 riddles I completed was enough boredom for me to say, “!@#$ it. Let’s just do the final mission and see how this game ends.”
The only good things in “Arkham Knight” are the occasionally interesting story and the graphics. That’s all it has going for it. By the time I hit the 20-minute mark, I already had figured out who the Arkham Knight was and my patience had peaked. There wasn’t much else in the story that made me care about what happened. As for graphics, it’s pretty to look around the city, but it’s fatiguing when the game forces you to fly and backtrack to similar landmarks numerous times or tells you that in order to progress in a side mission, you’ll have to wait and fly/drive around for a bit until new intel comes in. And as I mentioned earlier, there was some lag and a few bugs in the console versions of this game. This is 100% true. I played through the PlayStation 4 version and even with that console’s power, there were a few bugs and a handful of moments where the game had lagged.
The controls aren’t exactly the cleanest, either. Sometimes you’ll get sucker-punched in the middle of combat when an enemy appears from the corner of your screen and claims you could have countered but it didn’t give you an appropriate reaction time.
This game is NOT for everyone. “Batman: Arkham Knight” is probably worse than “Arkham Origins” was, despite this being made by Rocksteady after they had skipped “Origins.” This game could have been better. It had potential, but with a mediocre quality from a studio that has shown off its most awesome effort into the first two Arkham games, there is no reason why there could not have been more time to fix and adjust.
“Batman: Arkham Knight” for the Playstation 4 gets 2 villains no one will recognize out of 5.
(Seriously, which Batman fan has heard of Pyg and Deacon Blackfire? And who said it was a good idea to put them in this game?)
