K-SCORE: 92
Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive
Director: Sefton Hill
Writers: Paul Dini, Paul Crocker, Martin Lancaster, Sefton Hill, Ian Ball
Starring: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Nolan North, Troy Baker, Ashley Greene, Matthew Mercer, Scott Porter, Tom Kane, Tara Strong, Kimberly Brooks
Spoiler Level: Minor
“makes you feel like you’re playing as Batman”
In the 1980s, Ocean Software tried three times to make a decent Batman game. Those games, Batman, Batman: The Caped Crusader, and Batman weren’t stellar, and by stellar I mean playable. Then Nintendo released two Batman games in 1990, one for the NES and one for Gameboy. Those games were called Batman and Batman, respectively. The license saw an expansion of games for PC, Sega Genesis, and even an Arcade game all in that year, and those games were Batman, Batman, and the boldly titled Batman. None of those games sold very well and the few I played / watched gameplay footage of for the purposes of writing this review, are all terrible beyond reason. But the 1990s and early 2000s unrelentingly saw releases of licensed games and so the decade gave us Batman: Return of the Joker, Batman Returns, Batman: The Animated Series (the game), The Adventures of Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, Batman and Robin, Batman Beyond: Revenge of the Joker, Batman: Chaos in Gotham, Batman Vengeance, Batman Dark Tomorrow, Batman: Rise of Sin Tzu, Batman Begins, and finally Lego Batman: The Video Game, which is not to be confused with Lego Batman: The Movie, Lego Batman: The Song, Lego Batman: The Professional Bass Fishing Equipment, and Lego Batman: The Batman Lego. All of that came out before Batman: Arkham Asylum in 2009, which is definitively the first game that makes you feel like you’re playing as Batman.
Rocksteady Studios, a game developer with almost no experience making triple-A games or games of any kind, surprised the whole community with a really fun love-letter to the comics, taking place in a contained, manageable, rarely explored area of Batman lore, in its own universe with its own style. Rocksteady took its time and released two more Batman games in their trilogy, Arkham City and Arkham Knight, and they only improved over time. Their magnum opus is one of the most polished, technically impressive, narratively satisfying, and epic games I’ve played of any kind, and the best game tied to a superhero license ever. Rocksteady did what the gaming world craved for decades - let you live in the shadows, deliver fear to those that would prey on the weak, use the world’s greatest detective to uncover the schemes of the world’s greatest supervillains, to employ the gadgets only billionaire Bruce Wayne could afford to hide the fact that you are billionaire Bruce Wayne, and finally bring justice to the streets of Gotham. I am Batman and it’s about damn time.
The Arkham series gameplay really isn’t that complicated. As Batman you do three different things. You fly between gargoyles and rooftops, pop out of vents and crates, and around corners to take out armed thugs that are trying to shoot you to death. Or you brawl with thugs that don’t have guns, carefully countering their blows and using your superior strength and martial arts techniques to defeat entire mobs of criminals at the same time. Or you use your detective tactics to track down villains so that you can do those first two again and again. But most games, even great ones, are built on simplistic formulas that get duplicated and elaborated upon. By the time you get to Arkham Knight, you’re starting off fighting more enemies than you’ll find in the end sections of Arkham Asylum, making the whole series experience feel increasingly challenging, epic, and satisfying.
