Why were people so dismissive or negative about this game?

This is a question that has plagued me since I finished Arkham Knight.

I am currently on my 3rd playthough of it and it is still an extremely impressive and addictive game. Its a way more open environment than the previous ones and has a method of transportation with the grappling hook that is tons of fun to use. It also has Far Cry-like outposts and activities to finish which add to the addictive nature of it. Its essentially Far Cry: Batman, and as a Batman and Far Cry fan, all of it is amazing.

Now, for the life of me, I cannot understand why people were so down on this game. I think the PC release really coloured people's view on it, which I feel is a little unfair. I know the Batmobile sections were polarizing but even then, its maybe at most 5-8% of a very large game.

Its easily the best Arkham game. Well, anyway, this may be the alcohol on Christmas day speaking but I could never understand why people were so negative or dismissive about it. Obviously if you don't like the Arkham games, then fair enough. But as a game in that series, its definitely the best one and also feels mechanically quite different in some ways. The story is not the best but to be fair, all the Arkham games have kind of weak stories.

I was bored through most of it, and feel it's the weakest of the Rocksteady ones by a fairly large margin. Full of filler and I spent way too much time in that bloody car. Apart from a moment here and there it was just awful.

It's ok for you to like something other people don't. Even if that puts you in the minority.

That said I'm on the same page as @morningstar

@katygaga: I agree with you 100%

@morningstar: fair enough, I suppose. I just could not have had a more different experience than what you described.

As a Batman fan, its cool to see him essentially, singlehandedly dismantling an entire army piece by piece that has been terrorizing the city. The nature of this game simply wasn't present in the previous 3, each of which were great in their own ways as well.

@mister_v: I'm aware I'm in the minority, thats why Im asking the topic.

its cool if you don't like the game.

City had far more filler than Knight.

I think it's the second best one they've released. The complaints about the Batmobile and how required it is is the most overblown thing of 2015.

I liked it quite a bit, but I understand the negative sentiment.

It is the fourth game in the serie and the biggest addition is one that most disliked (the batmobile). The open world is also extremely static, and thus I'm not sure you can compare it to Far Cry. Knight does not feel like an evolution of the open world genre.

I think it is a game that feels awesome and is well produced (except on PC). I think it's good, but it is fair to expect more in 2015 than a better produced Arkham City.

@katygaga: Sorry, I thought this was going to turn into another one of those "WHY DO PEOPLE HATE THE THING I LOVE" threads.

Thinking about it I think the thing the hurt the game most for me was that it came out so soon after Mordor. That game let you do such cool stuff with the Batman combat engine that playing with Batmans non-lethal move set felt very flat to me. I know the arkam games are much more than that but I think that was one of the problems I had with it. That and the car...

Well I think the forced Batmobile sections are a bit more than 8-5% . Also it is not the batmobile for me , it is the bat tank shooting sections, it is not fun. And the story is a bit of a letdown, using the same crux for past 3 games and now it is just not interesting anymore. For me , personally I liked Origins more than Knight and City, the boss encounters were a lot more interesting and overall design to bosses are far more pleasing to me. In Knight there are no 1 on 1 hand to hand boss fights, the arkham knight as the main bad guy is just poorly done. The only thing that I liked is batman new suit, it looks so good.

That is the problem with every Batman since AC. AA was the best because it was a closed intimate environment with a tight narrative running over one night. Its like Resident Evil how you're stuck in a mansion and that's it.

Bigger, is not always better. For me Batman was at its best with the predator missions and in AA the game worked brilliantly around those set pieces. AK has too many batmobile sections too.

@rebel_scum: well, I just heavily disagree with that. The predator missions were also a favourite of mine and in my view, there are way more of those in AK, as well as much tighter mechanics and better ways to go about it. Like doing a 5 guys fear takedown, then using a critical takedown to drop one of the big guys, all of which is done in one free-flow movement. Its cooler than AA. Or thats how I see it anyway.

My comparison to Far Cry is that a lot of the outpost-like sections strewn throughout the city in AK can be taken out in a number of different ways and can be approached in numerous ways as well.

Again, for me, the bat mobile sections were a fairly small portion of the game. So I don't really understand why everyone hated on it THAT much. But to each his/her own, I guess.

