Playing Arkham Knight, you realize how unlikable a character Batman remains, how much by this point in the Arkham series you’ve developed your own lack of interest toward his lack of interest.
He’s all next-gen menace, a gothic armor-clad soldier of dourness, as obdurate as Master Chief in a cape. His judge-you eyes stare out over a scowl of nasolabial folds as rigid as jail bars. There’s no sense of him taking pleasure in his godlike command of all that bleak, industrial, forever-night-space—space that developer Rocksteady says is five times the size of Arkham City’s bleak prison sprawl.
But there is substantial pleasure to be had in controlling Batman’s new ride, something I wasn’t expecting going into my E3 demo yesterday. Maybe that’s because a feature like the Batmobile—the name alone sounds absurd, the sort of thing Adam West’s Batman would call it—seems like a comedown. It’s a car. That’s Arkham Knight’s entire impetus at first blush: Batman gets his driver’s license.
And yet as I brushed the cobwebs from my fingers to maneuver Batman from rain-slick rooftops to familiar thug-stalked rooms (Arkham Knight uses more or less the same controls as the prior games), I realized the Batmobile isn't just your means of locomotion or another accessory in your arsenal of Bat-tools. It's a fully realized second character, and in some ways, a more likable one.
I'd anticipated the Batmobile's cool Batman-propelling features, the one where Batman ejects upward and drops into a cape-glide, or the one where the car can transform into a Tim Burton-esque tank, then glide sideways like someone strafing in a shooter. What I hadn't been expecting was the role the Batmobile plays in solving environmental puzzles: not simplistic one-shot deals like "shoot the cover off that vent cover" or "blow a hole in that wall," but elaborate, multi-part conundrums where I had to learn to shuffle fluidly between Batman and the Batmobile while thinking about its—and Batman's—relationship to the world in completely new ways.
At one point, for instance, I had to rescue a hostage stuck in a chamber underground. To get to him, I used the Batmobile—controlled directly by you, but implicitly by Batman with a remote—to isolate and blast open access-ways for Batman, who I'd then shift back to, jogging from room to room to fiddle electrical panels or clamber through crawlspaces. After some detective mode sleuthing and destructive prep work, I had to use the Batmobile to fire a tether that attached to something which, as I hauled backward on the connective cable, slowly dragged an elevator car up a shaft. That allowed Batman to climb in and me to roll the car forward, lower him down, then pull off my rescue, after which I repeated the maneuver to raise the hostage to safety.
The person running my demo was helping me along, telling me what to do and where to look, intentionally spoiling the puzzle-solving for brevity's sake. But the sense was of two characters working together to solve sophisticated scenario-driven environmental stumpers, as if Batman were Ratchet and the Batmobile Clank. Now imagine what that might mean, if Rocksteady's as shrewd as in the last two games, for all the side challenges and mini-games that such an essential partnership might lend itself to.
I was expecting Arkham Knight to look breathtakingly fantastic, and to feel like the apex of everything Rocksteady has learned about fulfilling nerdy superhero power fantasies. But I wasn't expecting that clever Ratchet & Clank segment or for the Batmobile to feel so essential—and if I'm right that Rocksteady's planning to thread that partner-play motif throughout the game, Arkham Knight may just have laid its most compelling card on the table.
