What is the Best Batman game

Arkham City

It's Asylum this isn't even a question.

After Asylum they kept diluting the formula to the point where we got car combat in the last game. Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Arkham Knight quite a bit in it's own right, but it was a far cry from the well paced metroidvania styling of the first game. It seems like they just kept bolting more and more things and getting farther away from what Batman should be (in my opinion anyway). Question marks became mindless collectibles, your cape was suddenly a glider, the suit started to rival Iron Mans in complexity and armor.

I always really liked the first game and was kind of bummed out they got away from that approach and decided to go into the open world direction. Then again I realize it would be kind of difficult to find another location as perfect as the asylum as an engaging, enclosed playground.

@humanity: I hear you. My biggest issue Asylum was that the boss fights were too repetitive, with the exception of Poison Ivy and Joker they were all the same. Throw a Batarang at this big guy and dodge it, then attack it. City had more variety in its boss fights and a more colorful band of villains on top of that. I personally actually liked the open world, I felt it gave me opportunities to explore the nature of Rocksteady's depiction of Gotham City. I also liked how they added more sidequests to the game so players can interact with their favorite Batman villains if they weren't included in the main story.

While one of the Arkham games will likely win, it'll be interesting to see how the 8/16 bit titles perform as they had multiple versions released for each. Adventures of Batman and Robin are completely different games on SNES and GEN. One an action platformer, the other a platform shooter in the vein of Gunstar Heroes, both hailed as classics.

Arkham City has the best story in a Batman game, from the main story to the side quests. It's got a wider array bosses than Asylum and doesn't saddle itself with the car combat bullshit of Knight.

while i did enjoy Asylum's metroidvania, the act of swooping through the city in City was amazing. Knight made me very angry.

I think I personally enjoy City more but maybe Asylum is the stronger choice just for the incredible focus.

Asylum, easily.

I just wish the Asylum ending was 1/10th as good as the Arkham City ending...Asylum was fantastic until the boss fight...

While Arkham City has a much better main story, the tighter package of Arkham Asylum is still the absolute best in my book.

I love Arkham Knight. It's easily my favorite of the bunch just for being the best Batman playground.

But Asylum is a masterstroke. It's not just an airtight package in its own right - the game came out a decade ago and still has influence you can feel in games today.

The final fight in Asylum turning the joker into just another big strong guy that you have to punch a lot felt like a waste of that character to me.

Haven't played it since release, so my memory is hazy, but my memory of it is of overtutorialization and only-one-way-to-do-it forced stealth that involved a lot more sitting and waiting than I enjoyed.

Asylum is probably the best overall game, but as far as a Batman game goes i found the storytelling and amount of characters and side stories to be the most rewarding in Knight.

I voted Knight but I feel so conflicted here.

At the end of the day I think it's any of the 3 mainline Rocksteady ones depending on your take. Aslyum is probably the best/most cohesively designed game from start to finish. However having seen it recently due to me participating in a playthrough on my YT channel with some friends playing through, I gotta say it's actually way more gamey than I remembered. It still has some serious strengths, and it's focus allowed it to be a far tighter game than either City or Knight.

But City and Knight by it's extension do not often get a lot of credit for actually going above and beyond feeling like a video game and instead making you feel like your actually Batman. No limits, no restrictions. By contrast in Aslyum you feel like Sam Fisher with some of Batmans gadgets going through what is still very much a Batman in tone setting.

But when it comes to as the player, moment to moment being able to literally feel like Batman, I think Knight nails it to a tee. Again it's one of those love or hate additions with the Batmobile but it's impossible to feel like Batman without it. Ultimately despite my feeling that the overall package of Aslyum is better, there are stretches of a good 40-80 minutes of pure gameflow/rythym in Knight bouncing from sidequest to regular quest to random world stuff seamlessly that literally for me trumped every single thing Aslyum or City ever did. It's just so much easier to play with the games myriad of systems when you actually have everything there to roleplay and approach the situation as if you were Batman. Aslyum never once touched that level of immersion, and City while it had it in spots felt more like a fun playground than to me the Batman simulator levels that Knight achieves.

@devise22: Knight is also the only one where I feel like I'm stopping crimes in the open world because they're crimes, not because they're gamified occurrences.

Like, I understand City (and even Knight, as well as other games like Spider-Man) have scripted, repeatable events. But I loved the feeling of watching a riot happen from afar, or watching looters case a storefront. No waypoints, no UI markers saying "HEY A THING HERE, GET SOME XP." Literally just crimes on the street. And then descending on the criminals, leaving no one standing, to eventually shadow away into that forever night.

