3/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Batman™: Arkham Knight.

Batman Arkham Knight is a classic case of style over substance, but who really cares. In all honesty I had this game ranked a lot higher in my head from when I first played it years ago, there's very few series that manage to create a feeling like the Arkham games can. Between their flashy combat and the consistency of it's Gothic art direction makes the Arkham series one of a kind and Batman Arkham Knight is no exception. But when it really comes down to it, there's so much holding this game back from being truly great, but first lets start with the positives. Besides maybe Red Dead Redemption II, Arkham Knight might be the most gorgeous game I've ever played. It's genuinely hard to believe that this game is nearly 10 years old because it has not aged a day. I played this game on PC at max settings and it looks better than 95% of Triple A titles I've played recently. The way the never ending rain settles upon Gotham with it's constant neon everywhere just looks phenomenal. It's really hard to put into words just how fantastic Arkham Knight looks, so I'll just leave it at that. Combat has also improved drastically, for one it just feels a lot better to control, whether that be because of the sound design or the fluidity of how Batman moves, It all just works so well. The new fear mechanic is also a welcome inclusion, even if it makes some encounters a little too easy. The story is the real highlight for me, especially as someone that's not familiar with comic books I had no clue who the Arkham Knight was, I found that twist to be genuinely intriguing, especially with how it develops over time. Scarecrow is what I imagined Hugo Strange was supposed to be in City, I found him to be a genuinely great main villain in this. My favorite aspect of the story has to be the Joker angle with Batman going slowly insane, without getting in spoilers I thought the climax of this plotline to be worth the wait. What Arkham Knight gains in it's visuals, combat and story, it looses in depth and mission structure. When I played through Asylum and City I never really gave enough credit to just how well those games flow in terms of level design. While fairly linear in how you can approach a mission, they flow a lot better than they would in a more open ended approach. Instead in Arkham Knight everything is just somewhat open with very little to actually do. Sure you have these very elaborate set pieces but almost everything interesting is either story related or visual, the gameplay just tends to stay stagnant for it's entire runtime. For example there's hardly any boss fights in this game for whatever reason. It felt like in City there was one every hour but in this you have the Arkham Knight fight and some Batmobile sections, but that's about it unless you're counting the expansion side content and the episodes, which I'll get to. The majority of the actual gameplay is screwing around in your Batmobile in the open world, which I just wasn't particularly fond of doing. For whatever reason the heavy emphasis on the Batmobile kind of ruins a lot of the fun in this game. I love the sections when I'm simply playing as Batman running around and fighting bad guys like in the other games, but whenever the game forces me to use the Batmobile to navigate a level the pacing just comes to a screeching halt. I didn't play the Arkham games for tank sections, I came to them to play as Batman. I'll admit I was originally going to give this a much lower score, but after playing the side content expansions and the episodes I have a lot more respect for this game as a result. These sections are what I wanted the main game to feel like, the Batgirl episode in particular is a real highlight and is easily the best part of this entire game. It has linear level design akin to the earlier games, a fun story and an actual boss fight. After doing some research into the reception of this game, it seems I'm not alone in thinking the Batmobile sections weren't great, so Rocksteady pulled a 180 and pretty much removed all Batmobile aspects in these DLCs. There's one section I can clearly think of that involved the Batmobile, but everything else is Batmobile free which I'm a big fan of. I know It must sound like I really disliked this game, when in reality I didn't. While I definitely believe this to be the worst Arkham game, It's not a bad game, and there's still plenty of fun to be had here. If you're someone that's really into photo mode for games, I highly recommend checking it out as Arkham Knight is gorgeous.