QCF: Batman: Arkham Knight

hen Rocksteady defied the odds with their stellar take on the Caped Crusader with Batman Arkham Asylum in 2009, the sky was the limit with all of the potential its foundation of gameplay had to expand upon within the rich fiction that the Dark Knight’s universe had to offer.

Like, what if we could take Batman out of the Asylum, and onto the mean streets of Gotham city itself, able to zoom around the urban crime scene in his trusty Batmobile and everything, with entire skylines to grapple and slink though and all!

Six years and three entries later, Rocksteady Games drops the latest title to grace the Vigilante’s iconic gaming series that promise to deliver all of that and more; Batman: Arkham Knight, and now that it’s finally here—it’s kind of disappointing that the reality doesn’t live up to the expectations we had with the fantasy all those years ago…

Despite being the fourth entry to an a predictably formulaic series that’s bound by the specific designs that define the experience it offers, Arkham Knight affectionately raises the stakes in authentically emulating the Batman quite unlike any other of the previous titles within the series ever have done before.

A great deal of this is owed to the playground it takes place in, Gotham City; and it’s easily the best part of the entire game, from start to finish.

To be clear, we’re not talking about some sectioned city-turned-urban prison, or collection of glorified city blocks—it’s the actual Skyline Capitola of the Caped Crusader’s stomping grounds, genuinely realized for the very first time. While all open-world maps are known to suffer from a stifling sense of grandeur that numb players into actually enjoying the spectacle of the setting due the sheer scale of it all,  Rocksteady took strides to ensure that this Gotham conveyed a real sense of life to its world.

Recognizable landmarks and scenery of the iconic locale are implemented with a sense of purpose that wonderfully functions as an effective foil to the trademark methods of travel that characterize the wonders of being Batman. In addition to the raw enjoyment of simply grappling and scaling through the series of gothic building and municipal fairways, Arkham Knight’s Gotham is an overall engaging backdrop that’s filled with a load of fan service that honors the rich history and identity of the character and his place in culture over the last 76 years.

Well, with the exception one mode of travel anyway. It's sadly ironic that in spite of all Rocksteady’s effort to facilitate the thrills and excitement of being able to use the Batmobile, it’s the one of the biggest flaws that holds the title back from being anything short than a competent sequel.

Don’t get me wrong, the ambitious scope of the Batmobile and the role it aims to fill within the flow of the of the game is admirable; it’s just too damn bad the dynamic of it so clumsy and monotonous the fatigue of driving the Dark Knight’s whip sets in pretty thick by the halfway-way point of the campaign.

Let’s start with the direct mechanics of the car’s control and driving physics comprising it—they’re counterintuitive to every contemporary system of open-world vehicle operation that’s come before it, and it’s unlikely that players will acclimate to its awkward system soon enough to where the issue won’t drag on to the very end-game of the single player.

The core of the clumsiness boils down to the button layout and control scheme that delegates the exchange of the Mobile’s two forms of operation, transport mode, and battle mode. The tradeoff between the two and the frequency of it is about as vital the gear shift of a manual car, and the mapping to this functionality is set to the left trigger of whatever respective format you just so happen to be play the game on. The impracticality of it has bigger ramifications than it would initially imply and it’s just a real shit sucker.

Just to elaborate, the button that completely transitions the physics, interface, and play style of your vehicle is the same one that’s been traditionally used as the brake/reverse function in every other contemporary driving dynamic that’s been used in modern gaming for years, to a cognitive degree. This fundamental function is regulated to the west-end button of the conventional front-face buttons instead and yeah—this unorthodox layout just never stops feeling weird.

The counterintuitive nature of this flawed design is the equivalent of mapping the jump function to the “B” button and shoot function to the “A” button on an NES controller—it simply goes against the grain of every foundation that’s preceded it. The moment a high-speed chase suddenly changes into a combat scenario, or visa-versa, the process is vaguely agonizing, and at some points near the latter end of the game, excruciating.

The issues of the Batmobile wouldn’t have such an impact had it not been for Arkham Knight’s flagrant insistence to shove the damn thing down the throats of every player at nearly every turn that the story progresses; and a majority of these instances are grossly pandering, or disappointingly burdening.

While the surface level of Arkham Knight’s world building and fan service is breathtaking, the narrative and plot to the adventure is regrettably lazy in contrast, and falls short of being the epic swan song to the franchise that it promised to be. The characterization of the cast and their respective stake within Arkham Knight’s plot is often diluted into being nothing more than necessary plot devices to a flimsy premise that’s built out of the familiar story beats of similar action-filled, high stakes ventures that we’ve already seen time and time before.

The Scarecrow in particular, fails to inject any sort of definable identity to his role as the main antagonist, and is almost a misrepresentation of the villain. The portrayal of the character is essentially an understated retread of the characteristics, story beats, and motivations of Hugo Strange from Arkham City, which is a huge letdown considering the implicit magnitude that his imposition is intended to elicit out of Batman and the situation.

The titular Arkham Knight Character was one of the most predictable misdirection’s used in video game story telling yet, The “fridging” of certain characters, and the reintroduction of others who didn’t really add anything substantial to direct development of the plot, the list goes on. These are just some of the more critically missed opportunities that ended up hurting the direction of what was intended to be RockSteady’s Magnum Opus to the series.

When it comes down to it, Arkham Knight can be boiled down to the ambitious entry that failed to properly execute all of the potential the concepts were poised to deliver, and the spectacle of it all is simply competent at best, and a real shame at its worst.

Arkham Knight isn’t a bad game, it’s just the bad follow through of everything that could have made it amazing works into reducing it into an experience that is disappointingly mediocre.