Even if you’re a ninja billionaire with a massive underground cave, diving into a beefy title like Batman: Arkham Knight can be daunting. Think of Kotaku as your Alfred, delivering helpful info to your pointy ears. Read our tips, Master Bruce, and woe betide anyone who stands in your way.
As the third game in developer Rocksteady Studios’ long-running superhero series, Batman: Arkham Knight comes laden with a ton of new and old gameplay mechanics. Players will have lots of new gadgets, martial arts moves and plot points to keep up with. Consult the list of ideas to make the most of the Dark Knight’s latest video game outing.
Refresh Your Memory
The newest Batman game caps off a trilogy that started way back in 2008 with Arkham Asylum. (Arkham Origins doesn’t count as it was a prequel made by a different studio.) Even if you’ve played Asylum and its sequel Arkham City, you may not remember every detail or secondary character that moves through the plot. Hit up a wiki and re-familiarise yourself with the plots of the preceding games. No shame in that. Not everyone has time to replay that stuff!
Gotham City Is Dark. Make Sure You Can See.
Arkham Knight is a super-detailed game but it’s also a very dark one. In your rush to play, don’t forget to adjust your brightness settings. Doing so will make a big difference in what you’re able to pick out in the environment, which can be crucial when navigating in stealth or combat. You’ll also want to toggle subtitles on, so you don’t miss the best bits of dialogue.
The Batmobile Takes Some Getting Used To
It doesn’t handle like a normal video game car. Buttons that you expect to do things like braking actually launch weapons. It’s a good idea to run through the Batmobile tutorials that teach you how to use the Dark Knight’s ride a few times to get a feel for the car/tank hybrid.
Environmental Puzzles Involving the Batmobile Will Be a Pain in the Butt
Sometimes, you’ll need to remotely control Batman’s car so he can use its weapons or tools to get out of a tight spot. But figuring out exactly where you need to go can be a nuisance. One clue: if you see ramps or big movable platforms, you’re probably looking at an area that the Batmobile needs to get to.
Take Out the Medics First
Whenever you can, scan the throngs of soldiers before you engage them and identify the Medics. They can revive downed enemies multiple times until you take them out. Getting them out of the picture will make your life easier. And, hey, there’s a Waynetech Gadget Tech upgrade that instantly incapacitates Medics if they try to revive their buddies. So look into that.
Fear Multi-Takedowns Are Your Friends.
Arkham Knight introduces a new sort of takedown that lets you startle and knock out as many as five enemies in one chained QTE when fully upgraded. Seeing as how there are more bad guys roaming Gotham than ever before, it’s a good idea to master and max out the Fear takedown early and use it often.
Grapple Takedowns Are Great, Too
This is one of those moves that you’ve subconsciously wanted in a Batman game for years without knowing it. It lets you flow right into a takedown (or Fear Multi-Takedown if you have the option) right from grapple traversal. No more hanging from a ledge waiting for a guy to get into position.
Upgrade the Batsuit Against Firearms First
It’s a Batman game. The bad guys are going to have guns and you’re probably not going to be able to dodge every bullet. Amp up the armour of Bruce Wayne’s crime-fighting gear and you’ll have a little less to worry about.
Don’t Forget to Dodge
Dodging is the forgotten secret weapon in the Arkham games’ combat system. Striking and countering are great but if you flub the latter, your combo string breaks and you get less XP at the end of a fight. Evading attacks keeps combos going and is far more forgiving than nailing counters. Bigger combos mean bigger XP rewards and faster upgrades. Make Batman happy and dodge your brooding behind off.
Crime Scene Investigations Are Back and Better Than Ever
That’s good news and bad news. Like in Arkham Origins, Batman will come upon locations where he’ll have to piece together a chain of occurrences to figure out what happened. There’s still a connect-the-dots feel to these moments but the clues now flow along multiple vectors, including a tissue scanner that ferrets out clues from the skin, muscle and bone of dead bodies. This makes the crime-solving feel a bit more challenging than before, giving a nice nod to the Dark Knight’s moniker of World’s Greatest Detective.
Reduce the Cooldown of the Batmobile’s 60mm Cannon As Soon As You Can
The big gun on the Bat-tank is the only real weapon against armoured enemy tanks. But it takes a while to reload when you start up the game. Go to the Batmobile Weapons category in the upgrade menu and improve the reload time as soon as you’ve got the points to do so. You’re going to be fighting a lot of tanks during your time in Gotham and this upgrade will help a ton.
Upgrade the Batmobile’s Energy Absorption Efficiency Early On
The Batmobile has a two-tiered energy system, which sends power to secondary weapons for every drone tank you take down. These secondary weapons are the heavy-duty offensive options: missiles that do one-hit kills, viruses that turn enemy tanks against each other, that kind of thing. Amping up the Energy Absorption Efficiency skill lets you use these super-attacks more often. So get on that.
