In other games, I played through Arkham Knight. Story aside, this is easily the most mechanically refined of the games, if a bit bloated. The escalation of things is mostly handled pretty well: the fear takedowns being recharged by executing a successful silent takedown is a surprisingly good bit of balancing. The traversal is just out of this world, and probably the most satisfying movement system I've ever experienced in a game. Merely zipping and gliding over Gotham has that zen quality to it where you just fall into a trance and keep doing it. As I mentioned, this is one of the most gorgeous games I've ever played.
But it also feels like this is the game where the series hit the ceiling, and had nowhere left to go without devolving into total stupidity. The tank stuff is quite pushing it: you're blowing up tens of billions of dollars' worth of military hardware willy-nilly, yet the Arkham Knight always has more to spare. The Cobra segments feel especially egregious: apparently the Knight couldn't just spare a few footsoldiers surveying the environment from the rooftops or something. "Sneaking" in basically a tank just feels silly.
The story is just a mess. It jumps between different plot threads constantly, and feels like the central bits were picked at random. You could slot almost any part of this game into any point in it, and probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. City at least had Protocol 10 to count down to, here it's just Scarecrow making the same speech ad nauseam, and it also just feels silly. At least the ending section was memorable, if a bit mechanically underwhelming. I'm probably going to keep doing the challenge maps for quite a while, since there's just an astronomical amount of them... and like 8 different characters to play as.
But it also feels like this is the game where the series hit the ceiling, and had nowhere left to go without devolving into total stupidity. The tank stuff is quite pushing it: you're blowing up tens of billions of dollars' worth of military hardware willy-nilly, yet the Arkham Knight always has more to spare. The Cobra segments feel especially egregious: apparently the Knight couldn't just spare a few footsoldiers surveying the environment from the rooftops or something. "Sneaking" in basically a tank just feels silly.
The story is just a mess. It jumps between different plot threads constantly, and feels like the central bits were picked at random. You could slot almost any part of this game into any point in it, and probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. City at least had Protocol 10 to count down to, here it's just Scarecrow making the same speech ad nauseam, and it also just feels silly. At least the ending section was memorable, if a bit mechanically underwhelming. I'm probably going to keep doing the challenge maps for quite a while, since there's just an astronomical amount of them... and like 8 different characters to play as.