Tag Archives: batman

Thoughts: Batman – Arkham Knight

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Played on an Xbox, so only publicity screenshots for this review with the usual caveat: the game they portray may appear to be more interesting than it actually is.

The idea that game design is just as much about cutting bad or unnecessary features as it is adding new and exciting ones is one that I tend to bang on about on here a lot, but for good reason: Arkham Knight is a fantastic cautionary tale of what happens when you spend a full trilogy of games just piling on more and more features without taking any of them away — you end up with a bloated mess.

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Thoughts: Arkham Asylum.

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Making a Metroid-style third-person adventure game starring Batman is such a genius concept that I can’t believe it’s taken this long for somebody to do it. Batman fits the mechanicsĀ perfectly: not just focused on punching, reliant on gadgets, lots of swooping and jumping. All that has to be done to adapt him for a game is to construct an elaborate and varied playground for him to run around in – in this case, Arkham Asylum – while constantly drip-feeding new gadgets that open up new areas and new secrets, and in this the developers have succeeded spectacularly. But they’ve also achieved so much more.

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