Why Batman Arkham Knight Shouldn’t Be Game of the Year

The Dark Disappointment.
arkham knight

I get that this is all based on comics, a medium where Lex Luthor stole 40 cakes, but why in the seven fucks would you tell people to get out of town and then just gas it when only your private army and the bad guys you personally invited to join you in this plan make up the majority of the population at that point? Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, and Scarecrow are the only bad guys in the game who had some kind of reason to be involved beyond just showing up to show up. Even Joker just feels like he’s there more out of obligation than out of real need for the story, and while Mark Hamill is once again excellent in the role, his side plot just goes to show how overused he is.

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This was an issue in City too; bad guys just being there so Batman has someone from his rogues gallery to beat up every couple of hours. Two-Face and Penguin don’t have anything to do in the story beyond “hey, they’ve been in the last two, so why the hell not?” The real purpose to their hanging around is to justify their appearance for the side missions, and while that’s all well and good, the time spent on little divergent starter missions like Riddler’s whole thing with Catwoman feel like DLC criminals awkwardly stapled into the main plot. Even villains who literally are just side missions, like Deathstroke or Azrael, don’t get the due they deserve; you spend most of your time breaking Deathstroke’s stuff while he insults you, and Azrael’s missions make you wonder why they even included him in City for how much of a non-entity he is.

Arkham Knight is the longest game in the series, but that’s not the praise it sounds like. For the former, it means that the story annoyingly pads itself out and goes on about an hour or two longer than it really needs to. Aside from the story problems and the incredibly bad decision to lock the full ending behind completing everything (the Riddler missions aren’t that fun), blame can be laid on the big new feature that is the Batmobile.

arkham knight

It’s easily one of Batman’s most iconic gadgets next to the Batarang, and the initial announcement had plenty of excitement attached to it. Unfortunately, the vehicle itself isn’t all that fun to play; controls are awkward, switching from normal mode to “battle mode” is just stupid (why would you not want it to be in battle mode?), and the game practically forces you to use it, either with an annoying puzzle or a tedious battle with multiple tanks at once that quickly wears out its welcome. There’s one mission during the tail end of the game where you have to outrun a giant drill. It should be a tense but fun highlight, but after the cutscene ends, the game has your car facing the business end of the drill as it’s ready to tear you to pieces, because that clearly makes sense.

More than anything else, Arkham Knight’s biggest glaring issue is that it isn’t really sure what it wants its title character (the first one) to be. The game literally has a mechanic built around Batman fighting alongside his family, then the story forces them offstage unless it’s to put them in peril. It wants to give him the most iconic superhero line ever, but it feels like it’s only in there because they’ve got Kevin Conroy in the role. If Arkham Knight was just sure of what it wanted from its lead character and had better writing and pacing, it could’ve been a satisfying conclusion. As it is, it’s just like Dark Knight Rises: great, until you stop and think about it.

Guess this really is how the Batman died.


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Author
Justin Carter
Justin was a former Staff Writer for Twinfinite between 2014 and 2017 who specialized in writing lists and covering news across the entire video games industry. Sometimes a writer, always a dork. When he isn't staring in front of a screen for hours, he's probably reading comics or eating Hot Pockets. So many of them.