Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was ‘free’ on PlayStation Plus, less than a year after its reviled release. I downloaded it and was about to play it when I stopped myself. Why bother? Why play a game I know I’m going to dislike? Instead, I decided to replay the old Rocksteady Batman games I love (only to write an article moaning about one of those old games anyway). Arkham Asylum and Arkham City were huge games for me, I replayed them endlessly for a few years, but this was my first time revisiting them since the Return to Arkham remaster in 2016. Experiencing them again was fantastic, they hold up, so I decided to replay Arkham Knight, a game I’ve always had some issues with. My feelings solidified on this replay, and I rediscovered the reasons why the game fails for me.
But first it has to be said that the graphics and much of the gameplay are still excellent. It’s insane that Arkham Knight is nearly 10 years old and still this beautiful. The atmosphere, the rain, the visuals, the water physics. All exceptional, and it feels great to play, perfecting the combat of the previous games. The one gameplay hang-up is the Batmobile. It’s not bad but is overused. We fans demanded its inclusion in previous games yet now we’ve given far too much at once. There are endless chases and tank battles, which are fun but only the first hundred times. The Batmobile stealth sections are poorly designed, however, with the words ‘tanks’ and ‘sneaky’ being video game antonyms. And don’t speak to me about Deathstroke being defeated in a stealth tank section; a massive downgrade from the Origins fight.
With that positive paragraph out of the way (it was intended to be when I started it) I can get into the main reasons for Arkham Knight being a disappointment. Perhaps the most disastrous: Paul Dini wasn’t involved. The previous Arkham games felt like they were extensions of the nineties animated series, thanks to the involvement of that show’s best writer Paul Dini. He was unceremoniously ditched for Arkham Knight, with Rocksteady relying on in-house writers instead. That was a bad call. His balance of humour and darkness, of the serious and the wacky, is gone. The game has a different tone to previous entries. It’s too militaristic. An emotionless Terminator-esque Batman in armour and a tank taking on a private military of soldiers and drones. Dini’s sensibilities are lost and the game rarely feels comic-booky. The characterisation and dialogue and storytelling in general feel weaker. There’s just much less personality to everything.
“Don’t worry. Lucius made a spare.” That one line encapsulates the game’s storytelling issues. The Batmobile is destroyed and despite being called “one of a kind” earlier in the game, its replacement appears minutes later. That’s just one example to how there are no consequences to be found in Arkham Knight. There seems to be a fear of shaking things up. Barbara is killed halfway through and wow, I thought, that changes everything, creates some new interesting drama between Batman and Gordon… until she’s revealed to still be alive. It was a trick. On Batman but more so on us the player. The character of the Arkham Knight himself should be the personification of consequences but he too is nullified, with his story changing nothing.
Scarecrow is the game’s primary antagonist but by making him so his character is changed completely. He’s totally different to how he was in Arkham Asylum. No longer the insane doctor, he’s now a calm and collected mastermind. He’s just Hugo Strange 2.0, complete with emotionless announcements over a city-wide PA. If the story is that all Gotham’s villains unite, Crane is the wrong bad guy to be at the centre of it. Scarecrow should be a wildcard, and the writers have to change him into a different character to make fit him the role they’ve decided for him. And while the villains are supposed to be united it never feels like that. They’re all doing their own thing, bosses in different side missions, and there’s no reason for them to be in cahoots. The game needed to pair them off in unique combinations and mix their villain plots. Actually have them interact and work together rather than taken out one by one.
The Arkham Knight acts as Scarecrow’s enforcer, although little reason is given why they need to be working together. The Knight’s identity is the central mystery of the game but that’s all it is: a question. There’s little to the character before the reveal and I was surprised just how little he has to do. He bumps into Batman twice very briefly but then just broadcasts some messages to taunt the Dark Knight. Once his identity is revealed, the character disappears completely, only appearing for a split second in an ending cutscene. There’s no resolution to his story or the ideas he introduces about Batman’s responsibility for the Bat Family. He’s of course Jason Todd, with the Knight being a way to tell a Red Hood story while contriving to keep Arkham in the game’s title. The flashbacks to Jason’s torture are effective but as soon as they happen it’s obvious he’s going to be revealed as the Arkham Knight.
