Be Excellent To Each Other

I think I got a bit of an odd visual bug in mine, though.

Near-end of game spoiler:

I've jus finished it too, and done all the side quest except the riddler ones.

Yeah I like the end too, and a lot of the story. I think the twist was real bad, but liked most of the rest of it.

Btw to get the final ending you need to do all the riddler stuff. I've got like half of them already, and I guess I'll get the rest, but I am using a guide to find their locations and solutions when it is not obvious.

I'm a couple of hours in and I agree with most of the comments above. It's good, but it's not great, and the reason it's not great is because it's overstuffed. Too many moves, too many gadgets, too many side quests, too many upgrades to choose from, too many button presses to remember. For me, Asylum remains the best game in this series, because it has focus. I've compensated by putting it on Easy difficulty so I can ignore the stuff I don't like so much, which is a strategy I am finding to be quite pleasing.

The Batmobile is kinda neat in small doses in combat mode but too much of it or trying to drive it fast aren't so good. Races can fuck off. And it's probably killed the game for MrsDoc, who loved Asylum and City but hates driving in games.

You can ignore the side quests, of course, but some of them are lots of fun (the serial killer, finding a cure, the missing firemen, teaching an apprentice).

Some are not (blow up mines). The watchtowers ones are meh-okay.

They really frontloaded the Batmobile stuff way too much.

If you'd had a good chunk of time just being regular batman before you got the Batmobile, and more of that stuff was optional rather than mandatory, it would have helped a lot.

I loved Asylum, but gave up with City as it just seemed to have too many gimmicky gadgets and it was too sprawling. This sounds like they've gone even further.

Yep, very much so. There's good stuff in there, but it's spread thinner than ever.

"How do my enemies know who my friends are," mused The Batman, talking into the four foot holographic videoconferencing display projected from his glove.

Why are the Batmobile's Battyres covered in Batoil and Batteflon?

I just did a stealth section...

...in a tank.

Parts of this game are very not good.

Sounds like my preference for how to deal with stealth sections.

No, I mean, that's how the game is designed. You use your tank to sneak up on another tank.

The Adventures Of Bruce Wayne: Dickhead Boss.

Well, that escalated quickly.

The riddler trophies are interesting, but there's far too many. The APCs and land mines can go do one. Hence: I have one last firefighter to find and then I'm done.

I ended up using a guide to clean up the last of the riddler trophies.

Even with a guide, I have 200 of them to do. They're just not that interesting.

I found that in Arkham City I had a lot of collectable stuff left at the end that I wasn't interested in clearing up. If I get this one I might make sure I do them as I'm going along.

The problem with City, and its more open environment than Asylum, is that you'd see a lot of Riddler trophies around the place but you weren't sure if you were doing something wrong when you failed to get them or it was because you hadn't picked up an ability yet that was needed. I imagine Arkham Knight only amplifies that problem, so I'll probably be giving it a miss.

I don't think I've seen any Riddler trophies that needed any gadgets that I didn't start the game with. I've done about 50 of about 250 of them.

With regards to the game, I don't have much to add beyond the posts from other people upthread. The writing was mostly excellent



The biggest complaint I have isn't that the game is too large, per se. It's that the game seems to have been built by people who played Asylum and City to death really recently, and built on top of it. You know how any normal (decent) game builds over time, introducing new mechanics at the right pace so you've mastered the last one just as the next one comes along? To my mind the Batman games do that, but over the whole trilogy rather than within each game. The gadget/move list on starting City isn't far off where you ended up in Asylum, and the list at the start of Knight feels as complex as somewhere near the end of City, and then it gets more complicated from there. Maybe that's fine if you're a playtester who lived and breathed the games for months but I played them years ago and I've forgotten how they worked, so Knight was very close to overwhelming at first.

I was extremely glad I put it on Easy difficulty, which means I didn't have to sweat the brawling combat. That's where I have the least patience for the seventeen-dimensional game of rock-paper-scissors the game wants me to play, memorising which moves work on which enemy types. Predator combat, however, remains excellent, particularly once I'd reminded myself about the various tactical options of the various gadgets. I could see me doing some of the predator VR challenges.

There really are great new parts of the game mechanics in Knight, though. The sabotage gun is particularly good. I would have tremendous fun with it; sabotage the medic's healing kit, then hack a generator to explode and knock a guard out, then watch the medic get knocked out when he tries to revive the guard, and I'm laughing and laughing from the shadows. Fear takedowns are also great fun and even when it's a brawl against ten unarmed thugs they reward you taking your time to plan a stealthy approach and thin the herd before the fisticuffs start.

Did the "most of everything" ending, then watched the 100% ending on YouTube. Done.