Tales from the Grieve - A Review of Batman: Arkham Knight

Batman: Arkham Knight continues and concludes the tradition of Batman games started in Rocksteady’s 2009 Arkham Asylum: one of sheer excellence. On Halloween, Scarecrow returns with a new, dangerous strain of his fear toxin and a private army commanded by the titular Arkham Knight. It doesn’t take long for the city to evacuate, leaving an undermanned police department and Batman to take on the rogues’ gallery Batman is known for.

Within the first 10 minutes, it is made apparent that Arkham Knight is one monster of a game, boasting the entirely of Gotham City as your playground in a seamless open-world environment with no load screens between the environments. The traversal freedom is aided by both Batman’s grappling hook, which allows you to scale buildings and offers a unique in-glide speed boost, to cover extremely far distances in seconds. In the past, Batman has been restricted to running, gliding, and grappling as his methods of traversal. Now, there’s also driving with the Bat-mobile, a sleek black car that transforms into a powerful omnidirectional tank at the press of a button. Much of the game has been designed with the use of the Bat-mobile in mind: from completing challenge puzzles to combat with unmanned drones, and even underground scanning. For all of this though, near the latter half of the game, there is a point of frustration that stems from a vehicular stealth section involving a tunnel drill, requiring lightning-quick reflexes behind the wheel as opposed to thoughtful planning and execution.

Fortunately, Rocksteady has not abandoned its core gameplay, and this is especially noticeable when facing enemies in hand-to-hand combat: it’s as smooth as butter and is immensely satisfying. That said, Rocksteady found two new creative ways to tackle combat: multi-takedowns, done if you manage to stealthily get the drop on enemies, and in the new dual-play feature, allowing you to switch on the fly between two characters (such as Batman and Robin) in the middle of combat for devastating takedowns.

The dual-play mechanic is supported primarily within the extensive side-missions, which involve a good balance between Bat-mobile and hand-to-hand combat mechanics. Most are designed to tie up loose story threads found in previous games with some nice surprises here and there, with each of the missions culminating by taking a villain to the GCPD lockup. By far the longest one is collecting all of the 243 Riddler trophies in the game, which may seem tedious, but, after completing all of the missions, the player is treated to a special final cutscene for their efforts.

In terms of visual fidelity, though there may not be any load screens, there is definitely a lot of loading in the background, which we can be painfully reminded of when the frame-rate dips (usually in fast traversal such as gliding or driving) below 30…it would have been nice to see a feature to lock frame-rate in, if only to avoid the hassle. That said, this is a minor occurrence and is only being mentioned in this review because there aren’t honestly too many downsides to this game. The graphics, for example, are outstanding, particularly in the lighting department, and can be compared to the quality found in open world games such as The Witcher 3 and AC Unity.

Batman Arkham Knight is a sprawling epic, and an exceptional conclusion to the series and, in spite of its few shortcomings; the game deserves the admiration and respect of its peers and, more importantly, deserves to be played.

4/5

Here is the Launch Trailer: