One complaint with the Arkham Knight gameplay trailer that was released about a month ago was that it was a misnomer – the trailer had very little gameplay. At E3, Rocksteady showed us a juicier chunk of the game.
The trailer starts out with Batman putting on his new suit. The heavily armored, plated Batsuit seems like a ‘last stand’ measure that Batman is forced to take, and I can’t wait for the game to introduce the circumstances of this change. The Oracle tells him that Penguin is being protected by the Arkham Knight’s drone forces. The Arkham Knight has so far been shrouded in mystery, and this snippet of information about him is still one of the biggest we’ve received so far. It is interesting that the Arkham Knight is protecting another villain, and it is possible that the Arkham Knight was the driving force behind the truce between the sueprvillains.
Batman glides off the balcony of what seems to be his Clocktower base and continues across the city, before summoning the Batmobile and driving off to meet the Penguin. Gotham City looks absolutely stunning, and the gliding has been improved so much. Just before Batman takes off, we see the expanse of Gotham. The city looks far more realistic than it did in previous editions, and its vastness lends it a sense of secrecy also. In other words, it will be much harder to find obscure secrets in this city, and this is just the way it should be. The gliding is much faster and more realistic, as we can hear the fluttering of Batman’s cape. The Batmobile, which we have already seen, looks and drives like a dream. Based on the trailer, it looks like we are going to get the usual Arkham treatment and have no civilians in the game. On the bright side, the Batmobile sequence revealed that there are some cars in the city, probably driven by criminals. In addition to that, there are also police cars, so the city isn’t completely empty. This is already a huge improvement over the empty shell of a city we were presented in Arkham Origins.
The Batmobile cuts a lot of corners by driving down stairs, to reach its destination. As it approaches the drones, it switches to the Battle Mode that we saw last week. The drones are unmanned, so Batman just destroys them with the Batmobile’s formidable weaponry. It was great to see the Batmobile in action, and it looks like the Battle Mode also allows for maneuverability, as the Batmobile was also able to move from side to side. Batman ejects from the Batmobile and is launched into the air. He proceeds to do a fear takedown on the thugs guarding Penguin’s lair. The fear takedown looks mediocre, as it seems like a more polished triple takedown. The only difference is that it is accompanied with some quicktime button mashing.
Batman enters Penguin’s hideout and takes him down. I am a little uncertain about what happened next; I’m not sure if the choppy, laggy cutscenes were due to a glitch, or if they were an unorthodox introduction to the Scarecrow. Nevertheless, Scarecrow delivers a quick monologue.
“How many more bones would you crush? How many lives will you destroy in pursuit of what you call justice? You are the product of everything you fear; violence, darkness, helplessness.”
The trailer ends with those words, and I have to say, that I am thoroughly excited for Arkham Knight. The team at Rocksteady has delayed the release to 2015, so I can only imagine that they’re trying to make it better. The Scarecrow Nightmare missions are going to be PS4 exclusive, so that’s an added incentive to purchase a next-gen console for this game. Catch the new gameplay trailer for Arkham Knight right here!
