i recently completed this game and enjoyed most of it more than i thought i would from general opinion
to start i think Asylum is far and away the best of the series and after playing it the first time thought it should be considered alongside the best games ever made, almost as if it was a classic nintendo game
i enjoyed City the second time through but all the talk of improving upon the one 'flaw' of asylum - its flat narrative - left me disappointed as the story in city is very ramshackle and just throws villains at the screen for the sake of it then kills them all off when it doesnt know how to end everything
to this end i think origins actually had probably the best narrative of the series, i still think its a flaw of the series as a whole but origins made the best attempt. the introduction of the actual detective work / rewind feature was probably the greatest part of the new additions and game as a whole. It took what was the better part of city for me and made you actually use Batman's intellect, something which the recent games and films dont really touch upon as much as the gadgets and strength or psychology of batman
i wish they had made more of black mask but the denouement tied it up cleverly enough that i ended up enjoying it. though i still think black mask is under-utilised in batman media, i think the dynamic between him and bruce/batman could be as potent as joker (i've only read the more famous graphic novels so if anyone has any suggestions on black mask reading i'd appreciate it)
with this game i feel like its getting closer to a batman whodunnit, in the line of long halloween, which would be great to play but the games still feel disjointed, asylum was the tightest narrative but it felt flat because they'd tried to stretch what wouldve made a very interesting 30min or hour episode of the TV show into an 8 hour game which i understand is hard to deliver and something many narrative games struggle with; how do you provide 10 or even 30 hours of interactive entertainment with a convincing and enticing narrative over the same period of time, the equivalent of an entire trilogy or tv show season
the real problem with the game and the main thing that will keep me from replaying it -unlike its predecessors - is its technical problems, frame rate was (playing digital version on ps3) consistently terrible throughout, as in constantly, which i could only forgive because i wanted to know more about the story otherwise i would have stopped playing. But it made flying through the city a chore, despite being bigger / having more room to fly around and more atmospheric - it really hit the tone of 'Gotham' for me far better than City, if i ever get a gaming PC i'll definitely look into this
on the whole i ended up enjoying it, the premise is clever enough and handled fairly well throughout the game but technical problems completely let it down as well as just a general roughshod nature to everything - ironically the opposite of the previous games which i remember to be very competently made with a lacklustre, rushed or confusing narrative
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