Batman: Arkham Knight is what every tightly focused, well-designed video game eventually becomes when left in the hands of a big corporation. It’s a big, sloppy mess of conflicting ideas and mechanics, smoothed over with an expensive graphical sheen and a cookie-cutter, committee-designed big budget film plot. The series’ fluid gameplay is inundated and made obsolete by Arkham Knight’s terminal case of feature creep, and the exploration and level design that distinguished the series is entirely stripped out, replaced by big, bombastic car chases and linear point-to-point corridor traversal. It’s uncanny to see how comprehensively the game has been scrubbed clean of even the slightest scrap of challenge or player agency, and it’s really disappointing because the entire time you can feel that Arkham City’s solid groundwork is in here… somewhere.

It’s a real shame that the game is this bad. You can really clearly see how triple-A trends and marketing were the lead designer on this; the gigantic open world, seamless gameplay-to-cutscene transitions, and abundant particle effects and shiny, reflective surfaces make this the perfect game for trailers at tech conventions, and the more you play the clearer it becomes that this was the priority. Batman’s expanded arsenal of tools and weapons is impressive on paper, and could make for fun, open-ended gameplay in the hands of more imaginative designers, but Rocksteady doesn’t seem to understand that even the most innovative arsenal in the world doesn’t materially improve the game if there’s an easy ‘win button’ for just about every situation you could possibly encounter. The game has all these new tools like a voice synthesiser which lets you give fake orders to bad guys or the ability to pick up melee weapons or random debris in fights, but it never provides sufficient challenge for them to be necessary. A new attack called a ‘fear takedown’ lets you instantly incapacitate up to five enemies at once before they can even retaliate, and an all-purpose ‘disruptor’ sabotages or disables literally any tool that bad guys might bring to the table, and these tools are just so strong that the game becomes centralised around them. Stealth encounters are decided before they begin, because you can safely destroy all of your enemies’ weapons from afar before you even engage, and even if you have to get down and dirty, you’ll usually only need two fear takedowns to finish an entire encounter.

This is a pervasive issue throughout the game, and it’s hard to say if it stems from the story. Batman, like in most modern depictions, is an indestructible tank of a man who never has difficulty doing anything and can accomplish the most ridiculous feats with little effort. The plot of the game is always having to find ways to work around this. Nobody can hurt Batman, so how can I possibly care about what’s happening here? Why would I want to follow this weird ultra-American power fantasy plot if the central character is just a completely emotionless, invulnerable pile of muscle who wanders from impossible encounter to impossible encounter without ever facing a challenge? He talks like he’s in a movie trailer, and as far as the plot and gameplay are concerned, he might as well be. Nothing the characters do in Arkham Knight actually matters, which is a weirdly accurate reflection of how uninteractive the gameplay ends up being.