I thought about starting this post with a reference
to the 60’s TV show, but then I remembered that this post was originally going
to be just one instead of split into two.
So let’s not make this thing so long that it goes into three.
You know what’s next, right? Yeah.
Let’s talk about the Batmobile.
I don’t understand how this happened again. How do you put such a huge focus on cars and
traversing long distances, yet make that car so sloppy to handle? It’s bad enough that it happened once with Watch Dogs, but for it to happen again
with the flagship addition to the franchise’s big finale is utterly
baffling. But here we are, with a
vehicle that I crashed within seconds of my first drive with it. And I continue to crash every time I take it
out for a spin. That probably wouldn’t
be so bad, if not for the fact that the Batmobile is shoehorned into a huge
percentage of the game. There’s a reason
why it shows up on the box art, folks: it’s Batman’s real sidekick, but it’s
more annoying than a thousand Robins hopped up on helium.
As you’ve probably heard by now, the Batmobile has
two modes. The first is the unwieldy
mess of the car mode, while the second -- accessed by holding a trigger -- is
the tank mode. It’s exactly as it
sounds; the machine twists and unfolds, so that you can shoot unmanned tank
drones. But the problem is that it
doesn’t feel like you’re driving a tank, or even a Landmaster. The damn thing slides around weightlessly,
especially with a special booster that lets it strafe a short distance -- but
just barely enough to be worth anything.
By default, you’ve got a machine gun that fires “suppressor rounds” on
top of the standard, slow-to-reload cannon; there are also homing missiles that
you can fire, but only if you avoid damage and pepper enough foes with cannon
rounds. So how is that supposed to work,
exactly? Batman only presses the
“resolve situation” button one’s he’s hyped enough?
It boggles the mind that they made a vehicle so
unsatisfying to drive, no matter its form (and this is coming from a guy who
thinks tanks are inherently awesome).
But it gets worse -- because again and again, Batman is forced to use
the Batmobile, or take it along with him like a baby in its stroller. There’s one instance -- the first of many,
I’d bet -- where Bats has to escort Gordon to a clock tower, and the inevitable
rush of goons can only be beaten by knocking them off the road with your
slippery-ass ride. (Don’t worry; I’m
sure they survived that!) Battles
against tanks are absurdly plentiful, to the point where there’s a whole
side-mission type devoted to them…as if there weren’t enough in the main
story. You can’t even go through certain
doors unless you’re behind the wheel.
But here’s where things start getting absurd. You actually have to use the Batmobile to
solve puzzles, by which I mean you pull stuff with its winch to progress. And in turn, you have to do stuff like move a
crane at a chemical plant to drop a ramp-shaped…well, ramp so the Batmobile can clear a jump. (What’s a ramp doing at a random spot in a
chemical plant? Who knows?) You upend roofs and signs to create more
ramps to jump.
At one point -- and I hope you’re sitting down for
this -- you have to do platforming
sections with your tank, wherein you use the winch to scale buildings’
walls. Reportedly, there are stealth
sections with the Batmobile…which even in its default mode looks like a
tank. And the Riddler, whose entire
shtick is making people solve his dumb puzzles so he can feel good about
himself, decides to test Batman’s brainpower with -- drumroll please -- a bunch
of underground racetracks he has to clear within a time limit. I pretty much tapped out minutes after the
sidequest began.
But that’s all dodging the major question I have:
why does Batman even bother with the Batmobile WHEN HE HAS THE BATPLANE?
This isn’t me pulling from some alternate canon in
the Batman mythos. It’s shown directly
in AK that he has the Batplane, and
it can be deployed at leisure. What does
Bats use it for? It shows up in a
cutscene to attach a winch to the Batmobile, and then flies off. And the game just broke for me. Like, he
understands that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,
right? So why would he waste time
skidding through the drone-infested streets and dragging his tank up buildings
when he can fly to where he needs to go unimpeded? His mission is (or was) time-sensitive, because
early on he finds out that there are five hostages at the chemical plant. By the time he gets on the move, Batman only
finds two of them alive, and laments that he couldn’t get there to save all of
them. And I just sat there thinking,
“Well, maybe you would have gotten there sooner if you didn’t drag your tank up a fucking BUILDING!”