The game is okay, but the villain reveal could be seen from a mile away. As long as you ignore most bad parts about the game, the game is pretty good.

I think it's great, I think there is a bit too much batmoblie in it though. There are parts where they could have done potentially interesting segments but they're replaced by underwhelming batmobile gameplay. The showdown with deathstroke comes to mind, where you have a crappy tank battle and then that's it.

That said I still think it's fantastic and I loved all the joker stuff.

I absolutely loved it. City remains my favorite, but Knight comes close. The Batmobile stuff wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting, and I like the internal struggle between Batman and Joker. And that Johnny Charisma scene...

I will say that the story was a bit unfocused and the Knight was... underwhelming, but all in all, it's a great game.

Also, holy hell, is it ever pretty.

I think it's way better than Arkham City which had a ton of inconsequential filler missions and by God was the plot bad. Oh just go into the sewers of this super prison where the Penguin has somehow smuggled and assembled gigantic radar dishes..

I still think Arkham Asylum is the best one of those games and all the open world stuff was a completely misguided direction for this series.

I bought it on PC. That's why I'm negative towards it.

But don't you see, they aren't terrorizing the city. There are no civilians there to terrorize.

Half of the games side quests are completely mindnumbing because they would usually have higher stakes had there been people in Gotham City at this time. Side quests like Firefly, any of the militia stuff, Two Face... There are probably more, but it's been a while so I can't remember.

In Arkham Asylum, Arkham Asylum was a character. It was not just some place that these events transpired in, it was the central character. In Arkham City, Arkham City was a character. You got to go to Gotham for the first time, and see all of the famous locations we've heard about before. We get to see them in this insane condition of a prison city and what happens when the goons take over. But, I'm pretty sure there were civilians and innocent people hanging around in both of those games.

In Arkham Knight, Gotham City is a set piece and not a character. It's exists for you to fight guys and do missions and that's about it. There are no stakes. There are no civilians. Austin wrote an article about this, I believe. How every Batman story has those scenes of him swooping down to save a group of innocent people from being beaten and murdered. Yet in this game, you swoop in to do nothing but fight guys and fight more guys.

Personally, I felt like they missed the mark on making an interesting open world batman game. I felt the same way about Arkham City. The city just isn't alive enough. As said above, it just serves as a mean for you to get places, find side content, and have people to beat up. It feels like padding rather than actually benefiting the game. There's nothing interesting to make me want to explore it, and there's nothing to make me feel like I'm having an impact by being a cool hero in an actual city. Asylum is still my favorite out of the series and that's because it is a much more contained focused story. It's not trying to go big just for the sake of going big. They don't dilute whats actually cool with a bunch of extra content. If the game had kept a similar metroidvania structure to Asylum and avoided the whole open world craze then I feel like this series as a whole would have been a lot more enjoyable for me. I still like it because the art design and combat are great, but man it just feels like such a bummer to think about what could have been. I would have much preferred an Arkham Asylum experience with Scarecrow and Akham Knight as the leads, but instead we got just another open world game.

Oh, and yeah, the PC version is bullshit.

@n7: hmm, well your definitions of a "set piece" and an environment as "character" are ambiguous to say the least.

There are people to save in AK. A lot of people.

As a Batman fan, I understood that, while it isn't a city full of citizens to save (a game like that would be great too), its more about Batman's undying and fierce love for his city which he is so utterly tied to, and in a lot of ways represents something to him that is deeply personal and sacrosanct. How things from his past keep coming back and shaping who he is. How Gotham is being torn apart goes well with the idea of him fearing how he may become The Joker himself, as the story progresses.

I guess we're talking about narrative here more than gameplay, so in this respect I think the final words that the Joker utters to Batman in AK are a haunting and sad reminder of what chaos and turmoil has done to Bruce Wayne's life. Whether or not Rocksteady intended this is something I don't know, so i'll stick with my own interpretation of it. For me, in this respect, AK is better than AA or AC. However, to me, they're all near masterpieces. All great games.

I read Austin's article and there are some good points there but I don't agree with it all. It would be cool to see a Batman Year One style game where the city is full of citizens to save, but as AK stands, its still pretty damn good. Thats just how I see it.