The stealth sections of the gameplay are probably my least favorite. They’re just paced strangely and break up the narrative at times because they make you wonder why all these cronies of The Joker, Scarecrow, or whomever are waiting around as the Batman is picking them off one by one. Also it’s slow and forces you to use the detective mode scanner to watch enemy movement and sightlines so much that it’s easy to fall into the trap of not really knowing or understanding what you’re surroundings are like. The world Rocksteady created is so beautifully rendered that it’d be a shame to miss its details because you see as the Predator sees. It gets better with each entry though. The AI becomes more interesting. Arkham Knight introduces drones and turrets to the equation along with the disruptor rifle, cloaked enemies you can’t see in detective mode, enemies that jam detective mode, and fear multi-takedowns, which are awesomely Batmanic. Still, it doesn’t hold a candle to gliding into a mob of guys trying to rob a bank and punching and kicking them until they’re all out cold on the ground. The melee combat is phenomenal. The only times I had a problem with it were when the game demanded too much perfection from me that their system didn’t really support. The basic concept of building up combos, striking, countering, and doing special attacks after enough hits works very well, but there are times that you can’t predict whether some enemy will attack you and you need to counter versus when they won’t and you need to strike. Messing up either input, if the timing is just-so, is basically guesswork, no matter how much time you sink into the franchise. Not a big deal because you can always build up another combo. It only becomes an issues when you’re trying to do the most difficult of tasks, all trophy related, like get gold medals on challenges or complete the trophy Brutality 101. Whoa-ah that was tricky. And again, the combat evolves steadily over the course of three games, always improving, becoming faster, more difficult, and more fun. In Asylum, there are two special moves you can do in combat. In City, it’s four. In Knight I think there are maybe eight, maybe as many as twelve depending on whether you count things like the Batmobile-assisted takedowns and tag-team takedowns.
Arkham City expanded on the concept of Arkham Asylum so much that I thought surely they couldn’t make that many improvements when they completed their third entry, but I was wrong. City gives the open-world treatment to the franchise without ignoring the events of the first game. The storyline of that game is my favorite, following The Joker after his self-inflicted Titan infection. But when they move to the streets of Gotham proper, it gets even better. The map is bigger with more detail, more verticality to explore, and The Batmobile totally integrated into the gameplay both in traversing the world and fighting the villains. I think the studio was wise to wait until the third game to bring in The Batmobile. By then the controls and concepts were so well-polished that they could give the famous car the treatment it deserves, and though there’s probably too much of it, it’d be tough to claim that it doesn’t work well. But the final entry’s true innovation comes in its minute details. The way Batman’s Joker-madness manifests is brilliant. The way Rocksteady hides load screens so well that it feels like you can seamlessly move from any section of the game to any other without ever pausing. The jump scares that are planted in places even when you thought you weren’t following a linear path. The way the game changes settings and character positions when you happen to be looking the other way. The details in the art of every costume, expression, room, and model. Arkham Knight is the first PS4 game I’ve played that I can’t even imagine a version that would function on previous generation consoles. Yeah, The Witcher 3 would run slower and look far worse on last generation’s machines, but you could probably port it somehow. Arkham Knight, unh uh. It’s a crowning achievement in modernity in video games.
Even if the series hadn’t swept all other Batman games into the proverbial dustpan with its gameplay and narrative, it would still be fun just from the perspective that they employ all the Batstuff that we love from the old comics, movies, and TV shows. Everyone has their favorites. I can’t explain why exactly I like Clayface, but I do and he’s in there. Are you partial to Scarface, Killer Croc, Twoface, The Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Robin, Nightwing, Catwoman, Ra's Al Ghul, his daughter Talia, The Riddler, Hugo Strange, Deadshot, Victor Zsasz, Oracle, Lucius Fox, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, Deathstroke, or Firefly? You’ll find them in the series, either through the gameplay or little hidden lore details or both. Are you weird and you think Calendar Man and The Mad Hatter are Batman essentials? Well Rocksteady didn’t forget you. They did stratify the villains based on their narrative viability though. The Joker, being the best of Batman’s villains, plays the most central role. And the way they develop him and Batman together, concluding in the fear toxin episode at the end of Knight, is beautiful. Scarecrow is, I’d argue, second best. Preying on fears is a great conflict concept for the Gothamverse, second only to the raw clowny chaos offered up and delivered by Mark Hamill’s masterful performance in every game. Batmanity doesn’t stop there. The game utilizes smartly the Baterangs, Batclaw, Batcave, Batplane, Batcomputer, and a dozen other bat gadgets in a way that ties narrative, world-building, and gameplay together. It’s a feat not to be undervalued.