Asylum and City are both amazing games but the answer is definitely Asylum in terms of just how tight and well made the game is. A more interesting question (to me, at least) would be which is the most underrated Batman game and the answer is Arkham Origins.

I liked Arkham Asylum and City as you definitely felt as Batman and Rocksteady getting most of the cast from Batman The Animated series to reprise their roles was great. I liked Origins more cause of it taking place during Batman's years when he's just getting started. I never finished Knight so can't comment on that game, hopefully I can finish it.

Arkham Asylum. Easy chioce.

I see how the creator of the poll tried to force his own opinion through, of what the best Batman game is by placing City at the very top above Asylum, instead of putting them in chronological order which would place Asylum at the top.

Asylum is the most pure experience. It only got more diluted with each sequel.

It’s a tough pick between Asylum and City. I feel like Asylum gets extra points, even if only because I hadn’t really kept it on my radar during the launch and picked it almost six months later from a sale, not expecting much and ending up being blown away by how good it was.

I just want to say that Origins is a lot better than people give it credit for. The reception to that game was pretty negative since it was made by the "B team" but it's actually a pretty solid game where I would say the story the best/second best of all the Arkham games.

And it actually had good boss fights!

I would say Asylum because it's a tighter, more focused package than City. With City, it was just more of everything, one could argue to its detriment. The sneaky 2nd best Batman game is actually Origins. It has a good story, the best boss fights of all the Arkham games, and you actually get to solve crime scenes as a detective. Also it wasn't an insane collect-athon. People like to hate on it because Rocksteady didn't make it but it's actually pretty good.

Batman Returns on the SNES

Arkham Knight was my favorite in that trilogy. I beat City but never got hooked into it and the few times I've tried to play Arkham Asylum I was never captured like I was with Knight.

My runner up is the Telltale series. That first one single-handedly reinvigorated my fondness for Batman that carries over to now (I just recently binged the entire TAS). So so good.

I picked Asylum but the second season of the telltale series is a close second.

While I don't think it lived up to the concept of the early trailers of all the top tier assassins gunning for Batman, (Deathstroke was criminally underused), I loved Origins for what it was.

I've said it before but the Telltale Batman games are an incredibly fresh take on the characters while still staying true to Batman's roots. Its the first time they've made Bruce Wayne as compelling a character as Batman in all the batmania I've consumed over the years.

I'll go with Arkham City, since there's that one part of Arkham Asylum that was a legit "...Really?" moment.

Batman Arkham City is the best one from all.

It's Arkham City in my opinion. It's not a very feel-good argument to make since I feel like I have to drag Asylum a bit just to make it. Still love Asylum for introducing this formula for the games and it definitely does some incredible things stylistically and thematically. Unfortunately the more I think about it the more I think Asylum might have the worst plot of all four games and maybe even the worst boss fights as well, and that is saying something. The boss fights in City overall are only slightly better than the first game with the exception of one which is an all-time great boss fight in video games and the way it salvages the plot of Asylum into something interesting and meaningful is impressive. I also think the Metroidvania-ness of Asylum gets overstated when in fact you very rarely have opportunities to veer off the beaten path for anything other than collectibles. All in all I'm an unabashed lover of iteration in games and in that sense the second Arkham game nails it more than people seem to want to give it credit for.

The Mr. Freeze fight? Trying to remember City's boss fights without looking everything up.

@inevpatoria: Correct. I can't say enough good things about that boss encounter.

It's a super good one. Loved it on the harder difficulties where you had to use, literally, everything at your disposal to win.

The ones that don't have 'batman combat'.

You've somehow left out the only Batman game with good Batmobile handling: Batman: The Movie

Specifically, on the Amiga.

Asylum. It's just the most tightly designed game of the Arkham series, and it makes you feel like the damn Batman.

I liked Knight a lot, as well, since skipping side content gave you the most polished game in the series with a well-paced story.

After that, the 16-bit Adventures games. And then Batman Returns because it's not great but nostalgia.

I'm an Arkham City man myself, Asylum is great but I feel like City had just the right balance of still locking off content metroid style without the city becoming too overbearing which I feel Arkham Knight didn't manage. Can totally get the purity of Asylum but feel it showed potential that City delivered on.

This poll made me realise I've never fully played a Batman game.

I played Arkham Asylum when it was first released but it kept crashing during the Scarecrow boss fight so I got stuck there and never went back to it. I never really liked DC comics anyway, so a lot of the characters and references were completely lost on me. I'm sure they're all fine games though.