So I do not have the relationship with Arkham Asylum most do (ie. I have not played it at all) and that probably helped me a lot. Most of what they did with this game just felt like building on the last game's ideas, and most of it worked for me. I liked that they gave you a bunch of different activities to do around the world and all of them felt fairly different, and I enjoyed how they found ways to squeeze so many of Batman's rogues gallery in from a gameplay perspective.

But I also did not enjoy most of the boss fights, nor did I glean any true entertainment from any of the puzzles related to the Batmobile. To be honest I didn't enjoy most of the puzzles in City, either, so adding the car into the mix was just further muddying a part of the game I didn't enjoy much. The story also fell far short of its potential, in my opinion, and some of the Joker-related moments in the last third seemed to evolve from a spirit of convenience as much as a healthy narrative.

Overall I thought it was a really fun game, and I completed everything to 100% other than the Riddler stuff (which I mostly ignored in City as well unless the answer was cloyingly obvious) before attempting to start a New Game+. I didn't get very far at all in that mode, however, because rather than focusing on getting better at defense they doubled down on the new enemy types, particularly the shock wand dudes, and I didn't necessarily enjoy what they added to the combat. It was just another rule/button combo I had to juggle in my mind, and it honestly made the game harder in a way I found somewhat cheap. I can understand people who felt differently about the changes to combat since I readily admit I'm an intuitive game but also a strictly average one. But I did not enjoy those enemy types when thrown in a mix with shielded enemies, gunmen and strongmen. It was just too much to keep track of in New Game+ and rendered it unplayable for me.

In an isolated bubble it's a great game, in a world where it's the 4th one it's underwhelming and it's additions feel unnecessary and bloated

i thought all the hate came mostly from the broken pc version and the crappy dlc

Without having played it my guess would be two major things. First is the most obvious which is the PC version was and still is terrible, people bandwagon hate things when companies release shitty products. The second thing I would say is from what I've heard it's a by the numbers open world game in a year that had some REALLY fucking good open world games so when contrasted it's not as impressive.

The extra point is the batmobile was super divisive.

I still want to play it but man I'm not gonna touch that PC version until I at least am only paying $7.50 or something with all the DLC.

No major game in the last decade has been quite as ruined as this on pc. Of course people overlooked how it played.

I think the multi fear takedowns were a double edged sword of an enhancement. On one hand yeah they were cool looking. On the other it dumbed down the gameplay into what is essentially a QTE that allowed you to make the game heaps easier because you could target the toughest dudes.

Probably my favorite in the series, or at least up top.

My secret was to skip all the side quests. Played great, looked great, and it seemed to improve on a whole lot from City. Helped that I played on PS4, where it ran smooth as silk with no issues.

It's fine (except the PC issues), but it's uninspired. Not particularly surprising since it's the fourth game to use pretty much the exact same moveset with only minor variations.

Diminishing returns and all.

Screenshot of my nephew's last play through, lol.

Agreed. Knight is hands down my favorite of the trilogy actually.

It runs totally fine on my PC, aside from some weird physics jank that are from the game not its optimization (Batgirl's cape keeps getting stuck to her head). I'm kind of into it more than I thought I would be. The story is going in some surprising directions so far and while I'm mostly ambivalent about the Batmobile and irked I can't drive the Adam West version around Gotham, I have been continually amused by the ways they managed to make it required to progress as though it's the only logical solution available. I'm totally convinced Rocksteady made the car bits progressively more absurd on purpose.

if rocksteady had done something else after asylum and then came back with this game i would have probably been warmer to it

it looks great, though, i'll give it that

Because the pc version was bad I guess? I got it free with my graphics card on pc and never got what all the fuss was about, it played fine aside from the framerate lock which I wasn't bothered by.

A lot of people on this site (including the entire staff) are PC-first gamers so while there are obviously substantive discussions to be had regarding the gameplay, a massive portion of the giantbomb user base is going to shit on the game before it even gets in the door.

Arkham is over done needs a new city and the batmobile could of been used better

It ran like shit for me on PC and it was more or less the same game the 4th time with slightly more stuff. Some of the new stuff was bad as well (bat mobile).

