For me, the weakest audio source in Arkham Knight is the soundtrack. The music is completely forgettable and generic. There’s no chorus or riff that gets stuck in your head for hours after playing. The music is of the ambient variety more than anything else. It is serviceable as background noise while you beat down bad dudes, but it doesn't really have that much needed oomph to get you more excited about your actions.

Game Play Mechanics (Aka, the too much Batmobile rant)

The Batmobile is not a suitable replacement for the best Arkham combat system that Rocksteady has ever made. But unfortunately that is what the abomination has been used for. Instead of feeling like the most important Bat-Tool that he can’t fit in his Utility belt, the Batmobile instead takes the center stage of the whole game. Even if you didn’t actually spend most of your time in the game in the damn thing, you spend enough of your time there to make it the most memorable thing about the game. and that is not a good thing. As human beings we remember the negative in anything more than the positive, because it tends to leave a longer lasting impression. And sadly when I think about this game, the first thing I think of isn’t the story they told, the combat they improved, or the characters I fought alongside, it’s the Batmobile.

It may well be one of the worst character controllers I’ve seen on a speeding vehicle. It’s as if I’m replaying Ride to Hell Retribution, with a bigger hitbox so I hit more crap. The monstrosity controls significantly better in Tank mode, which I highly suggest you set to Toggle-Mode in the options menu, but in said state you will become bored quickly. Tank Vs. Drones battle sections consist solely of the following: strafe out of the way of visible raycasts before they fire, fire at their purple light, rinse and repeat. I refuse to believe that Rocksteady actually looked at that gameplay loop and thought, “You know what, that’s the best thing we’ve made for this game. We need to incorporate it as much as possible!” No, instead what I believe is that they only had a certain amount of time to get the game done to tell the story they wanted to tell, and made the decision to prioritize driving and tank sections because they're easier to make.

For as much crap as the close combat in these games gets for being easy or simple, it takes a lot of work to make. You need to place certain enemy types in very specific places relative to the environment and other enemy types. And with this game having the most ways to rank up combos, and the most varied bad dudes that require you to change up your style mid combo, the close combat ends up becoming quite impressive when you consider how they placed these enemies to greet the player. Did they place some normal dudes close to let you take the initiative and start racking up combos to prepare for the big baddy in the back? Or maybe the combat started off requiring a double counter, did they want to put you on your toes right away by sticking that big bad dude center stage? If so he starts to wail on you right as the combat begins, making you take a step back and quickly think of a new approach. In addition to all that, we are introduced to team fighting and takedowns, where in certain points of the story you are joined by your fellow heroes to beat up bad dudes together. You can swap to another hero with the push of a button, reminiscent of GTAV’s similar mechanic during its special story missions. It’s a damn shame you can count the number of these occasions in Arkham Knight on one hand.

The tank sections require nowhere near this amount of Level Design, place drones (both of the regular and scary stealth type) on a map surrounding the Batmobile, and done! Watch as the player does the same, strafe, shoot, wait, strafe dance until all the drones are dead. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a microtransaction to buy upgrades for the Batmobile early to reduce that wait time... Not to mention how easy it is to replace chasing enemies by grappling up to rooftop, gliding over buildings, and seeking your prey, with a mostly empty street that has a few crates or walls for the Batmobile to break as you chase another bulky hunk of metal that’s not the color black.

This rushed method of developing what takes less time most likely rolled over into one of the biggest crimes of Arkham Knight, not including any challenge maps. Challenge maps have been a staple feature in every installment of the series. Couple lazy modes being favored over complex ones with a lack of challenge maps and an obviously rushed PC port, the game just screams that it needed a few more months of development time to actually celebrate the mechanics that are done well.

The Stealth Sections, for example, are once again the best the series has seen. Levels are less closed off, larger, with more environmental means to pick off your prey. The introduction of even more enemy types to pile onto the roster continues to make the player think about what they need to do and what it will affect. Medics will revive enemies if they are not knocked out first, but do you risk being spotted early by the guy controlling that drone just to take out the medic? These hard choices make what was honestly a fairly weak stealth system in previous titles into one where constantly using detective mode is actually necessary.

Speaking of being a detective, this game offers a few great puzzles that actually made me feel like the World’s Greatest Detective. There’s a certain part in the game where you solve a puzzle without really using any of your gadgets or detective vision, and this part in particular really made me reflect on what I considered to be the best Batman moment I’ve had in a game. Apart from those sections, the crime scenes from Origins find a great place for themselves here and are still just as satisfying as they were in the previous title.



But once again we are offered very few chances to appreciate these well crafted sections. Or maybe we did play a lot of them, but still only remember the Batmobile....

Level Design/ World Design

The developers are quite aware that an open world game can run the risk of losing the value of Level design. But Rocksteady have seemed to create one giant Level called Gotham. Just about any section of the world can be used as a makeshift level that would appear very thought out and detailed.

