A study in bad sequel design
When it comes to great sequels, few games knocked it out of the park in the 360/PS3 era quite like Arkham City. It expanded upon the cool gameplay of Asylum and added some fun new tech and a great world to explore, along with a strong narrative and a hell of a lot of fun stuff to see and do. Arkham Origins was passable, mostly because it didn't upset the apple cart - if someone liked Arkham City and wanted more of it, Origins could help scratch that itch. Arkham Knight is neither great or passable. Instead, it's Bad Sequel Design 101.
While one large feature - the Batmobile - has been added to the game, the rest of the game remains largely unchanged from Arkham City. Unfortunately, instead of keeping that gameplay as solid as it has been in its three predecessors, the developers opted instead to simply make the game more difficult. Instead of hammering the punch and dodge buttons against three opponents, the player will instead hammer the punch and dodge buttons against ten or twelve slight variants on generic baddies seen throughout three other games. Previous games featured smart Riddler trophies that made good use of the player's noggin as well as the tools at hand without being overly frustrating in terms of controls (though any sequence involving the remote controlled Batarang was always infuriating). Arkham Knight makes the solutions relatively obvious but obfuscates the player's path by ramping up the difficulty on getting to those solutions.
That, in essence, defines Arkham Knight's biggest problem. It deliberately tries to get in the player's way without actually being fun in the process. Using electromagnets to get a ball through a labryinth sounds like a great idea for a Riddler challenge. Getting that same ball through the maze when I have to hop in and out of the Batmobile multiple times to pull obstacles out of the way while I keep the electromagnets charged on a very tight timetable while handling the game's sometimes horrid controls is a lesson in pure fucking misery.
The worst part of this shit stew is the Batmobile. Every Batmobile sequence in the game is terrible. Every. Single. One. The car itself has two distinct handling types - tank mode and full-on classic "race through the streets" Batmobile mode. The controls for both are stunningly awful. At least with tank mode, I could move slowly enough to navigate the streets, whereas in Batmobile road, I slipped and slid all over the damn place like I was playing some godawful Ridge Racer iteration. The car is, unfortunately, a huge part of the game's missions too. Forced stealth tank missions have the player following and evading invincible tanks over small stretches of land. If I'm driving a fucking tank, I don't want to be sneaking and hiding. I want to be blowing shit up all the time. The developers have given the player the coolest weapon in the Batman's arsenal and immediately neutered it. It's bush league game design - and the missions repeat themselves, multiple times.
Remember above when I said that instead of innovating on the games' mechanics wasn't exactly a priority? It's even less so within Arkham Knight itself. The whole point of playing a superhero game is to make the player feel powerful and maybe tell a good story. Arkham Knight almost gets the latter right, except that it insists yet again on focusing the story on the relationship between the Joker and Batman. These two have been going at it for seventy plus years. If their story was meat cooking on a barbecue, there would be nothing left but a few cold ashes. I'm bored of the Joker and Batman's dance. Have the balls to tell a fresher story, something that maybe concentrates on one of the many other foes Batman has come up against. One of his other enemies desperately needs the Frank Miller touch, so why not try to do that in video game form?
Arkham Knight sorely disappointed me. In 2015, this kind of bad game design from a AAA title is largely inexcusable, especially from a franchise where even a copy-and-paste game was pretty excellent. I do not recommend this, even to the most die-hard of Batman fans. It's a waste of money and time.
