3/5 ★ – TNGLiam's review of Batman: Arkham VR.

Platform: PS4 Time Played: 2.9 hours Status: Completed Friends have been on my ass for years to play the Batman Arkham series. I mean, I own all of them, but they’ve been unfortunately banished to the backlog. This recent PSVR fix I’ve been on guided me towards Batman: Arkham VR, and knowing that by the time I finally get around to the Arkham series proper that I most likely won’t have access to a PSVR, I figured I’d give this a whirl knowing it wasn’t going to be all to special, and that assumption was right. What we have here is a brief 45-minute long interlude that takes place between Arkham City and Arkham Knight, despite being released a year after the latter. Now like I said I haven’t played the main series yet, but I am aware that Bruce gets infected with Joker’s titan-infested blood and that poses a lot of problems for him with hallucinations of Joker and whatnot. From what I understand, the events of the game take place within a dream that Bruce is having under the influence of Joker’s blood, although nothing in the game itself really suggests that besides the ultimate twist here being that Bruce killed Nightwing, his death being the inciting incident of this story, when he is alive and well in Arkham Knight. So actually getting back to the plot at hand, Alfred informs Bruce that both Nightwing and Robin are missing. Robin’s tracker is off, so he goes to Nightwing only to find his corpse. Knowing that the only witness works for the Penguin, he goes to him, leading him to a morgue, where he learns of an explosive that killed some men in one of the Penguin’s clubs. This bomb brings him to a sewer, where Robin has been caged, surrounded by waters with Killer Croc lurking. Killer Croc “kills” Robin throwing Bruce has a hallucination of him being locked in Arkham Asylum for the death of Nightwing, as its revealed that Bruce was actually the one to have killed him as Joker took control over his body. Then cut to credits. Like I said, this is “all a dream,” but the game doesn’t articulate that very well at all during its brief 45-minute runtime. The rest of my 3-hour long playthrough consisted of me just finding all of the Riddler’s shits and some other small checklists and trophies after finishing the main story. I feel like if I wasn’t watching a video guide that these things would take a good bit longer for me to uncover. But also a majority of that time was genuinely spent in loading screens as playing this on a base PS4 takes forever to load on areas. You get your usual costumes and alternate skins for the Batmobile for solving the Riddler’s stuff, but even then you only see the Batmobile when going into it before finding Nightwing, and you obviously don’t really see your outfits because, ya know, the camera is your literal eyes. A lot of Batman’s dialog here is also really wonky and genuinely feels like placeholder or tutorial text. Everything he says is so surface level, especially when it comes to talking about that damn “forensic scanner.” It just really took me out of things, especially when he spends the first third of the game a mute, not saying fuck all until he sees Nightwing and acts entirely unsurprised and unshocked by his death. “But he’s the one that killed Nightwing!” Yeah sure but he doesn’t know that yet. The grappling hook and forensic scanner both feel really automatic with not a whole lot of actual gameplay to them. This really is just an incredibly brief storyline that you witness through the eyes of Batman himself. There are two really long and boring elevator sequences here too. One where you suit up that really just serves to teach you the basics of where what is and how to use it, but then is followed by a really long and drawn out elevator. Same when you’re going down into Arkham Asylum, just a long ass elevator that takes it’s sweet time. Like genuinely what was the need to have not one but two long ass pointless elevator scenes? Its not like this shit is Evangelion where it serves purpose, this shit is probably just one giant loading screen that had its own long ass loading screen to get there. One thing I did find fun though was the target practice with the Batarangs, although that was only after finding out that they auto-aim at whatever you’re directly looking at with the headset, so if you aim where you feel will hit the target, if your eyes are locked directly straight on that shit, well you’re shit out of luck. Genuinely had to plunge through a Reddit thread to find that shit buried deep in the replies. The little thing where you scan people’s blood to see if its infected with Joker’s DNA only to take a sample of your own to have the machine read out once again that Joker’s DNA has contaminated your blood is also really neat. There is a lot of neat stuff in the Batcave but revisiting it is all fucky because of the mission setup. You gotta wait for Alfred to finish talking about Nightwing and Robin and only then you can start doing stuff, and when you return back to him he has more dialog. Either way, Batman: Arkham VR isn’t the best introduction to the Arkham series, and I know that. When this game launched I swear it was like $30, and is probably still around that price on digital storefronts now when this should really be worth $5-10 at the least which is why I’m glad that I was able to borrow a friend’s copy. Otherwise, it’d definitely be a lot cooler if I had already played the main series, but even then I’m certain I’d still like it just as much. Thankfully a much better Batman VR game came along down the line in Batman: Arkham Shadow, which while unfortunately a Meta Quest 3 exclusive, still seems to be fantastic, so I really do hope to get to that someday.