It is no secret that I’m a huge fan of all things Batman. So today, I’ll be taking a look at Rocksteady Studios and Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment’s 2015 title, Batman: Arkham Knight. That’s primarily because the game’s main antagonist is one of my personal favorites from Batman’s rogues gallery, the maniacal, fear-obsessed psychiatrist-turned-psychopath Dr. Jonathan Crane, better known as Scarecrow.

Before we get to the main event, I must include a word of warning. This review will contain major story spoilers for not just Arkham Knight, but two of its predecessors, Arkham City and (to a lesser extent) Arkham Asylum as well. If you don’t want the events of any of these games spoiled for you, I understand. Having said that, let’s get started by discussing the events that set the game’s stage.

Arkham Knight begins with a narration by Gotham City Police Commissioner Jim Gordon. Gordon explains that nine months ago, The Joker died, referencing the end of Arkham City. Commissioner Gordon knows this rather intimately, as he is quick to tell us that he personally oversaw Joker’s cremation. Gotham City and its residents then braced for the inevitable power struggle that would surely rush in to fill the vacuum left by Joker’s absence.

However, according to Gordon, such a power struggle never came to pass. In fact, Gordon states that crime in Gotham actually fell. On one hand, I guess that’s to be expected when one of Gotham’s most prominent maniacs is suddenly removed from the picture without much pomp and circumstance. On the other hand, I can’t help but be a bit surprised that there was a drop in crime when there were so many other gangs, like those led by Two-Face and The Penguin, biding their time until the Clown Prince of Crime was no more.

That is, of course, until a couple of nights before Halloween, when Scarecrow decided to strike by releasing a small amount of his trademark fear toxin inside a small diner. I know that doesn’t sound like much, especially for such a major adversary of Batman, but the chaos at the hands of the mad Dr. Jonathan Crane had only just begun. Scarecrow manages to convince Gotham’s officials to evacuate the entire city by threatening to detonate a massive fear toxin bomb which would cover the whole of Gotham and turn it into (as he calls it) his personal “city of fear.”

It then falls, (as always) to Batman to stop the deranged former physician from detonating his chemical device and dooming Gotham to eternal panic. Batman manages to track down Scarecrow to the central mixing chamber of the Ace Chemicals building, the only facility in Gotham that would have the equipment Scarecrow needs for this purpose. Batman briefly apprehends Scarecrow, but is ultimately forced to release him because Crane claims to have Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, Barbara Gordon, in his clutches.

Shortly before this takes place, however, we learn the real reason for Scarecrow’s otherwise particularly peculiar decision to give local officials time to turn Gotham into something resembling a ghost town. It turns out that the chemical weapon Dr. Crane has been working on is so massive that it won’t simply envelop Gotham in fear toxin. It has the capability to form a cloud of toxic gas over the entire East Coast of the United States. Scarecrow didn’t care if everyone fled from Gotham because he was keenly aware that they had virtually no place on that side of the country to which they could safely escape.

We’ll come back to Scarecrow and his fear toxin bomb in a bit, but for now, let’s switch gears and discuss another aspect of Arkham Knight’s plot. Of course, in order for Scarecrow to be able to work on his bomb in peace and simultaneously accomplish his actual ultimate goal of “ending the legend of the Batman,” he’s going to need some obstacles at his disposal to slow the Dark Knight down. Dr. Crane can’t afford to make things too easy for Mr. Wayne, after all.

These obstacles arrive in the form of a private, well-trained militia force commanded by the titular Arkham Knight. No one (perhaps not even Scarecrow) knows the Knight’s identity, but it’s clear nonetheless that the Knight has quite a lot of personal history with Batman. The Knight makes it painfully obvious that he wants nothing more than to see Batman dead by his hand as a result of that history.

In one instance later in the story during a conversation between the Knight and Batman, the Knight states that there’s a significant difference between himself and Scarecrow in that “Scarecrow wants you to suffer, Batman; I just want you dead.” As it happens, the Knight’s militia force also deploys remote-controlled tanks in addition to the standard militiamen. These tanks, as you might imagine, are too powerful for Batman to destroy on foot. This forces the Caped Crusader to pull out the coolest party trick in his entire utility belt: the keys to the Batmobile.

From that point on, the Batmobile serves as the game’s preferred way for you to traverse Gotham City, although the standard “grappling-hook-into-gliding-around-at-the-speed-of-sound” method to which you may already be accustomed still works just fine. I think I can hear a collective sigh of relief from all the Batman fans reading this review who haven’t yet played Arkham Knight.

Honestly, the fact that this familiar method of travel is still a viable option has always made me feel like the entire “Batmobile versus remote-controlled tanks” idea was kind of shoehorned in. Yes, the Batmobile is really cool. Any nerd worth their salt will readily tell you that. Even so, I feel as though the Batmobile is trying too hard to overshadow the fact that players can just as easily glide around Gotham to get where they need to be instead of driving.