Arkham Asylum is the only one I've finished and it's honestly still such an impressive, tight experience in my mind. Bad boss fights aside, anyway. Honestly, I think City is still a really solid game too, even if it loses a bit by going open world. Still haven't played Origins or Knight, but given that Knight was free on PS+ this month, I think I'll eventually give it a look.

I'm going to be the crazy guy who stands up for Origins as my personal favorite Batman game. The asthetic being somewhere between the Burton films, the Nolan films and the Animated series is MUCH more in my taste than Asylums 90's EXTREEEEEEME art style. Just look at Asylum Killer Croc vs Origins and see the VAST improvement. The Origins Bat suit is also my favorite one. Also, as much as I adore the story and setting and concept of Asylum, I prefer Origin.

An angry young Bruce Wayne with something to prove who for the first time in the series decides to be an actual detective. A fantastic Joker origin tale with all of the usual classic Joker story beats, specifically taking over a criminal enteprise from the inside and being underestimated. And just the pitch of the game is so fun. Eight badass assassins who all want you dead, hunting you down over the course of one snowy Christmas Eve night.

I love love love Origins and I consider it one of my personal most underrated games of all time, let alone my favorite Batman game.

I picked Asylum but it was a tough call between that and City for me. I also never got around to playing Origins or Lego Batman 3, I really need to go back and check those out.

Asylum hands fucking down. It's not even a contest.

The one on the NES that had the rippin' level one music

While I appreciate the laser focus of Asylum, I think City hit the perfect balance of letting you explore Gotham without being diluted with content and sidequests. At the end of Asylum I was hungry for more. I couldn't wait to see what the Penguin, Two Faces and Catwoman looked in that setting... City delivered that and more, and without compromising the main gameplay elements, like Knight did after that.

Origin was decent, but it felt too much like City without the extra polish. Whether it was the weird difficulty spikes, glitched lag and quests and D-list tier roster, it felt too much like a response to the need of Rocksteady for more time before a proper sequel than a part of the series as a whole.

Arkham city just for nostalgia's sake. I think origins might have been better actually, but I did everything in City and loved that game at the time. I liked asylum but I always felt the mechanics needed more space to breath and they did that with the next games.

It's definitely Arkham Asylum for me. It's a lot more focused and tightly designed compared to the sequels.

I too would like to jump on the 'Origins deserved better' train.

I've only played AA and AC but my pick is AC.

I like Batman but I never read any comics growing up and I really don't know much about most superheroes besides the super mainstream stuff. So for me as a casual, I like seeing the rogues' gallery of villains and being able to fly around the space. That made me feel like Batman and what I imagined what a good Batman product could me.

I also liked playing as Catwoman. She played very similar but she had different combat and traversing animations so I thought they put in a good amount of extra effort in that additional playable character.

(hugs fellow Origins fan)

Out of the ones I've played? Asylum definitely. It's a pitch perfect Metroidvania that also functions as an amazing love letter to the character. The asylum is full of secrets to find and easter eggs from all across Batman's history, especially the solutions to the riddles. The gameplay is tight and engaging, the upgrades are useful and come at a good pace, the characters are spot on and the whole thing is so engrossing! I remember going out of my way to see every therapy event with Joker, or when I figured out the secret of Amadeus Arkham and literally cheered. Definitely the best Metroidvania I've played on PS3 and one of the best I've played in general.

That's not to say City (and the other sequels by extension) are bad games, but the word I can best use to describe my opinion of City is "bloated." There was just so much that was bigger and longer for the sake of filling time, and I felt like it got in the way of the fun, like how every Riddler Trophy now had a puzzle in front of it. I still had my fun with it, but in a comparison to the absolute ball I had with Asylum, there's no contest.

The other thing about City...while I know the whole "THERE ARE TOO MANY RIDDLER TROPHIES" was a criticism that made the rounds and was well deserved, the other really disappointing thing was that there were so many AND the payoff was barely worth it at all. While the Riddler trophy payoff in Arkham wasn't exactly spectacular, as you said, the Amadeus Arkham payoff was amazing and all of the tapes were great contributions. And the balance between Riddler trophy and environment riddle was better and the environment riddles in general were better than they ever were again.

Knight, while a game I enjoyed, is the worst with this because it also has a billion things to do, hides the "true" ending behind them all, and then is kind of a fart of an ending on top of all of that. Each one, for me, put into perspective just how much tighter and better designed the original one was, even though I enjoyed them all.