I’m not sure Batman: Arkham Knight is a game anyone can ever finish. There’s so much to it, even if you skip the 200+ Riddler trophies and the mountains of “AR” challenges. I’ve needed to clear space on my PS4 and was considering deleting it before going back and realising there’s more fun stuff in this game I’d never done.
I’d never finished the game’s Season of Infamy DLC, which adds a quartet of multi-stage quests to the game’s open world. I’d done the Ra’s Al Ghul quest one year ago, but until this week had never finished the quest to find the cops kidnapped by the Mad Hatter and hadn’t even started the missions involving Killer Croc and Mr. Freeze.
The Croc missions are mostly set in a crashed, formerly airborne prison and offer the eye candy that the Arkham games excel at: spectacular-looking environments and stunning, bone-crunching combat animations.
The Mr. Freeze stuff continues that character’s moving story from the previous game, Arkham City. It ends with some of Arkham Knight‘s controversial Batmobile tank gameplay, but I liked the narrative resolution to Freeze’s drama (he froze his dying wife a decade ago in hopes of saving her, she gets unfrozen, stuff happens).
The Season of Infamy’s Killer Croc fight brings back the game’s rare but oh-so-satisfying tag-team combat moves.
I had barely touched Arkham Knight‘s standalone episodes. I know that the Red Hood, Harley Quinn and Robin adventures that were released after the main game are short and supposedly not that satisfying, but I have higher hopes for the Batgirl-centric prequel episode and the Nightwing coda. Arkham Knight generally plays slickly.
It’s a pretty easy game, but the focus on fleshing out Batman’s world with small bits of character development amid satisfying combat and exploration have me hopeful I’ll dig some of these episodes.
The Riddler trophies are better than I remembered. I don’t have time to go back and get the 100-odd Riddler trophies scattered in the open world that I never got before. I do appreciate, though, that many of them are hidden in rooms that function like little Zelda-style puzzle challenges. You can easily find a trophy’s location, but getting it? That’s often trickier.
To grab one this week, I needed to make Batman stand on a pressure switch, which activated a cluster of armed robots that I couldn’t pass… except I eventually realised that I could throw a remote-control Batarang past the robots and hit a switch that would drop the ceiling on them and allow Batman safe exit. There’s a lot more like that and, really, who else outside of Nintendo is doing this Zelda-style stuff?
The late-game enemy barks are good. The average enemy gangster and grunt in Arkham Knight can be heard on Batman’s radio as you glide or grapple past them. Sure enough, a lot of them have funny things to say about the game’s final plot twist. I’ll not mention it here for those of you who also left the game unfinished and want to be surprised.
Arkham Knight has a lot of baggage. The Batmobile gameplay was controversial. The PC release was such a disaster that the game’s publisher temporarily removed it from sale. Its DLC was released in an unsatisfying drip feed. My colleague, the Dishonored puzzle scribbler Kirk Hamilton, already re-assessed the whole package last year and found that it’s really good.
I’d not found time to go back until now. I’m impressed and somehow, I’m going to find time to play more.
Comments
8 responses to “Batman: Arkham Knight Is Still Worth Going Back To”
is the PC performance still a pile of turd or has it been improved with the patches they released?
I got the game for free and uninstalled when i problems and never looked back
In my experience it never made it. I had to rebuy on ps4 to get the experience i paid for on pc.
Most retailers didnt refund pc purchases despite WBs offer. 🙁
No. It’s still a steaming pile of dogturd. If you have a console get it on there. You can get it super cheap at eb or jbhifi.
thanks, nice to know they just gave up lol
It’s worth another shot, since you’ve already got it. Updates fixed pretty much all issues on my PC (GTX 780, i7-4770k, 8GB DDR3). YMMV, but worth a shot before buying console.
Well, this was meant to be in response to @sielinth
I was playing it a few months ago and found that performance was vastly improved.
More than playable I thought, and far better than the abysmal state it was in closer to launch. Obviously though everyone’s computer is generally different, so mileage could very well vary.
I finished all missons including dlc, except for the Riddler trophies – i normally do them but there were so many batmobile focused ones i cant stand.
This game is my least favourite in the franchise, i hated the bat-tank and found the visual style not as good as previous games.
I still enjoyed playing it, but it definitely was missing the ‘feel’ of the other games – arkham asylum is my favourite – I’ve finished that 4 times.
I loved this game. Didn’t mention the mad hatter missions. They were a high point.
Batmobile gets old and the boss fights suck. But everything else is great. The disappointments are strong through. The confrontation with Deathstroke was a big let down.
No probs with performance on my rig though. I played it on ps4 first which was fine, but for the ultimate, i go my PC. It’s quite insane how good it looks and how nice it runs.
I never got to play it because after waiting two years for them to fix the PC version I forgot about it. I still want to, and will try to with the latest version. I even liked Origins for what it was, a Batman/Joker origin story, so I can’t see how I wouldn’t like this.
I played the whole game on easy once on Xbox and then played the whole thing again on normal and got 100% and did all the DLC. Now I start over on PC.
GTA V story completed 5 or 6 times. Gotten 100% twice.
This is what my life is.