Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League looks like Destiny dropped into Batman: Arkham
Rocksteady Studios shows off first gameplay of its DC third-person shooter
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Rocksteady Studios shows off first gameplay of its DC third-person shooter
As Ed detailed in his review earlier this week, Gotham Knights is a bit of a disappointing dud. I’ve also been picking my way through Gotham City as various members of the bat family, weightlessly punching dudes in alleys before crafting new sticks that hit 2% harder than the one I was using before. Despite a relatively good looking rendition of the iconic gothic metropolis and a pretty engaging story, Gotham Knights ultimately failed to capture my imagination.
It didn’t help that throughout my time with Gotham Knights, I was thinking about the Arkham series. Rocksteady’s trio of Batman-em-ups are essential superhero games, titles that redefined the genre and provided a template that still feels contemporary to this day. Aslyum, City and Knight fully immerse you in the Batman fantasy, successfully crafting a depiction of the caped crusader that was deadly, capable and – perhaps best of all – human.
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the Gotham Knights review as an avid Batman Arkham series fan, but Warner Bros Montreal endlessly throws gameplay mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, making it feel like the open-world RPG version of Frankenstein’s Monster. Rather than distilling what makes Rocksteady’s Arkham series so popular, it believes that bigger is better. The result is a bloated game, but one in which a colourful cast of characters tell an engaging story that’s worthy of its predecessors.
RELATED LINKS: The best superhero games on PC, The best RPGs on PC, What if Batman: Arkham Knight 2 had happened?
The worst day of my life was at EGX about 4 years ago.
Nestled in the retro area of the exhibition hall in front of a row of black, plasticy LCD TVs sat a young boy of about 10 years old. Interested in what was passing for retro in this modern era, I hung around for a minute as the loading bar finished spinning and what I saw filled me with hollow, existential dread.
Next to the Pac-Man cabinets and CRTs with Super Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog flickering on their screens, the kid wasn’t playing Arkanoid, or Asteroid, or any other -Oid, but Batman: Arkham Asylum on a PS3.
I’m a big fan of shared, collective funtimes, so I must lay flowers at the feet of posters on the Batman Arkham subreddit (maybe not flowers; like, bat-themed knives and big stompy boots. I don’t know, what does Batman like?). A couple of weeks ago, with no new mainline Arkham game since 2015’s Arkham Knight, they started discussing Batman: Arkham World, a fourth game in the series that came out in 2021. Except, of course, it does not exist.