Batman: Arkham Knight Release Date: Page 3 of 5

The Batman is bigger, darker and more violent than ever (the game too)


Gotham City

Does the name get your attention? It rightly should! If you've played all the previous Arkham games, you'll know that the events took place in, well...Arkham. Be it the asylum in the first game or the city in the latter two, it was happening on an island built for the criminally insane.

If you're keeping up with the news, then you'll know that the prequel, Arkham Origins, was never part of the package. It was something that came in on the side in order to fill the gap while waiting for the next generation systems to come in. Rocksteady Studios was determined to wait and make this game entirely next-gen in order to fully realize their dream. While we've heard the cliché before (*cough* Hobbit trilogy *cough*), it seems there's actually a lot of truth to this.

Looking at Gotham City, the map is considerably greater in size than anything they've done until now. It is, again, an open world, which I'm not fond of. I always found Arkham Asylum to have the best pacing and fluidity, while the later games were trying too hard to be packed with content. I'm assuming the same will happen here, though on a larger scale.

A new place, yet still so familiar...

However, the atmosphere makes it feel like a super-sized Arkham City more than anything else (which may not be a bad thing since it's a Batman game). I'm guessing it's because they took out all the pedestrians whom you'd normally expect to be in a city and filled it up with bad guys instead. They did add cars however, which apparently wasn't possible on the previous gen, if for no other reason than street width. Plus they finally added... *drum roll*...the Batmobile!

You get to drive the Batmobile!

It's about time! This can be viewed from two perspectives. There's those who are super-stoked that they can drive a car in a game to just not care about anything else, and there's the skeptics who question the need for driving in a game where you can glide off buildings. I'm one of those skeptics of course.

I know I've spent the better part of the previous games in the air, only touching the ground when I needed to take part in an event. So, why would I opt to ground myself with the Batmobile? I mean, other than the fact that it's an incredibly cool, weaponized tank with the mobility of a sports car? Actually, that's reason enough.

Shut up and look at it! LOOK!

Rocksteady did promise to make the Batmobile more relevant by adding challenges and story segments that need to happen in car or on the ground. I have to admit I find this approach a bit off. Adding a cool feature in the game, then trying to justify that feature is the exact opposite of what Batman does for real. Of course, after they boasted about the guns and missiles they packed on that thing, I don't really believe we need specific challenges to want to use it. Even us cynics have to agree that it's a damn cool feature regardless of usefulness.



High standards & easily bored. Good luck
Gamer Since: 1992
Favorite Genre: RPG
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MJuarbe's picture

MJuarbe 8 years 10 months ago

im more excited about driving the batmobile then anything else. I'm really happy they didnt try to pull some BS to get the joker back. i love the joker but batman has so many really good villians to choose from. i hope its a polished game with little bugs in them. the first two games of the series were great right off the bat, very little bugs i beat both games with out needing to update the games to fix the problems it had.