Even discounting the technical issues, the game just feels derivative and repetitive. Basically, it suffers from the same problems as the Watchdogs and Assassins Creeds of the world. It has plenty of content, but only about a tenth, if that, is actually worth doing. Engaging in endless tank battles with the Batmobile isn't exactly my idea of fun - especially when they involve villains like Deathstroke. AA is by far the best of the Arkham games simply by virtue of the fact that it's a tightly-designed metroidvania with well thought-out set pieces, stealth sections and boss fights (excepting the final one). City started to lose some of those qualities by opting for the open-world formula but was redeemed by sections like the Mr Freeze boss fight and the Mad Hatter. AK threw all of the concise design philosophy of the previous games straight out the window in favour of derivative tank battles and tedious Batmobile 'puzzle' sections.

@katygaga: Wow. Perfect timing. I just bought all of the DLC for Arkham Knight, and have been enjoying all that you get from it, though don't think any of them in particular are amazing in and of themselves (though I love the 2008 suit). I don't know, I've struggled this year to consider it in my top five, but it probably is. Arkham City was just such a disappointment to me. I played Origins late since I wasn't sure I wanted to, but it turned out I really enjoyed that game. I got Arkham Knight first day despite not loving City, and once I finished it, I really enjoyed it as well, and still do. I am currently playing it again, and as I type this I am listening to the soundtrack. You ask a fine question, and I've been wondering about something similar. I think the fact that we've already played this same kind of game, it makes it harder to really appreciate, when I think this game is probably the best. It's very easy to say the games that came before and did things first are better.

Arkham Asylum is one of my favorite of last-gen, so it's hard right now to consider Knight as better, even though it may be. I will say I didn't like the ending at all. For one, I am not going to go after the Riddler trophies, and two, what you get after is just underwhelming. The fact that right off the bat (hm, pun not intended), you don't get credits after you finish the main story was actually disappointing to me. That's probably my biggest issue with the game. I roam Gotham in Knight, and everything is detailed to a degree that satisfies me, where Asylum did and City didn't. To me, it brings a bigger scope than City, but brings nearly as much detail as Asylum as well, and the visuals are some of the best this-gen to back it up which I love. The things that happen in the story I felt were arguably the best I've seen in these games as well. I really enjoyed it, but yeah, I still find it hard to mention it when it comes to my top few favorites of the year.

A couple of other things I disliked, and really the only other things, is that the reveal of Arkham Knight was obvious, and he was quite annoying, instead of what I would have hoped be a badass character. I never really felt he was the one to take Batman down, when it would have been cooler if he was; instead the story was really about The Joker, the better part of the story. Arkham Knight just has a neat suit is all. And I enjoyed playing the side content, there was some interesting stuff going on there too, but I felt there wasn't enough of it and you did the same thing over and over basically to get the villains in the cell. I think the marketing on the game is justified, but still pretty bad considering it doesn't really tell you about what Batman is actually fighting, or it tells you about the less important aspect, which is the Arkham Knight.

Just finished my second playthrough, and I do really enjoy the game. Unfortunately like every Arkham game before it, the story is absolute trash.

The Arkham Knight is just a screaming lunatic with a bad name, and no real goal other than to kill Batman. How does he go about killing Bats? By invading the city with unmanned tanks.

At this point everyone knows Batman doesnt kill people. So with all the additional insight the Arkham Knight has about The caped crusader, his master plan is to put enemies in his path that he would clearly have no quams about destroying. If he were actually a threat he would've filled those tanks with people and watched Batman squirm.

Hush was a cool multi-piece side quest in City with a creepy ending (I only realized in a recent replay that he's also the bandaged guy with the box in the clock tower near the very beginning of the game).
In Knight his arc gets wrapped up with a single cutscene.

The revelation of who the Knight is never goes anywhere outside of a quick awkward moment near the end of the game.

Deathstroke should have had a second phase to his fight where you duke it out on the street.

I actually enjoyed the Batmobile and Battank stuff, as well as all the crazy Joker stuff, especially that weird FPS section at the end of the game.

Eh, it made sense to me as it seemed he wanted to kill batman at full strength and didn't want him holding back against tanks with people in them. I liked all the arkham stories, especially origins.