I guess the reason why the Batplane isn’t used is
because it would step all over the gameplay’s toes -- because, like I said,
Batman can already pretty much fly via his grappling hook and gliding
mechanics. But that just begs the
question: why even add the Batmobile in the first place when there’s already a
dedicated (and much better) traversal system built into the game? The simplest answer is that they put in stuff
that would look cool, and didn’t bother asking if it would make sense. You just know
that they added in up-close, borderline-pornographic shots of the Batmobile
and the new Batsuit so players could revel in the devs’/publishers’ opulence
how “cool” it looks. And I say as much,
because the goons you overhear regularly talk about how awesome his tank is,
and how badass his new suit
looks.
But it’s not.
It’s not badass, it’s not awesome, and it’s not fun. It’s a bad decision that the game keeps
trying to justify, and ends up doing its best to smother the good parts to
death. And even the good parts are
either flawed, underdeveloped, or used sparingly. I want to do more detective stuff, but
apparently that’s not part of the job description for the world’s greatest
detective. I want to do more stealth,
but I can’t because even when I’m granted the privilege, I’m still a human tank
instead of a mechanical one. I want to
feel the nuances of the combat, but I can’t because the combat alternates being
a chore and a snore. But most of all, I
want to get engaged in the story -- but every other character is doing their
best to make me hate the entire mythos.
Why?
Because right now, I have a theory that Batman’s rogues’ gallery is full
of needy, screeching man-children.
Nobody in this game has the decency to shut the
hell up. One after another, the villains
vie for their chance to start Handsome Jackin’ it and fill every waking moment
with their meaningless, attention-seeking chatter. The Riddler won’t shut up about how much
smarter he is than Batman, and how he’ll win, and how much he really, really wants Batman to try out his new
racetrack. The Arkham Knight won’t shut
up about how much better he is than Batman, and how he’s got the advantage, and
how he’ll win, and how much he hates that mean ol’ caped crusader. Scarecrow won’t shut up about fear, and his
evil plans, and how he’ll destroy the world, and how scared Batman is. Joker won’t shut up about how much Batman
sucks -- which got old within minutes of his introduction, but has yet to stop.
THESE ARE
NOT CHARACTER INTERACTIONS. It’s
just one character blathering on, and on, and ON about how cool they are to
another character that can’t react, won’t react, or simply doesn’t give enough
of a shit to respond. But their chatter
is virtually constant, even when they’re miles away, underground, or
nonexistent. Hell, I’m afraid of finding
another villain in the game, because they might start talking at me, too.
You know what?
Maybe I’m the one who sucked up Scarecrow’s toxin.
(Side note: was the redesign really necessary? I’m not sold on it, but whatever. Discuss.)
I’ve tossed around the phrase “the same, but less”
when it comes to eighth-gen, PS4 games.
But Arkham Knight seems like
it has the opposite problem -- and is worse off because of it. Yet again, we’ve been delivered a
multimillion-dollar open-world game. And
yet again, it has the same problems as stuff you’d expect from The Ubisoft Game. Yeah, it’s cool that you get to fly around as
Batman high above the city streets, and I’d be lying if I said the game didn’t
look good (although I’m concerned about why it looks like everyone smeared
piles of dirt and sand on their faces).
But what was the price to pay for this bigger Gotham? Besides the obvious issue of “necessitating”
the Batmobile?
I thought that the appeal of Arkham Asylum -- you know, the game that started the franchise in
the first place -- was that it was mostly a small and intimate experience that
put Batman in close quarters with his greatest foes. So the best way to evolve from there was
apparently to run in the completely opposite direction and create a world
that’s devoid of all but thugs who apparently didn’t care about the threat of
Scarecrow’s fear toxin?
I would have loved to have been able to take on
one mission after another in sequential order.
Batman needs to save some firefighters?
Okay, sure -- make that into a little episode, and the end goal of a
section of the game. It could be a very
literal episode; start with the rise of a conflict, have Batman play detective
to find clues and the whereabouts of the firefighters, throw in some action, a
reveal that blows the case wide open, and a final encounter with the boss du
jour. There. Done.
