Rocksteady Says Batman: Arkham Knight Is "The Biggest Game We've Ever Made"

 Batman's enemies have united against him and taken the fight to the streets of Gotham. But can they stay unified long enough to take down the Dark Knight?

"A clean shot to the head," drones the villain known as Arkham Knight. "That's all it will take." At every opportunity, the Knight speaks of the horrific deeds he might perform, doing his best to drive fear into Batman's heart throughout the open-world adventure game that features his name. Scarecrow similarly trades on Batman's doubts, attempting to convince the troubled hero of his own impotence at every turn. "All eyes, all hopes upon a man who fails his friends," calls out Scarecrow through Gotham's public networks, reminding Bruce Wayne that he, too, bears responsibility for the losses his loved ones endure.

Batman is a troubled hero, and past Arkham games haven't shied away from exploring his dark side. Arkham Knight is no exception: the caped crusader growls his way through one confrontation after another in which he must question his role in Gotham's current crisis. We've seen these themes before, many times over, and Batman: Arkham Knight's villains repeat them ad nauseum, as if you weren't already choking on heavy-handed metaphors at every turn. It's fortunate, then, that Arkham Knight, for all its ham-fisted storytelling and frequent returns to well-trod ground, features the qualities developer Rocksteady has infused its previous games with: superb production values, hard-hitting combat, and a wonderful sense of freedom as you soar above the skies of Gotham.

Hey, it's the Batmobile! Over and over!

Scarecrow, Arkham Knight, and the legacy of the now-dead Joker loom large over this freedom. There is another, more surprising obstacle which you must overcome if you wish to retain your ownership of Gotham's skies, however: the Batmobile. For the first time in this series, you can leap into the iconic vehicle and zoom down the streets, drifting around tight turns and pursuing key vehicles as they speed away. The driving itself is slick and satisfying, as long as you can overlook Rocksteady's tendency to wrest away camera control to show you some dramatic sight or another. Yet there's no beating the incredible rush of using your line launcher to fling yourself through the sky--and it's worth mentioning that taking to the air is usually faster than settling behind the wheel. As a result, Arkham Knight is constantly trying to justify the Batmobile's presence, forcing it upon you at nearly every opportunity.

Particularly in the latter third of the story, you're frequently forced to take part in vehicular battles against remotely manned drones. When you first engage in this kind of combat, which turns the Batmobile into an agile tank, it's a delight. You strafe from side to side, sliding the vehicle into safe areas between the visible lines that indicate the path of incoming enemy rockets. All the while, you fire your cannons at the drones and use small fire to eliminate missiles fired upon you; the dark sky lights up during these battles, giving vehicular combat an initial spark, and making you the director of a spectacularly violent fireworks display.

Gameplay utilizes Batman's excellent detective skills. His orphan skills go underutilized, however.

But in spite of the upgrades the Batmobile earns over time--EMP blasts, the ability to hack enemy drones, and so forth--the Batmobile battles never become more interesting, just more monotonous, as they seem to go on forever. The story's final hours succumb to a series of same-ish battles that play out more or less like the last, lending an air of tedium to what should be the game's most poignant surprises. The Batmobile is also the centerpiece of a number of mediocre boss encounters, all manner of puzzles, boring cat-and-mouse games with superpowered tanks, and even some of the Riddler's many optional challenges scattered across the city. Don't be surprised should you end up muttering to yourself, "Too. Much. Batmobile."

Arkham Knight is at its best when you are given the freedom of movement you both need and deserve. What a treat it is to look down upon this beautiful and derelict city as you glide through the thick, black air. Gotham has been deserted by most citizenry due to Scarecrow's most recent threat to release a hallucinogenic toxin into the streets, making the clouded heavens and the stoic statues all the more imposing. The bat-symbol cuts an impressive silhouette in the sky, drawing you towards your next mission objective--and the objective itself may be a structure like the grandiose Panessa Movie Studios, where climbing ivy and guardian statues warn you of potential danger.

Arkham Knight is constantly trying to justify the Batmobile's presence, forcing it upon you at nearly every opportunity.

Batman is beautifully animated and an absolute joy to control. To soar towards Man-Bat and tackle the shrieking beast in one of the game's many side missions, and to zip to higher vantage points only to descend onto a rioter and deliver a hard kick, are the moments that represent Arkham Knight at its very best. Every mechanical edge is oiled to maximum slickness: Batman glides through Gotham with the confidence of an experienced predator, and exhibits the exact right amount of stickiness as he approaches surfaces. There is an astounding amount of flavor voiceover; Batman comments on the task at hand should you try to leave the area you are confined to, enemies remark on the number of fallen comrades they have counted during stealth encounters, and the annoyingly chatty thugs swarming the streets have more speaking lines than any number of film scripts. Few games are this rich in audiovisual details.

