LK ranking:
- Batman: Arkham City
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Batman: Arkham Origins
- Batman: Arkham Knight
- Gotham Knights
- Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (GAAS hence worst rating, no need to play it :P)
Personally I found Knight best of the first four games by good margin
The batmobile + dead Joker constantly making fun of Bruce just made my day…and incredible graphics even to this day
I remember doing the Batmobile’s transformation from combat to race (?) modes, while driving round some cool corner and thinking whoa - next gen is here :)
Knight took away my favorite thing from the previous games, the Metroidvania aspect.
Hmm, I don’t particularly care about that. But didn’t City and Origins already dispense with that approach? I remember them being open world too, albeit smaller.
I didn’t play Origins, but City still had many elements that were basically discrete levels, a la Asylum. Even Knight did, but only a handful and very short.
Personally Asylum is still my favourite for that reason, though I liked a lot of the QoL and polish that City provided. It really had a sense of place, whereas the open world never really added much to City (and while it made more sense in Knight with the vehicle emphasis, the game suffered overall.
I don’t get the description of Asylum or City as Metroidvanias. They take place in a world that is interconnected and gated by acquiring tools and abilities, but the way they give access to those tools and abilities is entirely scripted and linear. There’s no exploration, you never choose when to take on a boss or go back to explore a new area of the map that was previously inaccessible. You go to sewer and fight the sewer boss when the game decides it’s time.
By the time we get to Arkham Knight it’s more open, but in an Ubisoft way.
Finished this morning. I enjoyed it quite a bit. No, it is not as good as rocksteady trilogy, but it kept me well engaged for some 30 hours, all of it playing as Batgirl. Combat is mechanically simpler, the loot mechanics are annoying and unnecessary, writing is not particularly great. But the main missions were all fun, with some nice atmospheric interiors, the city is also good looking, Batgirl is likeable protagonist with great booty to boot. The “main” sidemissions about going after Freeze, Clayface and Harley were all fun to play through too. There is a chase sequence with Clayface that was particularly awesome.
Regarding the technical state, I had two strange framedrops from 60 to zero that required game reload to fix. Other than that, no bugs, no crashes, no framerate dips below 60. So I consider PC version to be near flawless now.
7.5/10
