By the way, since I’ve finally finished this a few days ago I thought I’d share some of my thoughts, there might be some Spoilers inside, overall I thought it started out strong and ended up being the shittiest of the bunch, anyway:
+ I liked the world design approach best overall, probably more than Arkham City, likely because they had basically taken what RockSteady built before them and added some areas to the South.
+ “Detective” sequences were a good start for similar gameplay in a future title but they didn’t take it far enough, and what RockSteady managed to do more subtly they applied more blunt force to, for instance instead of irregular blood-stains/smears they literally just added a pattern with the exact same spacing from one another and really close together
+ It’s more of the same mainly, which in this case wasn’t that bad, but I don’t know how many titles they can still pull off like this anymore without people getting very tired of the concept
- Too hard to keep a combo up at times in comparison to previous games, I think the speed that henchmen attack and that you have to counter right away might have to do with it, they definitely messed around with the combat formula and seemed to have made it worse, there is also the combat camera that seems to have been chosen so you sometimes can’t see what is happening right behind you (especially in tight spaces) when I can’t remember this issue much from the previous titles, counter sometimes also ends up not working for apparently no reason at all
- They reused too much stuff from Arkham City, instead they could have put some more effort and own ideas into it, there also seemed to be a lot more filler than in the previous games also (and with it typical “video gamey” linear level design, at least seemed such a lot more than previous parts - basically walk along a single corridor, 3-4 fights till the next task to get through without much variation)
- It’s kind of stupid that they didn’t use the occasion to depict a livelier and some other sides of Gotham too, it’s Christmas Eve and you don’t see any civilians or anything other than a very limited number of ones that are threatened with their death. There were actually more scientists and general civilians in the previous game (Arkham City) than in this one, which is kind of weird since it was supposed to have taken place in a quarantined part of Gotham used as a prison, anyway this was a B-Studio take on it, I’m curious to see what RockSteady does next
- Starts good, but gets gradually worse as it progresses (Joker appears and the ending itself and what leads up to it is probably one of the most uninspired and anti-climactic parts of the game)
- A few of the sequences (Copperhead Poison) looked like they saw what Rocksteady did in the previous games (heart poison in Arkham City, hallucinations Arkham Asylum) and tried to pull it off but failed, a few of the characters (mainly Bane, Joker, Firefly ended up being really exaggerated and overstated)
- The “Riddler” stuff seemed to be a lot more boring and contrived in this game, basically didn’t come off as an integral part of the game but more like a chore, which I felt it didn’t in the prequels
- The characters they designed themselves looked boring in partsThe game was rather buggy (crashes, bugged combat moves, graphics bugs, Riddler trophy stuff displaying wrong)´
- Shock Gloves ended up being OP, they introduced a bunch of different enemies over the span of the different games, but here you got something that counters them all.