Finally played it on PS5... I'm flabbergasted and depressed.

[Ingel Riday]

When this game was on sale for the price of a hamburger, I scoffed and bought a hamburger. "When it's $1.99 or less, I'll look. Sate my morbid curiosity, like I did with Saints Row 2022 after Volition shut down and it was free on PlayStation Plus. I'll do it THEN."

Well, it's free on PlayStation Plus now, assuming you claim it before the end of January 2025. That's the price point, so I claimed it and have played it about 4 to 6 hours.

I'm stunned. I wasn't expecting much, but my God. It was somehow worse seeing it myself than just reading about it. The traversal mechanics are kind of fun and the guns don't feel too bad to use... but that's about it. Otherwise:

- The writing is awful

- The dialogue is cringe-inducing

- The story is terrible

- There are way too many cutscenes. They look like they were way too expensive to make, they're poorly paced and written, they interrupt gameplay far too often, and they actually make me frown when they start up. They're like punishment, taking you away from mostly competent shooting and jet-packing to torture you with SBI slop.

- The plot has so many holes in it that my mind reels trying to comprehend them all

- The plot armor on Task Force X is so risible that it makes me chuckle

- The open world is bland. It feels at once small (which it is) and large (because locations blur together so much that you don't feel like you've covered any distance after traveling)

- The game's structure is depressing. It's just me having to do X amount of open world live-service fluff before another cutscene-heavy main quest unlocks, over and over.

- The pandering is off the charts

- Every character being a gun character makes them too similar to one another

- Why does every character have to glory kill for shields and ammo? It's so lame and uninspired, and Waller's incredibly stupid excuse for it is some peak SBI writing slop.

- I had seen every enemy type within the first 2 hours. I can't imagine fighting these bland bio-synthetic, neon-purple, pimple covered mutants for 200 plus hours

- The Diablo / Destiny loot system feels forced, unnecessary, and tedious. Why is this even here, outside of creating a gear treadmill to keep players grinding for hours on end on activities they've already done too many times to progress the main story? It should never have been part of this game

- The soundtrack is forgettable. I still listen to the Arkham Knight soundtrack for fun. It's brilliant. This is just... man

- There is so little substance to the open world. Why in God's name does this game need battle-passes to drag it out more? Who would want to suffer through those?

- Getting disconnected from the server while playing by yourself is peak awful. It makes me have to close the game, restart it, load it back up, and lo and behold... I'm 961 meters away from my cookie cutter open world fluff objective. Great.

- Oi vei


_____________________________

When I beat Saints Row 2022, I remember thinking that it could have been a great game... if it had entirely different writers, an entirely different sense of humor, a better combat system, an entirely different vehicle system, a more interesting set of main quests, an entirely different cast, and so on. In other words, it was a total loss. If every change necessary to make it a great game had been made, Saints Row 2022 would have been an entirely different game from top to bottom. There was really nothing for it. Gearbox games cutting out 35% to 40% of the dialogue, improving gun combat, reducing AI cheese, and patching some bugs before pulling the plug was the most you could hope for.

There's nothing for this game, even more-so. WB has already pulled the plug. There's not going to be a Gearbox Software coming to excise the awful Diablo loot treadmill in favor of a traditional weapon / armor upgrade system. There's not going to be a Gearbox Software to excise 35% to 40% of the dialogue alongside tweaks to the remaining dialogue to make it more palatable where possible. The best thing you can do is make an offline mode (which you've now done), retcon the disrespectful ending in a way that renders the whole game utterly pointless (which you've done, to great ridicule), and then consign it to an "elseworlds" story while pivoting back to Arkham Batman proper.

Even then... I doubt the people that made this disaster are fully gone from Warner Brothers and I've seen no indication that WB is done with ESG firms and losing money. Given this game and the subpar Gotham Knights, why should I have any hope that a pivot back to Arkham Batman proper would be any better than this?

Bleh. At least I saw it, I guess. I can now say that I played the infamous game that outed SBI as a bunch of hacks and exposed them as a corrosive influence on the gaming scene. All without wasting a single penny on it. Just wasted my time, which I suppose is still bad. Guffaw.

[Ingel Riday]

As an addendum, perhaps the oddest part of the experience for me was getting flashbacks to other live service games. In particular, this game reminds me so much of Marvel Avengers. The overly detailed starting level that turns into your gradually-changing base of operations (only instead of the SHIELD airship getting repaired and re-peopled, it's the Hall of Justice getting defiled by ARGUS). The bland open world objectives that you grind over and over for Diablo loot that gradually improves your gear-score so that you can do slightly harder versions of said bland open world objectives to get better loot that so on and so forth. The awful decision to have every character level independently of the others, so you're stuck running a paltry amount of content over and over to get them all decent. The locking of what few cosmetic options exist behind still more grinding / battle passes (though Marvel Avengers eventually just gave everything away for free when it shut down servers). It's uncanny deja vu.

This game has a far better combat system than Marvel Avengers did, but Marvel Avengers had better writing, a way better cast (I'd take Winter Soldier over whatever the heck Mrs. Freeze is supposed to be any day of the week), and characters skills that didn't devolve into tedious statgasms (oh, you'll get X% more of Y for Z seconds given AA condition occurring at B combo level).

Point being, when Marvel Avengers (an unmitigated failure of a game) is my brain's logical point of comparison for your game, something is deeply amiss. :-/

I wish this hadn't been Kevin's last time playing the Arkhamverse Batman. Just heartbreaking.

[TundraTroll907]

The over hate for this game is insane.

[Ingel Riday]

Originally posted by TheThrillofDefeat:

The over hate for this game is insane.

Having finally experienced it for myself... no, it's neither insane nor "over" in quantity.

It's 100% warranted. A lot of things went REAL wrong here. It's such a steep decline from Arkham Knight that it boggles the mind. But, as has been noted, it isn't the brand name that makes games... it's the people behind it, and the people that made Arkham Asylum, City, and Knight aren't there anymore. This is a new crew, and this is what they are capable of producing. Night and day difference.

[unholyghost842]

The fact they keep saying "don't worry we're making a real continuation to Arkham now!" Just makes me more sad.

You already proved you lack the talent to make a game anywhere near as good as Arkham Knight (one of the lesser quality games in Arkham!) So I have no faith in your next project. Why would I?