Don't forget: Batman isn't killing anyone in his rampage against Gotham's enemies, though he delights just enough in breaking bones that it's hard not to nod your head along to the Arkham Knight's insistence that Batman is just as responsible for Gotham's dereliction as anyone else. The storytelling gymnastics the game performs to remind you that Bruce Wayne is not a murderer are ridiculous. The Batmobile is using nonlethal rounds, you are told, and when you run over criminals, a little zap lets you know that you're not squishing them under your tires, just giving them an electrical jolt as you pass. I could dismiss this mounting nonsense easily as forgivable video game logic if the narrative didn't devote so much time explaining (and re-explaining, and re-re-explaining) that Batman lives by a non-killing code. Rocksteady tries to have it both ways, representing this code as an emotional conflict that figures heavily into the story, then letting you plow through crowds of bad guys without consequence. Even in the oft-illogical world of video games, the dissonance is striking.

Everyone loves a good crane-moving puzzle.

Then again, this is a story about a billionaire in a bat suit, so perhaps there is only so much plausibility to be expected. It might be hard to believe Batman isn't sending men to the morgue during Arkham Knight's melee battles, but the series' rhythmic hand-to-hand combat continues to set the bar high. Batman is a frightening, almost otherworldly creature as he tumbles and slides from one target to another, and his fists exhibit the raw power of any hammer or club. Stealth combat sequences, which offer astounding flexibility in how you approach enemies, are as good as ever. Slinking through vents, taking down a goon, and zipping away is as rewarding as it is to sabotage your armed foes with your disruptor rifle, causing their weapons to malfunction and leaving their owners open to attack. Smart level design and a large array of gadgets--a remote electrical charge, a machine that emulates villains' voices, a hacking device, and so forth--keep each predator room as interesting as the last.

Batman's many talents give rise to a terrific amount of variety. He is a scientist and a detective in addition to being Gotham's scowling savior; he has a computer that knows the answers to every imaginable question (except the ones that drive the plot, of course); and he possesses the memory of an elephant rather than a bat--a nice skill to have when solving the murder mystery that serves as one of the game's better side plots. Arkham Knight finds great ways of incorporating these talents into gameplay. For instance, you re-create a kidnapping by activating the returning bat-vision mode and scouring the street for clues. The crime's events are then depicted on screen, allowing you to forward and reverse through them at will in your search for answers.

Poison Ivy is dressed for success, and like almost every one of Arkham Knight's female characters, is in need of rescue.

Puzzles like this are clever, and the related tasks, such as scanning a corpse's tissue to find anomalies, make you feel like an active participant in a real forensic analysis. The game constantly digresses, asking you to team up with comrades like Nightwing and Robin to deliver cooperative beatdowns, and to perform all number of secondary missions, which incorporate villains like Penguin, Two-Face, and Firefly. Some set pieces, such as one in which you defuse a set of bombs as a villain stands on a rotating platform, are particularly noteworthy for smart use of camera angles, and for the way the gameplay assists in characterization, teaching you about the miscreants at hand not just through dialogue and plotting, but through the way you interact with them.

Arkham Knight is loaded with villains, actually, including the one that gives the game its name: Arkham Knight himself. His identity is meant to be the game's greatest mystery, but conspicuous foreshadowing, and a reliance on age-old storytelling cliches, make every reveal as surprising as the time The Mighty Ducks won that big hockey game. There are some tense story beats and moving events, but your two primary goals--to stop Scarecrow's evil toxin plot, and to confront and unmask the Arkham Knight--are too predictable to be compelling.

Pow! Crunch! Whiff! Harumph!

What Batman: Arkham Knight does well, however, it does really well. Gotham is a dazzling playground where neon lights pierce through the rain and mist; all it takes is a single glimpse to tell you that this is a city in need. Moreover, many individual elements are so carefully constructed, and presented with such flair, that appreciation is the only reasonable reaction. Yet most of these elements--excellent acting, wonderful animations, moody soundtrack--are ones that Batman: Arkham City also excelled in, making Arkham Knight's missteps all the more noticeable. Rather than escape the pull of the games that spawned it, The Bat's newest adventure refines the fundamentals; it is a safe but satisfying return to the world's most tormented megalopolis.

Batman: Arkham Knight Tells "A Much More Personal Story"

With Gotham under siege, Batman's allies rally to fight alongside him. But does this mean he's more vulnerable than he would be alone?

