Arkham Knight may not be the game we need, but it’s the one we deserve. If prevailing trends in the video game industry are anything to go by, game makers are totally fine with taking an existing game, adding new features, putting on a fresh coat of paint and releasing it again under a new name. The market laps up these nuggets, with their 80/20 mix of familiarity and originality, and their utter lack of ambition. So why wouldn’t developers and publishers keep mining this vein for all its worth? It’s no secret that the AAA game industry is centred far more closer to money than to creativity, so it’s no surprise that they set up this drip feed of refurbished games, downloadable content (DLC) and season passes.
When Rocksteady came out with Arkham Asylum, it was a fresh take on the caped crusader, who previously hadn’t had too many games of note in his name. Asylum created a tight twisted world to explore, and integrated simple but effective systems for stealth and combat. Along with some fun hallucinatory Sandman boss levels, and a standout voice acting performance by Mark Hamill (of Luke Skywalker fame), it cemented the first solid showing by the Bat in modern gaming, and finally made him relevant in this field. Thankfully, the treatment was far away from the tiresome grittiness of the Christopher Nolan movies, and the silliness felt intentional, rather than as a result of poor writing.
Arkham City was the follow-up, and the marketing buzzwords seemed to be ‘bigger world, playable Catwoman levels’. Not a bad game, but certainly a little on the over-ripe side compared to its predecessor. The next sequel, Arkham Origins (dubbed Oranges by its detractors), was positively mold-ridden. Did we really need another exposition on how Bruce Wayne tragically lost his parents and then applied his desire for justice, along with his many millions of dollars, into becoming a crime-fighting vigilantes? I think not. The game was uninspired and had a very unstable PC version to make matters worse. Since the game was developed by Warner Bros Montreal and Splash Damage instead of Rocksteady, those changes were singled out as the reasons behind the shoddy work, and there were clamours for Rocksteady to come back and save Batfans the world over.
Those prayers were answered, since Rocksteady was at the helm of game four – Arkham Knight. However, as many people discovered, just getting the old band back together wasn’t a guarantee of another hit. The game itself felt unadventurous in that it was straitjacketed by what people had come to expect from the series. The big new addition was the Batmobile, and they made sure we knew it by choosing to crowbar puzzles and painful platforming sections where you have to use the vehicle to get past.
Leaving aside the fact that a car, no matter how fancy, is a really inefficient way to get around a city for a guy who zips and glides through the sky, it just doesn’t feel fun.
Many PC players didn’t even have the luxury of experiencing the tepid gameplay, since the port was completely awful on a technical level. Both AMD and Nvidia card owners experienced massive frame rate drops and bugs galore, to the point where the game was practically unplayable. Normally this would be standard fare where modern games are concerned. The difference this time was that Steam had recently implemented a refund policy, where users could return a game and get their money back in case of problems with its functionality. Arkham Knight was the first to feel the full brunt of this feature, as users began returning the game en masse, and the rating plummeted to an all-time low for an AAA title. Following this, Warner Bros took the unprecedented move of withdrawing the game from sale, presumably till all the issues are ironed out and it is fit for purchase once more.
It’s sad seeing something as new and fun as Arkham Asylum lead to this, but that’s what happens when you keep reheating and serving one meal over and over again because the patron liked it the first time.