Batman™: Arkham Knight

I went back to Arkham Knight after finishing both Asylum and City back-to-back, expecting a confident swan song. What I got was about two-thirds of one, with a whole extra game bolted on involving the Batmobile that nobody seems to have questioned loudly enough during development. Let me be straight with you: the parts that feel like Batman are genuinely outstanding. The parts that feel like a military tank simulator are not. On foot, this is the Arkham series at its mechanical peak. The FreeFlow combat has been expanded with quick-gadget inputs mid-combo, meaning you can chain batarangs, explosive gel, and the bat claw into your strikes without breaking rhythm. The new Fear Takedown lets Batman chain up to five silent eliminations in rapid succession, which is the kind of power fantasy the series has always been building toward. Predator sections, where you stalk armed enemies from gargoyles and vents, are the best they have ever been: more enemy types (medics who can revive downed thugs mid-brawl, armored units that force you to improvise), and smarter AI that actually reacts to your patterns. The Dual Play mechanic, letting you switch control between Batman, Robin, Nightwing, or Catwoman during certain encounters, adds real texture to combat that would otherwise feel familiar. Gotham itself is enormous, reportedly around five times the size of Arkham City, and gliding and grappling across it at speed still holds up. Then there is the Batmobile. It is fully drivable and genuinely fun to cruise around in for the first hour. The problem is that Rocksteady built the entire enemy army around making it mandatory. Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight flood the streets with remote-controlled drone tanks, which conveniently can only be destroyed by switching the Batmobile into its Battle Mode and trading cannon fire with wave after wave of identical targets. The Riddler, historically one of the best sources of side content in the series, has you driving timed race tracks. Several major boss fights resolve into tank duels. The repetition is real, and players who bounced off it are not being precious about difficulty, they are responding to a genuine design problem. The story lands somewhere in the middle. Kevin Conroy's Batman and the supporting cast (including a returning Mark Hamill as Joker, handled in a way I will not spoil) deliver performances that anchor the whole thing emotionally. The Scarecrow plot gives the game its best moments, particularly a running psychological thread involving fear toxin that keeps the tone genuinely dark. The titular Arkham Knight himself is a weaker element: the identity reveal will not surprise anyone with passing knowledge of the comics, and the character spends most of the game barking threats over your radio while you dismantle his drones. The side missions range from a genuinely unsettling serial killer hunt and a tight Two-Face bank-robbery arc, to repetitive watchtower clearances that exist only to pad out completion percentages. On PC in 2025, the game runs acceptably on modern hardware. The infamously broken 2015 launch, when the port was pulled from sale entirely for months due to unplayable performance, is a piece of history rather than a current concern for most rigs. The game is capped at 30fps by default, though community mods address that, and the trade-off for extra visual fidelity over the previous two games is visible. If you are buying it now on a reasonably modern machine, it will work. It is not a technical showcase the way it was designed to be, but it gets out of its own way. Play the Arkham trilogy in order if you can: Asylum, then City, then this. Jumping in cold will rob the ending of its weight, and this game absolutely wants you to feel the weight of its ending.

Alex · Scout Team

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