For however much I respect these games, I do have problems with them. It’s just that in comparison to what they do well, they seem petty. In every game, there are too many riddler trophies. How many times do I really need to pull down a vent grate, climb in, and pick up a green question mark before I get the idea that something little is hidden there. It’s a shame too because a lot of them are really awesome, well-designed mini puzzles. And the ones that involve actual riddles are great because they force you to notice what would be easter eggs in lesser games, things like Scarface’s gun, the Freeze chamber in Arkham Asylum, Wayne Tower, Lexxcorp, etc. But unfortunately the riddles for them aren’t really riddles and don’t actually help you go to the right place and solve them. They might as well read “take a picture of something related to <insert Batman lore here> which isn’t ideal. In Arkham Asylum, there’s too much backtracking to do all the collecting. In Arkham City, you’re locked out of certain little puzzles for way too long and it’s not clear which ones you’re locked out of if you don’t know exactly what gadgets you’ll get. They struck the right balance of progression versus exploration in Arkham Knight, but in that game there are 243 trophies! That game is also plagued with way too many tank battles. The Batmobile battle mode is easy to control and fun, except that it over-rewards streaky success and punishes bad luck really hard, but it feels way less like something Batman would partake in, especially for something that will happen forty times for completionists like myself. The fact that you can control the Batmobile remotely right off the bat (ha!) is so Batmany and great though that it almost makes up for it.
“stopping something called a Cloudburst... using Poison Ivy and giant underground flowers that counter the effects of Scarecrow’s fear toxins...”
I have some narrative gripes too. The comic book conflicts are cheesy and convoluted in general, and this Batman universe isn’t generally devoted to realism and a serious tone like Christopher Nolan’s so I don’t have many issues with Titan formula and Protocol 10 and Ra’s Al Ghul’s Lazarus pit, but as the story takes darker turns, the threats facing Gotham should be less ridiculous and grittier. So when you’re stopping something called a Cloudburst in Arkham Knight using Poison Ivy and giant underground flowers that counter the effects of Scarecrow’s fear toxins it doesn’t quite match the sense that Batman is fighting crime for the final night in his vigilante career in a battle that could actually kill him. The Arkham Knight of Arkham Knight is a twist so obvious it’s painful how long they draw it out and that is the titular character of the final entry in the series. At least they get the themes and drama at the end really right. The whole narrative line just could have worked better, especially if it had been set up in the previous games. I also felt that it was somehow a little soon for an “end of Batman” kind of story. I feel like Rocksteady flung me in the final trimester of Batman’s crime-fighting career and they tackle that really well, but I guiltily wish they’d done over twenty years of gaming, released eight Batman games, each bigger and bolder than the last, before finally getting to their end point here. Had they done that, Rocksteady’s Batamanverse could have become the one I first think of when I think of Batman, and that’s coming from a guy whose first word was Batman. But maybe they want to move on. Their formula still has room and their Nightwing, Catwoman, Robin, Azrael, and other characters play so well that maybe they’ll do a Bludhaven spinoff or take Catwoman in a high quality direction for the first time in her video game or cinematic career. Maybe they’ll make a new IP sans license that’s the next big hit for current gen consoles. They’ve certainly earned my support should they wish to try. We’ll see.
Batman is the best superhero. It’s not even really that close. He has the most interesting origin story, his dominance is most exciting because he doesn’t have any magical superpowers, his world lends itself to the best conflicts, the thematics of the Batman are superior to anything else in the genre, which usually doesn’t even try (Spiderman and responsibility? Superman and humanity? Captain America and patriotism? Daredevil and coping with blindness?), his villains are a combination of the scariest, most compelling, and most interesting out there, and he’s the kind of cool vigilante you can imagine criminals would be petrified of. And if you want to use games to take on the role of Batman, the Arkham series is the only good option. Unless you want to listen to that music from the NES game. Da na NaNa, na na nowww!