Don’t Be a Loner
Aside from the Batmobile, Arkham Knight‘s other big new feature is Dual Play, which lets players switch between the Dark Knight and his allies. Aside from the first battle when the feature is introduced, you’re almost never forced to play as Nightwing, Robin or Catwoman. But do take the opportunity to jump into another Bat-ally’s body, since it keeps combo strings going and offers up a different look to the beatdowns you’ll be handing out.
Don’t Skip the Side Missions
A fair chunk of players will want to plough straight through the game’s story missions to see how the drama between the Arkham Knight and the Batman ends. But you only get Batman: Arkham Knight‘s full ending if you complete 100% of the game. (Yes, that includes those annoying-arse Riddler missions.) So you should hit the sidequests as soon as they open up, especially since many are a good source of upgrade points. Some start appearing when you get new gear, like the missions that have you shut down the Penguin’s weapons caches after getting the Disruptor or getting tasked to shut down enemy watchtowers after getting the Remote Hacking Device. Seems like it will take a fair chunk of time doing it all but most of the work should be pretty dang fun.
Got the game already? Have some Bat-hints of your own to share? Sound off in the comments below.
Comments
28 responses to “Tips for Playing Batman: Arkham Knight”
Buy a console…
BOOM TISH
Yes i like how kotaku has completly ignored reporting on the pathetic pc port…
There was this earlier:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2015/06/batman-arkham-knights-pc-version-is-a-mess/#comment-3358889
I’m 10 hrs into the pc version and it is painful. even after using the console command to unlock the fps the game drops from 60fps to 11fps every time the un-disableable motion blur kicks in (the most annoying effect ever) and they ruin all the nice high res textures with film grain that you also can’t turn off.
They should ban motion-blur and film grain from all games permanently.
Playing Mass Effect without film grain just wouldn’t be the same though…
That’s wear I definitely turn it off. 🙂
I’d say even though the game pushes you towards it pretty hard just avoid the Batmobile. Upgrade it so you can keep time spent with it to a minimum but otherwise stay out of it. It’s not incredibly hard to use once you get used to it, just do the AR trials for it and you’re golden, but no matter how good you are with it the result is an experience that clashes with the rest of the game. In a series where Batman always looks like Batman no matter how terrible you are at playing it, the Batmobile never looks like Batman is driving it even if you’re a master.
Gliding is fun and it’s way more direct/practical than Arkham Origins where scaling a building usually meant finding a path. There’s also a really early upgrade that super charges your grapple boost so getting from A to B is actually sort of faster without the Batmobile.
Also the grapple chaining is a thing now which makes getting up multi-level stuff really quick. It’s sort of like how Catwoman climbed stuff, but rather than a preset path you can just go to anything you can grapple to. Just hit the bumper while you’re ziplining and you’ll grapple to the new target when you land.
I’m digging the Batmobile
BatDogMan. Especially in tank mode. Controls turned out way better than people made them out to be.I’m fine with the controls and to a degree the gameplay itself, if Destiny gave us tanks like this it’d be awesome, I’m just finding tank vs tank combat and sliding around the streets running people down clashes with the rest of the game. Atmosphere and story are a huge part of the appeal of the series for me. The fact the combat is delicious and brilliantly cinematic is just a bonus that enhances that. I know Batman isn’t afraid of excess force and aggressive driving, but this is more like the Boss from Saints Row is driving.
Wow, what an asshole wall to put the ending behind. Getting 100% in these games is stupidly intense and require you to do things that sometimes the game doesn’t recognize. I’m still stuck at 99% on Arkham City because I can’t jump from one thug to another due to the terrible input delay on Ps3.
i dont think it counts acheesements as part of 100% criteria, infact alot of games dont count unless they are story related
I think you misspelled ach-
…no wait, yours sounds better
It’s just all the side-quests, including Riddler’s stuff. I think that is limited to everything on the Most Wanted menu, but I’d do the AR challenges too just to be safe.
Means I’ll skip for a while…. These killed city for me.
243 in this game, as opposed to the I think 400 in Arkham City.
240 in Asylum…. But that was tapes, teeth, puzzles and trophies.
Refund it if you bought it from steam.
I got it from GMG, but I haven’t added it to my library yet, so I’m trying to get a refund from them and have them revoke the key.
Not getting the hate for the batmobile? Finding it quite cool myself.
Yeah those puzzle sections are the best part of the game so far for me.
Although I did have to change the control options to toggle battle mode, that way driving has normal R2=accelerate and L2=brake/reverse.
Same. I’m digging it especially in tank mode. Pew pew pew.
BOOM! PEW PEW PEW!
This article should be “Tips for being able to play batman arkham knight”
Buy game from JB for $69
Go home, install day one patch
Browse console store while waiting and spot the $60 season pass
Eject disc and throw game out nearest window
It baffles me that they get away with charging that much for season passes. I blame BF and their overpriced ones.
1. Redeem key on steam
2. wait for 30GB+ to download on ADSL
3. Come home and realise that the download of 30GB+ has decided to restart
4. Go play WOW