You get a focused game as a result, with the ability to create tension
and the illusion of a time limit (if nothing else) without the player going off
the beaten path to scrape up Riddler trophies.
It’s a shame that AK plays out the way it does, because I would have loved for the
side missions to become more well-defined.
Can Batman save an innocent doctor from his transformation into the
Man-Bat? Who could be behind the
mutilated bodies pinned throughout the city?
Those are plots that could easily earn some much-deserved respect;
instead, they’re just diversions used to fill the map with chores to fritter
away time, or as a chaser between story missions that Batman can get to
whenever he feels like it, even if it means Barbara Gordon is still in the Arkham Knight’s hands. Also, not to be that guy, but am I the only one who thinks there’s something
incredibly disrespectful about turning firefighters into collectibles in a damn
sidequest? Yes? Okay, moving on.
Like I said, I want to get deeper into the story,
but thanks to the open-world format, it feels like the amount of hours put in
doesn’t translate to the amount of the narrative I get. That’s likely because of the sidequests
distractions -- I saw a Batmobile marker for one story mission, and
bat-grappled in the opposite direction -- but either way, the pacing of this
game really suffers when huge swaths of time can be spent (in-universe or out
of it) screwing around. I appreciate the
scope of the game, but I wish it didn’t have to come at the expense of a solid
structure. Or any structure, really.
That may well feed into a bigger problem: so far,
I’m not compelled enough by the story to push toward its conclusion. I’m doing it more out of obligation than outright
excitement. Scarecrow is more The Dark Knight Rises-style Bane than
Scarecrow, to the point where I suspect I’ll learn how to tune him out. The Arkham Knight is even worse, in the sense
that I wanted him to shut the hell up in his first conversation with
Batman. I’m not even remotely hyped by
Joker’s return, because -- setting aside the depressing inevitability of it --
he hasn’t done much besides troll Batman, which has thus far proven as
effective as teaching calculus to a fire hydrant. I sincerely hope the Riddler gets crushed by
a giant Rubik’s cube.
I don’t buy the idea of Batman being forced to
confront his fears and foibles, because it has yet to materialize besides some
jackass clown hopping around. There was
actually a really good moment at the chemical plant when he first gets gassed,
and the blast radius of Scarecrow’s bomb -- which his efforts slowly reduced --
is suddenly announced to have jumped up by a thousand percent. But after that, it’s just Joker trying to
mess with him.
If the point is to show Batman beginning to crack,
then he needs to…you know…begin to crack.
He hasn’t. He’s had one
hallucination where he witnessed Barbara’s infamous moment from The Killing Joke (the
problems of which are well-documented), but that’s it -- and it’s not
nearly as effective as one would think because A) that’s a trauma Batgirl experienced, not him, and B) it
allowed her to be reborn as the just-as-tough Oracle.
I guess the next -- or maybe final -- step is for
Bats to relive the death of his parents, but damned if that’s not the easy way
out. In the same vein as the above, if
the point of this game’s story is to deconstruct or break down the Bat, then
it’d be cool if we actually got to see him break down, gradually, over the
course of the game. And sure, maybe he
does later on in the game -- but in order for that to happen, there need to be
signs that he’s losing his grip early on.
The most I’ve seen so far is Batman going into
“WHERE IS THE TRIGGER” mode for a couple of seconds to find a kidnapped
Catwoman (side note: how does someone as skilled and clever as Catwoman get
kidnapped, especially by the Riddler and his goons?). So I guess the moral of the story is to have
a character that reacts to stuff, instead of a character that scowls and says
almost nothing all day erryday. Which is
weird, because I have a hunch Batman has been plenty emotive and vulnerable in
the past. And it didn’t take ten hours
to happen.
But the sad thing is that in a lot of ways,
there’s no point in trying to go for deeper explorations in Batman’s character
or psyche in this game. Setting aside
the fact that it almost feels as if they’re trying to show just how much Batman
secretly sucks (in the same way Man of
Steel was made by people who hated and wanted to sabotage Superman), it’s
impossible to go for any deeper meanings and themes when the Batmobile breaks
the story over its knee. The implementation
of it -- the gameplay and story integration -- is absurd at best.
