Arkham Knight concludes the fantastic Batman adventure that first debuted six years ago with Arkham Asylum, and more recently with Arkham City. In the past six weeks, I replayed through both of these titles again, this time on PC, in eager anticipation of the finale. Between the two, I actually liked Asylum better, in large part because it felt like a much tighter and more focused experience, but clearly City was no slouch, and it’s a classic in its own right. Having now completed the main story of Knight, and achieved at the time of this writing a 81% total completion percent of all available content, Arkham Knight separates itself from the previous two as the clear “best” of the series and one of the most compelling sequels in gaming history as far as I’m concerned.
One thing I will strive not to do in this review is spoil anything about the main story. I’m the type that purposefully avoids watching trailers and reading forums on titles I am highly interested in for story content. The story in Arkham Knight is so strong that it would be a shame to have it ruined, so extra care should be taken to avoid spoilers. On that note, you need not have played the previous Arkham games from Rocksteady to enjoy this one, but make no mistake, the fan service and references and so forth in Knight all operate under the assumption that you are at least pretty familiar with the events of the first two games.
Ok, with that out of the way, let’s get to some details. The city of Gotham has been enjoying an unusual peace since the death of Joker some nine months prior. For law enforcement, its a welcomed change, but an uneasy one because most of Gotham’s super villains are still on the loose. As you may have seen with the E3 video that Sony showed during their briefing, this time of peace is rapidly and thoroughly disrupted when Scarecrow threatens Gotham with a new fear gas (that penetrates gas masks, too), forcing a mass, somewhat organized exodus of all six-plus million Gotham citizens. Those that stay behind are there for good reason only. On the one hand you have Batman and the Gotham City PD, on the other, there are rioters, thugs of some of the super villains including Scarecrow, and a mysterious newcomer who calls himself the Arkham Knight. The Knight is a badass beyond just looking the part, with the combat skills to back it up. Speaking of backup, he has his own private militia already deeply entrenched in Gotham; he is clearly the most well-organized and powerful threat Gotham — and thus Batman — has ever faced.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and in Gotham’s darkest hour, its hero will rise. On this rainy Halloween night, Batman takes to the skies and the streets of Gotham to quite literally go to war. Scarecrow’s plan to release a toxic cloud smothering the entire city coupled with the Knight’s brute force militia are so far beyond typical criminal activity that Batman has to bring all of his tech, wit, and skills to the frontlines. For starters, he’s bringing the Batmobile in to help stomp out the Knight’s tanks and drones. The Batmobile can also transport up to two prisoners, provide armored protection, electrical power to structures, pull and hoist objects with its winch, and more.
I’ll admit, when I heard the Batmobile was an integral part of the game, I was a bit anxious; but I was very quickly convinced upon playing it was a great design move and a huge positive. Using the Batmobile takes a little bit of getting used to, but it’s easily overcome with maybe an hour of time. As far as how it controls and the physics of it, it felt very much like controlling a sports car from the Burnout series — fast, hella fun, and very much arcade-like. Interestingly, the controls call for using Square to brake, R2 for acceleration, Triangle for the afterburner booster, and X to eject into a Glide. The Batmobile is also capable of being remote controlled which is used not only in combat situations, but also in puzzle solving. The Battle Mode requires players to press and hold L2, which is interesting that it cannot be toggled, but it works just fine as is. Weapons include a vulcan cannon and a 60mm launcher, as well as a few perks you get along the way like a drone virus dropper and an EMP blast. As you may have seen in a video or heard about, yeah, you do inadvertently (or maybe on purpose, depending on how you play) cause a ton of property damage while you are cruising its streets. But the way I look at it, this is Gotham’s darkest hour, it’s all or nothing, and smashing a few lamp posts, gates, or structural supports is a fact of war.
I touched on some of these aspects already, but to elaborate, the Batmobile is used for more than just getting you around town. The arrow navigation system works fast and really well by the way, allowing you to focus on your surroundings instead of looking at a mini-map (which does not exist here) and let’s face it, there’s no cooler and more secure way to travel. While great for getting you right to or at least fairly close to destinations, the Batmobile is also wisely used to help solve some puzzles or initiate tasks with its power winch, and to get Batman out of tight positions with its remote control ability. Combat is the obvious third design pillar of the Batmobile, and there is plenty of that to engage in, especially if you go after some of the side missions that have you hunting down militia lieutenants and disarming mines, and so forth. In the Battle Mode, there are a few main things to be aware of, firstly knowing how to dodge by using the left stick and X, and this is something you can upgrade slightly. This scoots the Batmobile quickly in the direction you pressed with the left stick, the idea being that you avoid the targeting beam of enemy fire. But, certain enemies can missile lock you and strafing/dodging does little to help that, leaving you to either take the hit or shoot down the missiles with your vulcan cannon. Ammo is of no consequence for either the militia or Batman, so fire away, by all means. Besides the cannon and the 60mm launcher, secondary weapons include multi-targeted missile barrages, EMP pulses to disable nearby vehicles, and a cool virus dropper that can cause drones to turn on their own.