In fact, let’s skip ahead a bit in the story, shall we? The screenshots that will be present throughout the next few paragraphs are from later in the game wherein Scarecrow does actually manage to envelop Gotham in fear toxin, albeit on a much smaller scale than he had originally hoped. In the process, the Batmobile’s power cells short out somehow, which renders the car inoperable until Batman finds a way to repair it and subsequently braves the cloud of toxin in order to do so.

This constitutes one of a few segments where the Batmobile is either occupied or out of commission for some reason. I felt liberated during these portions of Arkham Knight, for lack of a better word. That largely has to do with the fact that throughout the points where the Batmobile is unavailable, there’s no risk of me accidentally pressing my controller’s left bumper and consequently having Batman stop whatever he was doing to dive headlong into the car when it arrives at his location.

That really breaks the flow of gameplay when it happens. Especially because the button command on a controller for summoning the Batmobile in Arkham Knight is the same button that all three other Arkham games designated for the activation of Detective Mode. Needless to say, because of this I find myself in the driver’s seat of the Batmobile far more often than I’d actually like. In retrospect, that’s something I really never thought I’d say.

Let’s go back to Scarecrow and his big, scary bomb for a short while. I mentioned earlier that Batman tracks down the mad doctor to the central mixing chamber of the Ace Chemicals building and actually manages to get hold of Scarecrow before everything starts rapidly going south for the Dark Knight. After Scarecrow escapes, we see that Batman apparently knows off the top of his head how to get the mixing chamber to deploy a neutralizing agent to counteract the chemicals that Scarecrow has loaded into the facility to create his bomb. Of course he does, he’s Batman.

The Caped Crusader must load the neutralizing agent into each chemical chamber, and he must do so agonizingly slowly so as not to be blown to Bat-bits. As you might expect by now, Scarecrow’s fear toxin has begun to take its toll on Batman, so he starts to hallucinate. He manages to load most of the neutralizing agent and significantly reduce the blast radius of the bomb until a certain someone makes a surprise appearance.

Yep, that’s The Joker, all right! He’s voiced by the legendary Mark Hamill and everything, even though I could almost swear I’ve read about Mr. Hamill saying he would give up the role after Arkham City. Now, let me hazard a guess at what you’re thinking: “Wait, but The Joker is supposed to be dead! Commissioner Gordon cremated him at the very beginning of the game!” You’re right, but let me explain. This is where the other major spoilers for Arkham City’s story come into play, in addition to some spoilers for Arkham Asylum.

I’ll summarize this as quickly as I can. You see, as we’ve established, The Joker died at the end of Arkham City. What killed him was a blood infection brought on by the Clown Prince of Crime injecting himself with what was called the “Titan formula” back at the end of Arkham Asylum. This “Titan” stuff constituted what Joker thought was a way for him to essentially create massive, brutish henchmen that not even Batman could bring down. The formula had a similar effect on Joker when he injected himself with some of it, but Batman and his particular brand of justice prevailed once again.

Then, a little ways into Arkham City, Batman winds up knocked out cold and wakes up restrained in The Joker’s hideout within the titular portion of Gotham. The Dark Knight is horrified to find that The Joker has transfused some of his infected blood into him, which means that Batman must rush to find a cure for the disease if he doesn’t want to die a horrible death in a matter of hours. The reason I bring that up is to help this aspect of Arkham Knight make a bit more sense.

Even though the actual Joker is nothing more than a pile of ashes at this point, Batman still has enough of Joker’s infected blood coursing through his veins to where the new and improved version of Scarecrow’s fear toxin causes the Caped Crusader to see and hear The Joker in his hallucinations. It’s almost as if Batman can’t cope with the loss of his archenemy, even though he actually attempted to prevent Joker’s death. Sad, isn’t it?

Actually, speaking of sadness, that leads me to another aspect of Arkham Knight and Arkham City that I want to discuss in this review. These two Arkham games in particular contain a lot of moments and plot points which I think are clearly intended to tug at the player’s heartstrings. Now, I usually don’t get emotional over video games, but I have a bit of a confession to make.

The sight of Batman carrying the body of The Joker out into the snow and gingerly resting him on the hood of a police car still gets me tearing up at the very least every time I witness it. I’ve finished Arkham City’s story at least four times now, and that remains the case. Arkham Knight (in the same vein) has several moments that are designed to cause similar emotions within its player base. Fair warning, though: this is where the story spoilers for Arkham Knight will get particularly heavy.