I talked about the stealth sections being the best in the series despite being few and far between. They are better because the level design of the areas has improved dramatically. Instead of each stealth area being a re-skin of a base level as they were in previous titles, stealth sections feel more natural than an enclosed room with gargoyle perches. The levels offer a multitude of ways to approach or take out enemies. Level composition has also greatly improved, offering unobstructed views of guard patterns and highlighting various elements in the level in a subtle fashion to encourage experimentation.

Close combat environments also show a great level of improvement in composition. With the ability to use the world around you to take down enemies and the way enemy types are laid out in the crowd, the Level Design skills of Rocksteady shines bright in places that many would not notice.

I mentioned earlier that the thematic appearance of some areas of Gotham might not be the version of Gotham we imagined while reading books like Dark Knight Returns or Year One, but I have a far greater problem with the City than its occasionally strange appearance. Gotham feels really empty at times. Yeah, this sounds like a pretty silly thing to say since the city is evacuated in the first five minutes of the game, but that doesn’t mean that the streets should have so little going on in them. In previous titles, despite being open world in the latter two, every area felt crowded and full of life. Arkham Knight isn’t completely empty, but seeing empty street after empty street makes me wish there was more crime to stop on them.

Story

The story that is webbed in Arkham Knight is a story many a Batman fan has hoped to see retold off the page, well at least one of Arkham Knight's many stories is. If you also correctly guessed Arkham Knight’s not so secret identity because of his use of the phrase “Old Man” in the trailer while talking to Bats, then you probably know what story I’m talking about. And despite a few minor plot holes, the story is respected and told very well. Having Scarecrow be a catalyst to said story, and unleashing something quite sinister, was a brilliant choice. That being said, I’ve been surprised by the lack of character development in the game. I know these characters have fifty years of development under their belts, but it would nice to see them grow and act in the story.

Beyond character issues, the games multiple stories are strung together in a series of events rather being a cohesive tale.Let’s take a look at the what the logline for the game would have been. A logline is a single line description of a story. So the for example the movie Die Hard’s logline would be, ”A disgruntled cop visits his wife in L.A. when her 35 story office building is taken hostage by terrorists.” Tells you exactly what kind of movie it would be, who our hero is, and what his goal is. Arkham Asylum, which had a wonderful and clear cut story, would have a logline like this, “Batman is trapped with an Asylum by the Joker, who plans to make sure bats must face every foe he's ever locked up.” Arkham Knight does not have a story that can be summed up in this way, instead its logline would be something along the lines of, ”Batman must stop the sinister Scarecrow from covering Gotham in fear, while learning the identity of the vengeful Arkham Knight, while dealing with his decent into madness, and attempting not to become the monster he fears the most, with the help of an unlikely hero.” Doesn’t quite catch your attention does it? Maybe one or two of those plots would, but not all at once. When every subplot introduced is more intriguing than the main story, you have a problem.

I have one more major beef with the game and it's the way two certain characters are treated. The Riddler, my second favorite Batman villain, is only the Riddler in name to me here. Riddler’s whole deal is to prove that he is smarter than Batman right? So what does that have to do with driving a car through easy courses that rely more on reflex then actual thought process. Sure the Riddler trophies still stay true to the character's motivations, but replacing what should have been the best puzzle levels in the game with Batmobile courses is downright insulting. But not as insulting or out of character as what Poison Ivy does in the story, unfortunately saying any more would be spoilers so I have to stop there. But man, it felt super out of place.

Leveling and Upgrade Systems

The leveling system should feel very familiar to those who have played an Arkham game before. With options to increase armor, combo abilities, or even Batmobile accessories, you can tailor your Batman to your own playstyle and create a unique Bat-experience. Thankfully certain abilities cost more or less than others, preventing you from being even more overpowered too quickly. at least early on. If you're half decent at ranking up higher combos, you’ll earn more experience and could easily have a fully decked out Batman before the end of the game.

Throughout the story the Batmobile will be given its own separate opportunity to upgrade either weapons or tech. These choices add some cool mechanics, such as hacking enemy drones to shoot other drones for you, but it doesn’t break the monotony of doing it too much.

Map and Menu Layouts

The map in this game is actually quite good and looks amazing, it's a shame you will hardly ever need to look at it. That’s not exactly a bad thing, I’d rather spend more of my time cruising around Gotham than looking at a AR display of it. And Rocksteady went to great lengths to always make sure the player knew where they were going. I just wanted to take the time to celebrate another great aspect of this game that you almost wish you got to see more of.

The way you access game menus is where I have a bone to pick. There are two menus I needed to deal with during my play-through. Quests, and inventory/gadgets. These are are assigned to different D-Pad directions on a gamepad, and, well D-Pads tend to suck at times. My routine for changing weapons before I switched to keyboard and mouse was, try to select gadgets, accidentally pull up AR Challenges, close that, pull up gadgets after taking careful time to make sure I only hit the appropriate direction.

Conclusion