Batman™: Arkham Knight Premium Edition

I own this on Steam. If you like the AAsylum- and ACity-games you will most probably enjoy this. The freedom you have in this game is gigantic with movement,fluidity and switching between the car and on foot works great and overall feels more real and thus immersive than the previous games, This feels like a real city for the first time. Unfortunately you will will spend most of the time in the car driving through it doing lots of busy work from chasing numerous vehicles, bomb-defusal defenses-games, taking down numerous outposts, taking down drones. The game is filled with more filler-tasks than a Ubisoft openworld game and you have to solve several hundred Riddler-riddles (again), on top of that. For me tank-missions were fun but too many are too many nevertheless. Storywise it did not cling to my memory as impressive as Asylum or City did, but it was good enough and diverse as far as I remember. Probably because of all those fillers. But it has to be said gameplay, no matter if melee, tanks, the fights are fun and rock solid, as was the whole game for me, technically. It's also a good 'closure' to the series, as long as you unlock the secret ending - and no fraking Denuvo!

What so many people waited for in Arkham City became a twisted reality. We wanted a living city to drive through and got a city full of bad guys (good guys were hiding) in which we had to use a tank to solve some gameplay riddles and fight drones. When released, the PC verion had some serious problems, but those were not solely Rocksteady's fault. This game would fill most of the memory of the common graphics card back then, the most common Nvidia card at that time however would not adress all of it's memory at full speed, so we had some very severe frame rate drops from time to time. But there were also some opportunities for random crashes which had nothing to do with the hardware. But after a few months and quite a few patches later, the game was running just fine. The public reception was ruined however. It was also recommended to use a dedicated graphics or Ageia PhysX card to run hardware accelerated PhysX. Is Arkham Knight a bad game? No, not at all. It still has most of it's predecessor's strengths, there are not too many skills (yes, at some point you are actually done and don't worry about XP anymore). The story is still guite good, the gameplay is just the same as before. There are more annoying enemy types which were really frustrating when I played this game the first time. Some of the battles I had to play multiple times. But at some point you figure out how to beat them and then you are glad not to see these buildings ever again. As long as you don't need the tank for riddles, try to use another Batmobile skin from the DLCs. You can use the 1989 version and als wear a skin that resembles Keaton's suite. I liked playing the game, but in the end I must say that Arkham Origins felt more fitting to the Batman francise.

After a rocky start to the PC versions release (I finished the game with a broken 30fps mess with more issues than Cyberpunk 2077) the dev team at Rocksteady took over the ports reigns and between their efforts and tech catching up in power to run it smoothly Arkham Knight has been my go to Batman game for some time with over 300 hours logged into the Steam version. Finally introducing the divisive Batmobile into the games open world, Rocksteady didn't just shoe horn it in and made it an integral part of Knights gameplay. With a tank style battle mode for crushing the opposition thrown at you to gadgets to help you solve puzzles Rocksteady really did think of how you use Batmans wheels in every situation. I see a lot of people not enamoured with the car gameplay but I say if you stick at it and master it then it becomes the best part of the game. As well as that are the usual stealth elements and gadgets as well as new abilities such as taking 5 enemies out at once after upgrading. The Riddler challenges return in mixed format from races to simple puzzles so there is plenty to work at after the credits roll. The story for the most part is pretty predictable but competently executed with some good character moments with the Gordons, however a lot of the later Arkham Knight stuff does fall pretty flat. Fortunately other characters make up for the short comings here. The visuals are still decent even 5 years on with an intricate batsuit for Bruce and some impressive skin simulation on the facial tech. There are even more character skins and Batmobile skins available in the season pass that deck Batman out like Keaton or Affleck with the appropriate car. Also, I recommend the season pass of not just for the final DLC in which they brought back Freeze and Croc among others. All in all this was a triumphant end to the series that deserves to be remembered as the peak of the Arkham series.

Had this since if came out and probley my favourite Arkam game, its plays really well for the PC now, but best to have a good spec PC to really enjoy the graphical experience. Well worth it now being on sale, and I would rather get from here than Steam, GOG always have less problems with games, and more helpful than Steam I would say.