There are three such moments that really stand out to me. For the first of them, I feel I should include a content warning, though I won’t describe anything in detail. There’s a part in approximately the early mid-game wherein Batman sees Oracle trapped by Scarecrow in a fear toxin dispersal chamber… within arm’s reach of a gun. I think that’s all I feel even remotely comfortable saying about that particular section of Arkham Knight. If you feel at all uncomfortable because of what I’ve just mentioned, I want to emphasize that I’m right there with you.

Secondly, I should establish that throughout most of Arkham Knight’s story, Batman works alongside Poison Ivy. Poison Ivy comes into play because she’s naturally immune to Scarecrow’s fear toxin, and because she can raise plants that can remove the toxin from the air, thus purifying it and allowing anyone remaining in Gotham to safely breathe again.

There are a few points in the story wherein Batman has to use the Batmobile’s built-in sonar scanner to search for and raise the roots of plants powerful enough to purify Gotham. Once these plants are raised, Ivy can harden their bark and make it impossible for the Arkham Knight’s militia to destroy them before they can clear the toxin from the air.

Unfortunately, this entire process takes quite a physical toll on Poison Ivy. Much later on in the story, Batman heads toward where Ivy is stationed with the intent of checking on her, only to solemnly discover that she’s not long for this world. This part usually brings a tear to my eye, although it doesn’t make me quite as emotional as the aspect of the story I’m about to bring up: the reveal of the Arkham Knight’s identity.

After several skirmishes and head-on battles, Batman finally unmasks the Knight to find that he is none other than Jason Todd. You know, Jason Todd, the second iteration of Robin after the arguably more famous Dick Grayson. Well, if you don’t know who Jason Todd is, I suspect that there’s a good reason for that. Let me explain.

If you’re like me, you’re far too young to remember the event I’m about to describe from the comics. In 1988, during the four-issue A Death in the Family story line, DC Comics held an opinion poll where readers in the U.S. and Canada could call a telephone number and vote on whether or not they wanted to see Jason Todd killed by The Joker. Those who participated in the poll decided, albeit narrowly, that they wanted Jason to die. So, DC dutifully obliged. Why, I would most assuredly go so far as to call that an injustice, or perhaps even two!

So, that would probably be why you may not remember Jason Todd as Robin. Well, that and the fact that he was widely regarded as a lackluster incarnation of the Boy Wonder even before his untimely (and probably brutal) demise. However, you may know him from the role he took up upon being revived in later story arcs, namely Red Hood.

Despite being trained by Batman, which means he had the whole “never kill anyone under any circumstances” thing forcibly drilled into his skull throughout his tenure as Robin, Red Hood serves as more of an antihero and a vigilante with an obvious willingness to use firearms and lethal force. Anyway, back to Arkham Knight. There are resolutions for two of these three moments that stand out to me as being particularly emotional.

To my immense relief, it turns out in the end that Oracle is perfectly fine and didn’t harm herself. Batman was merely hallucinating when he saw her in that fear gas chamber with that pistol. Secondly, after Batman defeats and unmasks the Arkham Knight, the two eventually manage to reconcile. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much that could be done for poor Poison Ivy, but as Alfred said after her death, “her final act [of purifying Gotham of the massive cloud of fear toxin] was a noble one.”

I don’t want to spoil the actual conclusion to Arkham Knight’s story, as I think I’ve included enough spoilers in this piece as it is. Instead, I’ll wrap up this review by mentioning the last thing I wanted to discuss. If I had elected to review Arkham Knight at any point before approximately mid-2020, I would likely have started that article by spending at least ten minutes complaining about the poor quality of the game’s PC version.

Batman: Arkham Knight is exceptionally infamous for having a PC port which was so utterly unplayable on many machines that the game was actually temporarily pulled from Steam so that more work could be done to improve it. Even despite these additional efforts, the game still ran particularly terribly on my computer after I bought it once it returned to the Steam platform. That is, until some mysterious point within the last year and a half or so.

I have no earthly idea what may have been done, when it was done, or who was responsible for it. All I remember is that the game automatically downloaded what I believe was a small update at one point somewhat recently. Since that day, Arkham Knight actually runs nearly flawlessly on my aging, middle-of-the-road gaming rig. I’ve had exactly one frame rate hiccup during the time I spent recording footage of the game for this review, and even then, I was still getting 55 FPS rather than 60.

If only I knew who was responsible for repairing this port, I would gladly salute them for making what’s probably the final game in one of my favorite franchises actually worth playing again. That’s part of the reason I decided to revisit the game today. Since it has been restored to the glory it should’ve possessed originally if not for its once-awful Steam version, I think you should give it a try as well if you haven’t. Even moreso if you were put off by all the initial negative reviews because of those technical issues.

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Batman: Arkham Knight

0.00

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Outstanding Finale to the Arkham Franchise
• PC Version Has Vastly Improved Over Time

Cons

• Certain Story Aspects May Be Considered Uncomfortable