Batman: Arkham Knight (PC):
I was expecting deeply derivative product with now famous performance problems on PC, something like Assasin's Creed Unity. Was i wrong. This game is
amazing.
First Arkham game i liked well enough. It was a very good low-brow entertainment: satisfying power of Batman fighting mooks, exhilarating cape flying, some puzzle-solving and DC fanservice though the game targeted teenage boys a bit too blatantly with character designs. Combat was dumb and simplistic, bosses were bad as usual for western studio, but overall the game was enjoyable as a hamburger-tier game.
Arkham City was basically more of the same and put Batman in a huge city filled with pretty much the same but on a bigger scale: more mooks to fight, more puzzles and trophies to collect, more flying on cape through rings. It also solidified the structure, pacing of how the game dolls out challenges for you to choose from. There were
400 secrets that you had to do or collect. Some of the challenges were quite annoying to do.
Arkham Origins, in my opinion was the most polished out of them all which is a given because it came after City. Before Origins i wasn't really captivated by these games' stories, but i really liked Origins plot and especially it's ridiculously overproduced cutscenes. Otherwise it was kinda rehash of City but i thought it was overall a better made game. It added detective sequences and had less collectathon with
just 200 secrets too.
By fourth game Arkham series has probably reached the peak of what hamburger-style AAA production can achieve. It builds on everything all 3 previous games did and makes the whole package better and more diverse. By the time i was done with Arkham City i was exhausted by the repetition, but not in this game.
The strength of Arkham Knight is how proficiently it's made. It drips out new missions organically little by little not allowing player to be intimidated by hundreds of markers on open-world map. By adding several new types of activities with batmobile, finally Arkham games have achieved the level of variety where none of the activites don't actually get old by the end. There a lot of various side-missions you can make progress in simultaneously but most of them are not as prolonged as stuff in City and Origins and that's why it doesn't get repetitive.
Fighting mooks or taking them out stealthily, flying, racing, racing with flying at the end, racing with vehicular combat, tank style vehicular combat, puzzles, environment puzzles are back (i
missed them in Origins).
Evev the bosses -- usually the worst part of any western AAA production are decent enough. The clearly realized where their strengths lie and made most bosses easy enough so not to get annoying. Some bosses are literally just one button press at the right time but it's so well done.
Story really goes some places and Hamill is delivering the best
voice work of his career:
Plot pulls from BTAS, from "Killing Joke", "Death in the Family", "Under the Red Hood". Origins already had a great "Killing Joke" Red Hood flashback scene that was the highlight of the entire game, but Arkham Knight shoots amazing flashbacks and story pieces like that one after another.
Manic, deppressive atmosphere of the game with Batman getting the closest than ever to cross
over the edge are helped by great camera work in hallucination scenes and small details like bugs crawling everywhere. Game managed to fool and pleasantly surprise me all the way to the end and even past that -- in New Game+
And it looks amazing too:
Pretty picture comes at a price and there are performance problems, especially during vehicular segments (game lags when rotating camera too fast or just when making sudden turns), but it is playable enough for other types activites: flying over the city districts is especially impressive.
I always really liked layered 3d design of Gotham across it's many incarnations. Gotham in Shumacher movies with it's crazy architecture especially impressed me. Arkham Knight's Gotham is more vertical than ever with overpasses built over other overpasses, over ground train lines, gothic skyscrapers, futuristic towers, and construction cranes on top of the modern glass and steel buildings.
This game introduces Batmobile as a main way to get around, to give it more purpose a lot of puzzles were made to justify it's presence and there are a lot of drone battles where you transform into Bat-tank and fight automated drone-tanks. Whole Batmobile business is kinda clunky but it helps to break monotony.
Great game. Sure there are some problems with framerate but outside of that it's an apex of what modern game developer can do with established open-world formula. Very enjoyable game, all the way from beginning to the end.
Topic: What is the last game you beat? Thoughts/impressions? (Read 512744 times)
