“Batman: Arkham Knight” is the finale of the critically and commercially successful “Batman: Arkham” series and was one of the most heavily anticipated video games released this year. While the game is certainly fun to play and the graphics are beautiful, the game suffers from a number of writing, design, and technical problems that prevent it from meeting the expectations that the game’s marketing had been raising for nearly two years.
“I wanted it to be as good as ‘Arkham Asylum’, but I didn’t expect it to top ‘Arkham City’,” said junior Aric Sweeny. Unfortunately for him, the game doesn’t measure up to either of its predecessors.
It should be mentioned that I played the game on a Personal Computer (PC), which was an absolutely terrible experience from a performance standpoint. I ran the game using some of the best hardware available and its awful optimization still resulted in an unacceptable amount of stuttering, glitches, and crashes.
Charging $60 dollars for a video game only for it to not work properly is something that should not be encouraged. Potential customers should instead buy the Playstation 4 or Xbox One versions. However, even on those platforms the game is far from being the grand finale that fans anticipated.
The game’s story also suffers from problems despite its clear attempt at a more dramatic, character-driven experience than the previous games. The game’s largest plot thread centers around the identity of a mysterious doppelganger to Batman named “The Arkham Knight”, for whom the game is named. If you’re at all familiar with Batman lore you’ll know exactly who this guy is the second you hear him speak – effectively ruining the game’s plot.
The excellent stealth and combat mechanics that the Arkham series is famous for return once again and are as fun as ever, but regrettably there’s precious little of them because of the game’s insistence on you instead fighting tanks using a version of the iconic Batmobile that has enough guns attached to it to invade a small country. The very appearance of this thing will make anyone raise their eyebrow and think Doesn’t Batman not kill?
It feels like half of the game is spent inside this terrifying bat-tank, and while strafing around and firing at tanks is enjoyable at first, the overuse and repetitive nature of these segments gets old, fast. This banality combined with the embarrassingly predictable plot amounts to a series finale that Gotham did not deserve or need.