They didn’t have to create a scenario where Batman
needed a transforming tank -- and even if it’s been
done before, there’s still the fact that A) that was in an entirely
different context, and B) it’s not something that hampers a story or our understanding
of this iteration of Batman. This Batmobile does. It’s a vehicle that’s so obviously, blatantly
lethal, but the game has to distort itself to explain away the thugs you careen
into on the streets (they’re fine, they just got shocked and knocked aside!),
the cars you knock aside (don’t worry, the drivers are definitely okay!), and
the enemies you fight (it’s a bunch of drones, so no need for guilt!). And while the game asserts that Batman fires
non-lethal rounds against human enemies, it doesn’t explain away the sheer
amount of property damage the player can and will do -- especially when it can
lead to deadly explosions.
The golden rule -- however flexible -- is that Batman doesn’t kill. But the player has no such moral code. That might cause some problems, I think.
I don’t get it.
How can anyone spend years on this game and millions of dollars -- tens
of millions, definitely, and hopefully not
hundreds -- on a game with such glaring flaws that they HAD to have popped up
on the drawing board? How could the guys
that made what’s hailed as one of the greatest superhero games ever created not
even a decade ago have missed the mark by such a huge margin, least of all
because they thought they could explain away issues that a six-year-old could point
out? Did they all get the talent sucked
out of them? Was there pressure from
above? Did they focus too much on “OPEN
WORLD!” and “DEM GRAFFECTS!” to see the obvious problems? How?
Why? Why?
I guess what I’m getting at here is that AK is not the game for me. I don’t want to call it a bad game, because there are things to
like about it -- but even so, I have a hard time calling it a good game. Chalk it up to biases, personal preferences,
whatever; the intangibles built into the proceedings are ones that have been
picked up by others, and more importantly shouldn’t be ignored. They’re real issues with varying levels of
severity, even if that’s only on a person-to-person basis. Even if I can only speak personally, I have
to be honest: this is far from Batman’s finest, and not the sendoff this
franchise deserves.
So I have a question: where’s my Commissioner
Gordon game?
I highly doubt this is the last we’ll see of the
Batman games, especially one with the assets, skills, and styles amassed
throughout the Arkham series. So if they’re going to keep the money train
rolling, then why not make a game where you play as the Commish, or other
members of the GCPD? It’d require some
big adjustments to the stealth and combat sections, but the gains could be
phenomenal. Gordon and crew don’t have
the resources or nigh-superhuman abilities, but they’re still men and women
capable of solving crimes and beating the bad guys. So make them be detectives. Give them a bigger role. Have them struggle against baddies in a way
that Batman can’t. Take away the dark
knight’s toys and tricks for a more grounded, more difficult game.
It’d be a chance to contextualize things in a new
light, or at the very least offer us a new character (and cast) to get invested
in. Gordon in AK has a full range of thoughts and emotions from minute one on,
and is a lot more interesting to follow because of it. I don’t agree with everything he does in that
game (he cuts ties with Batman because he’s “responsible” for Barbara’s
kidnapping, and declares he’ll save Gotham without Bats…somehow), but the fact that he does
do stuff means that he should be allowed to do more in a game of his
own. Make him younger and let players go
through a virtual Gotham. Or keep him at his current age and create a
sort of XCOM-style scenario where you
take on missions with a slowly-developing GCPD.
There are possibilities that could and should be tapped here.
Failing that?
Just let me play a full game with Barbara. Oracle, Batgirl, either one; she’s a cool-ass
lady.
And that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I’ll go
ahead and say it again: I’d actually like to get into Batman. I’ve got my preferences, but it’s not as if I
think he and everything around him are an unsalvageable mess; even now there’s
stuff I like about him. But this game
does him no favors whatsoever. I might
play it once or twice more to see if things get better, but right now I’ve
mentally checked out of AK. But I might not even make it that far. It’s entirely possible that after this post,
I’ll have given up and read The Dark
Knight Returns instead.
No big loss, though. At least it’ll get me away from the
Riddler. That guy can go suck a jigsaw
puzzle.
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