Rounding out the trifecta of storylines, we have the return of the Joker. However, Joker isn’t as dominant as I remember him being. I think he’s a nice addition, trapped in Batman’s mind, slowly taking him over, and commenting on all the action. It’s like we’re playing the game with a Joker commentary track. A decade after first playing, I think Joker’s appearance (despite dying in the previous game) works better now because there’s been more distance between the release of Arkham Origins, which had a similar twist of the Joker suddenly becoming prominent. Yet it still feels like one of several plot threads loosely connected that never come together as tightly as they need to. We have Scarecrow’s plot, the Bat Family issues with Jason and Barbara, and then Joker taking over Batman’s mind. They interconnect but don’t feel like a cohesive narrative.
But really I’m less interested in the main plot and more interested in the side missions. That’s where these open world Batman games shine and by that metric Arkham Knight is a mixed bag. After years of theories and expectations following their appearances in Arkham City, Hush and Azrael are huge disappointments. Even now, with a decade of reconciling, those side missions are lame, especially Hush. It’s clear Rocksteady couldn’t think of a story for him but had to follow through on the tease in the previous game. Deacon Blackfire is another notable weak point, restricted to one tiny mission and lacking any explanation or exploration.
On the other end of the spectrum we get Professor Pyg. He’s one of the highlights of the game. I love investigating the crime scenes, finding the clues, and the confrontation is appropriately dark and unsettling. The DLC offers some of the game’s other great side missions. Not Mad Hatter but the Killer Croc and Mr Freeze storylines are strong and it’s questionable that they were held back from the base game. And, of course, perhaps controversially, I love the Riddler trophies. There are plenty to collect but it doesn’t feel as exhausting as Arkham City did. The final fight with a big Riddler mech suit is rather lame, however. He’s not a villain to have a fist fight with; the game needed a more imaginative and cerebral conclusion.
I do miss indoor locations in Arkham Knight. There are only three main buildings/airships to enter so the game is missing that contained, oppressively claustrophobic atmosphere the series began with. The Batmobile sadly defines all aspects of gameplay. So much of the game takes place outside on wide, open streets. The one great location is the movie studios, with all the different sets providing variety for combat and predator challenges. The studios are the location for the infected blood plot, which I like a lot and wish was focused on more. The storyline is a consequence of the previous game and the one supernatural, comic-booky plot point in the whole game. But then all the new Jokers die quickly and the game moves on. The Henry Adams twist is decent and I wish we saw more from him but as soon as he gets interesting he is instantly removed from the story, just like the Arkham Knight.
The are some good new additions to the series I enjoy in Arkham Knight. I love the GCPD hub location that slowly fills up with captured criminals, but it takes too long to get down there. I’m sure it’s to disguise loading but driving down the packing garage gets tiring; just give me a front door to walk through. The new enemy types and fear takedowns are cool, and ‘dual play’ is fun even though the missions utilising it are a little repetitive. It would have been better if Nightwing or Robin joined Batman for a section of the main campaign to discuss Jason and explore the Bat Family aspects rather than be separated on side missions. But I really dislike that there’s no audio chat function when communicating with Alfred or Oracle. In the other games you could continue playing while talking to allies but here Batman opens up a video display on his arm, slowing the game down.
So, we get to the ending, which I don’t think works at all. I like the idea of Batman not just representing fear for criminals but hope for Gotham, like in Matt Reeves’ The Batman, which is an idea that can get lost in the grimdark Batman stories. But the finale here feels like a manufactured ending to the story, not a natural conclusion. Why does Batman give into Scarecrow rather than just beating him up? The writers force him to be bested without a good reason why (other than they’ve decided this is the last game so it needs to end here), and then he’s demasked and his legend ended. I get the idea but that doesn’t feel like the conflict the game has been dealing with, with the Joker toxin plot not factoring into that decision and the Jason Todd/Bat Family subplot lacking resolution.
Batman fakes his death to begin again, but surely everyone will realise that. It’s obvious. As much as the game wants the ending to be some definitive moment, as with so much of the storytelling, it’s just going to return to the status quo. Give it a few months after the credits roll, and it’ll be back to normal with Batman publicly fighting villains. The only difference is that Bruce Wayne is dead to the world but Arkham Knight isn’t a Bruce Wayne story, it’s a Batman story. It would be better if there was genuine ambiguity to Bruce’s/Batman’s fate, that the fear-inducing creature at the end may or may not be him, but it doesn’t feel like there’s any other option than it being Bruce Wayne back as Batman. So what was the point of all this? Disappointingly, Batman: Arkham Knight doesn’t conclude any of the themes and ideas of the game, let alone the trilogy.