It was fine, one of the best of the year even. It's more of the same, but the gameplay is still top notch. Also, I actually liked the bat mobile stuff. I thought it did a good job of making you feel like a complete badass, and the insane destructibility made it feel satisfying to plow through the environment. For me it was a fine way for the series to end, especially since I didn't play arkham origins and didn't feel fatigue with the formula just yet. Also, I only payed 20 bucks for it, which probably skews my opinion a little bit.

I actually really loved this game. Arkham City didn't really connect with me that much - I enjoyed it, but it never really hooked me too deeply. I went into this game expecting a similar experience, but I really got much deeper into it than I expected. I really enjoyed the main story in this, and I also found the bat mobile stuff to be totally fun (though maybe there was too much of it in main missions). I didn't find it clumsy to control at all.

@oursin_360: Pretty sure that's not the case. I remember Scarecrow telling him not to kill Batman with a helicopter during the Ace chemical section. Not exactly a fair fight with him at full strength

I found it really boring. I also found Arkham City to be pretty boring as well. I loved Arkham Asylum.

I don't really like the open world-ification of the Batman games I guess. The overall story was alright but I think the stellar story-telling of Arkham Asylum took some of the gloss off of this. It felt a bit old hat. I found the Batmobile stuff to be super repetitive.

The game controls well enough, and my arguments are somewhat ironic given that I've enjoyed other open world games (for example the Assassin's Creed series), but Arkham Knight really didn't resonate with me. I haven't played any 'bad' games this year, and Arkham Knight wasn't bad, but it will come in last on a list of games I've played this year if I were to rank all of them in terms of how much I enjoyed them.

Because it was a fucking exploding nightmare on PC, and now it's a fucking exploding nightmare that they admit will probably remain as a fucking exploding nightmare for all time.

I'm pretty down on games that have multiple crashes per session; despite that, I still slogged through it to the end, and the game is fairly uninspired even without those issues.

Asylum > all the rest.

It has its very obvious flaws, but I still very much enjoyed it. City still remains my favorite, and Asylum is just more tightly designed and has that lasting impact of a breakthrough debut.

Lots of great story moments and set pieces in this on. Of course, a lot of it is predicated on how much of a Batman fan you are and how much you like the Joker. It's easy to see why a lot of people are disappointed with the narrative turns because of how the three previous games also were centered on the Joker. I didn't mind the Batmobile parts, and I actually enjoyed some of the races and riddles using it. It's just that there's way too much of the battle sections, especially when you're also doing all those militia sidequests. Same thing for some of the other sidequests where you just do the same thing over and over with no big gameplay climax to cap them off, like the Man-Bat, Two-Face, and Penguin quests. Imagine if those three quests had actual boss battles like the end of the Riddler quest or some clever mechanic for a nice flourish! Instead, they just end.

The one Batmobile thing I 100% did not like was the fucking stealth encounters. They're tedious and unrewarding. The Batmobile worked for me for the other segments because they made me feel powerful, just like how Batman is on foot when fighting or stalking guys. There is nothing interesting about moving the bulky Batmobile around tight spaces and waiting for a missile to lock on to a tank. Worse is that if you get spotted, you can get one-shotted too. Awful design. The fact that the freakin' Deathstroke encounter is treated this way is a goddamn travesty.

Basically, it's a game that you can very easily list glaring problems with, not even mentioning the PC problems. The good stuff about it has to be qualified by your attachment to the character/universe and the mechanical improvements to the older games.

Personally, I still like it. Got the super secret mega ultra final ultimate ending, and will probably go for the platinum. All the combat and predator encounters are at their best in the series. Whenever you teamed up with someone, it's just real fun. The riddles are actually back to being ingenious unlike the ones in Origins which felt half-assed (I did all of them in that game too yes I am crazy). Barreling through Gotham with the Batmobile is exhilarating. And that entire ending sequence is just batshit crazy in the best way possible.

It'll still be in my top 10 list for the year. I will also bet on it being in the bottom half of Brad, Jason, and Dan's personal lists!

I had a lot of fun with the game. I also was among the lucky ones that didn't have any problems with the PC version. I understand some of the arguments people have for this being bad but in the end I enjoyed my time with it a lot.

The busted "AAA" game launching infested with shitty microtransactions?

I beat the game when it came out so I might be forgetting, but I dont recall a single micro transaction in that game. I just tried searching and am also finding nothing. I think you are just talking about the DLC, which isn't a microtransaction.