So, on a number of occasions, by the way, the Batmobile is not “in play” — in other words, you are in a situation (perhaps inside a building or a variety of other cases) in which its not a factor. This may help ease the minds of those concerned that the Batmobile is too much of a focal point, a point to which I would disagree with. I think it’s used aptly and with just the right balance, adding additional fun, efficiency, gameplay elements, and it helps hammer home the fact that there is literally a war in Gotham.
Batman is aided in this massive struggle by some familiar and welcomed characters, such as Gordon, Oracle, Nightwing, and Robin. Alfred is in nigh constant contact with Bats as well for updates on the main mission as well as nearly all of the side missions, too. Contact with these other characters is sometimes face to face, but, especially in the case of Alfred, Lucius Fox, and Oracle, much of it takes place on a holographic screen generated by a communicator in the forearm of the Batsuit. Watching the visual feedback of these characters as well as hearing their voices (and once again, stellar voice acting as you would expect from the series) adds nicely to the experience. Meeting up with the likes of Catwoman and Nightwing in game to take on a room of twenty or so bad guys is pretty sweet too and introduces the Dual Play feature to Arkham. During these sequences, you can switch between characters (sharing the same HP meter) by pressing L1, and Team Takedowns are a spectacular way to finish off enemies. Some of these Takedowns would make even the most creative and successful tag team wrestlers blush as they’re acrobatic and awesome to behold.
Takedowns have evolved in Knight as well, with new Fear Takedowns that are wonderfully effective and fun. After performing a few Silent Takedowns, you can then do a Fear Takedown which can, when fully upgraded, instantly put five bad guys on their backs for good simply by pressing Square and moving the right stick to mark the next target. This all happens quickly and in a stylized, quasi-bullet time manner. New gadgets like the Disruptor and Voice Synthesizer are some of the new tools available for the Predator encounters the series is so well known for. It’s a good thing too, given that the enemies have also gotten better, with the inclusion mini-gun toting brutes, smarter tech to find Batman or jam his Detective Mode, and hell even medics that can revive downed foes if you don’t get to them fast enough or use the appropriate gadget (starts with a capital D) to prevent them from doing their work.
Of note, your gadget loadout and progression is different than in Arkham City, which I was a bit surprised by but how it was done in Knight is very sensible and agreeable, too. Gadgets, Combat, Batsuit, Batmobile, and other upgrades are much more interesting this time around as well. That’s actually something I ran into with Arkham City was that, after a certain point, I had a hard time finding any upgrade I actually wanted to buy. With Arkham Knight, there are more choices and more interesting choices at that; also, wow, the upgrade screen is much easier to navigate than was in City. Speaking of which, I like that the objective indicator in the HUD now has a small arrow to let you know if you need to go up or down, taking into account that all important z-axis instead of just the x and y.
As I refer back to my notes, this is one of those games I do not have a whole lot of issues with. It depends of course on how nit-picky you want to get. I will say that I had no technical issues at all, and by that I mean I did not have any framerate hiccups, freezes, tearing, none of that. Maybe a slight bit of clipping on very, very rare occasion but hell, that’s going to happen with practically any 3D game, certainly one on this massive scale. On the other hand, load times are a little on the high side, I think about thirty seconds is what I tallied, but, reason for reloading ought to be fairly rare and the good news is that any time that you do reload you are right back at the ‘scene’ or area where you died at, so you do not have to travel back to that location, saving some time. But as with the other Arkham games, if you play smart, you probably won’t die much at all. It’s only when I was tired or just playing sloppy that I had to reload. But, forewarning if I may, watch out for the side mission on top of the Gotham hospital — I made the mistake of taking that on probably a dozen times and I finally got it. Later on in the story I would get a new gadget that would have really helped that combat encounter a lot, but I digress.
Getting back to the ‘cons’ column of my notes, you could make an argument that, at the end of the day, the core gameplay is just a series of distinct combat encounters with some puzzles sprinkled in. This is true to a point, and it might be that the Arkham games make this more obvious than other titles, but no game in the genre is perfectly impervious to this statement. Furthermore, many key interactions are expressed to the gamer as simply “Press X to do this.” These are anti-climatic and take but the most minimal interaction, but again that’s still just the state of gaming, all games still have the old “pull the switch” or “press X” design. I will say that Knight does have some cool interactive moments in which players do have to do more than just press a single button. Analyzing video footage, creating a new DNA strand, multiplexing a voice sample, these are all neat things you do in Knight with interaction well beyond just pressing a single button. You may not do these things much, in some cases just once, but it’s a credit to Rocksteady that they went beyond the simple route to create something more compelling and memorable with these interactions.
Compelling and memorable — two words I would absolutely use to describe Arkham Knight and its two prequels for that matter. Let’s head to the summary…