Rocksteady's Batman games have evolved beyond their humble origins in Batman: Arkham Asylum. Where Batman was once confined to this single location, later games in the Arkham series have granted him greater room to glide through. In Batman: Arkham Knight, the entire city of Gotham is under siege by a united rogues gallery--so where does Arkham itself fit into the story?
"The word 'Arkham' has come to represent an aesthetic and a philosophy," says Arkham Knight's brand marketing producer, Dax Ginn. "Our games are very 'real'--not hyper-real, but there's a realism about the way the characters behave. There's a grittiness about the appearance of them. The connotations of the word 'Arkham' have moved away from a literal connection to Arkham Asylum. But we think about the word 'Arkham' as meaning more than just the geography of the place. It stands for an interpretation of gritty realism within the game world."

'Arkham' also represents Rocksteady's interpretation of Batman himself: playing as him offers "a fantasy of empowerment", according to Ginn.
"That's been an escalation from Arkham Asylum through to Arkham Knight, with every game being a step up in the threat that Batman faces, but also counter-threat that he brings," he continues. "The skill tree that he has in terms of combat and gadgetry, as well as the addition of the Batmobile, makes him more powerful than he's ever been. But the threat that he faces is more threatening than it's ever been. That's the essence of this arms race that has been the plan throughout the three games."

If it sounds like an unstoppable force is about to meet an immovable object, you wouldn't be far off the mark. The eponymous Arkham Knight has been designed to be Batman's equal, so when the two inevitably clash, Ginn hints that the result will be a "fascinating gameplay experience."
And yet, in the Arkham series so far, Batman rarely ever feels like he's in real danger. This plays into the power fantasy Ginn speaks of, and is a core aspect of the character: Batman is equipped to deal with any situation. So what is the nature of the new threat he faces in Arkham Knight, and why is it actually threatening if Batman is more powerful than ever? This time around, Batman is joined by what Ginn calls the 'Bat-family'--Nightwing, Robin, Oracle, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, Lucius Fox, and Catwoman--and they are the ones who cannot withstand an unstoppable force.

"Batman's allies become more important, but his allies aren't as capable as him, and they get drawn into the crossfire that surrounds him because of the decisions he has made about the war he has brought upon himself through his own moral compass," Ginn explains. "This is a fascinating aspect of Batman's personality that we haven't covered at all in the previous games. It's a much more personal story than we've ever told before."

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At the core of Arkham Knight's story is the question: 'Is Batman a solitary character? Or is he part of an alliance?' Ginn says that's an open question, as other interpretations of Batman have seen him feature in a group of superheroes, but it's one that Arkham Knight may see you find a different answer to.

Batman: Arkham Knight PC, Xbox One, and PS4 File Size Revealed

With just a few more weeks to go before Batman: Arkham Knight's release, we have now learned the game's file size. Rocksteady's action adventure, its final entry in the Arkham series, will weigh in at around 45 GB across PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.

That's according to the game's Steam, Xbox Marketplace, and PlayStation Store pages. The file size is roughly in line with other AAA games.
Publisher Warner Bros. has also rolled out a special deal for the Arkham Knight Premium Edition. This bundle, which comes with the game's $40 DLC pass and other bonuses, will sell for $100 at launch, but you can buy it for $90 up until launch. This discount applies to all versions of the game.
After multiple delays, Arkham Knight launches for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on June 23. For a closer look at the game, check out some images in the gallery below.

How You Can Help Make This Year's Assassin's Creed Better

Ubisoft announces first-ever "Playtest Road Show" for Assassin's Creed Syndicate.

Ubisoft wants your input to help make this year's Assassin's Creed Syndicate a better game.
The French publisher has announced the first-ever "Playtest Road Show," with the first stop on the tour scheduled for next week at E3. On June 17, people can play the game and then talk directly with developers "to make an impact on the final game," Ubisoft said.

E3 is held in Los Angeles, so you'll have to be there to take part in the event. You can apply by sending an email to playtestroadshow@ubisoft.com with your name, age, and a short summary of your experience with the Assassin's Creed series in 100 words or fewer.
Ubisoft notes that it will only select "experienced" Assassin's Creed players, and you must be 17 years old. Transportation is not provided
It's unclear where the Playtest Road Show will be headed next, but other big-time gaming and pop culture events this year include San Diego Comic-Con (July) and Gamescom and PAX Prime in August.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate is scheduled to launch on October 23 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a PC version to follow later in the fall. The game is set in London during the Industrial Revolution.
You play as twin Assassins, Jacob and Evie Frye. For lots more on Assassin's Creed Syndicate, check out GameSpot's previous coverage and some images in the gallery below.