Batman: Arkham Knight
| Batman: Arkham Knight | |||
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| Batman logo: Arkham Knight | |||
| Studio |
 Rocksteady Studios
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| Publisher |
 Warner Bros. Interactive
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| Erstveröffent- lichung |
23rd June 2015 | ||
| platform | PlayStation 4 , Xbox One , Microsoft Windows | ||
| Game engine | Unreal Engine 3 | ||
| genre | Action adventure | ||
| Subject | Batman | ||
| Game mode | Single player | ||
| control | Gamepad , mouse and keyboard | ||
| system advantages preconditions |
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| medium | Blu-ray , download , DVD-ROM | ||
| language | German | ||
| copy protection | Steamworks | ||
| Age rating |
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| information | The PC version was re-released on October 28, 2015 due to technical problems. | ||
Batman: Arkham Knight is, without an offshoot, the fourth part of the Batman: Arkham video game series and was released in 2015. The game can be played on Microsoft Windows as well as on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles and is based on the events of Batman: Arkham City a. It is intended to represent the final part of the game series.
action
After his death in Batman: Arkham City , the Joker's body was cremated. Nine months later, it's Halloween , a restaurant in Gotham is the scene of a fear gas attack by Dr. Jonathan Crane, who is up to mischief as the Scarecrow . He threatens to distribute his gas over the whole city by means of a special device. Thereupon the six million inhabitants are evacuated from the city, leaving only the marauding and looting criminals with their leaders, some policemen of the Gotham City Police Department under the direction of Commissioner James "Jim" Gordon as well as Batman and his allies.
With the help of Barbara Gordon , who works for Batman under the alias Oracle , and the technical equipment of the Batmobile , Batman is able to locate Scarecrow and his machine at the ACE Chemicals factory . When Batman tries to storm the factory, he is confronted by an unknown warrior in state-of-the-art armor, the Arkham Knight . He not only has detailed knowledge of Batman's equipment and combat techniques, but also has his own army of hundreds of soldiers, unmanned battle tanks and aerial drones. This militia moves out shortly afterwards and forcibly takes Gotham City under their control.
After Batman rescues hostages held at ACE Chemicals, he can put Scarecrow in the factory's mixing chamber. This escapes, however, while the explosion that would spread the deadly fear gas all over the east coast is imminent. Batman can minimize the radius of the fallout and escape from the exploding factory. In flashbacks one learns that the blood of the Joker, which was distributed in Batman: Arkham City and contaminated with "Titan", was administered to several people who now show more and more the characteristics of the clown prince of crime. Batman was able to isolate said victim in a hiding place in the Panessa film studios , but he himself was also infected and is from now on accompanied by an ever-present hallucination of the Joker, who begins to question his actions and manipulates his awareness of the environment so that Batman can no longer distinguish between reality and hallucination.
Meanwhile, the Arkham Knight has kidnapped Barbara Gordon from her hiding place in the clock tower. When her father, Commissioner Gordon, learns that his daughter is supporting Batman as Oracle, he loses his temper with him and sets off alone in town to hunt down Scarecrow. Batman can isolate the Arkham Knight's trail with the Batmobile and locate Oracle's apparent prison in the penthouse in Chinatown . Arrived there, he sees Barbara, panicked by the fear gas, shooting herself.
The shaken Batman determines that Scarecrow was working with businessman Simon Stagg in his airships over Gotham on a device called Cloudburst . When Batman has made Stagg harmless and wants to catch Scarecrow, a pinch of fear gas ensures that the Joker in Batman's mind briefly gains the upper hand and almost makes him go crazy. In this mess, the Arkham Knight suddenly appears and removes the cloudburst from the airship in order to install it in a designated tank.
Meanwhile, the film studio in which Batman keeps the Joker patients and which is guarded by his protégé Robin alias Tim Drake is attacked by Harley Quinn and her allies, who see in the patients a possibility to keep their beloved Joker alive. Batman and Robin then search the film studio stage by stage and are ultimately able to catch Quinn and track down the patients who, however, have already turned into psychopaths due to the progressive effects of the "joker toxin" and will eventually die.
The toxin also has an ever stronger effect on Batman, which barely enables him to distinguish reality from his fantasies. When Robin learns that Batman is the last to be infected, he asks him to enter the last free cell so that he can no longer pose a threat. But Batman remembers Jason Todd through the ghost of the Joker, the second Robin, who wanted to face the Joker alone and after months of torture, apparently broken, found death. Then Batman overpowers the new Robin, locks him in the cell and sets out on his own way to defeat Scarecrow and the Arkham Knight. The Arkham Knight activates the cloudburst, causing the whole city to sink into fear gas, which further attacks Batman's mind. Still, he can destroy the tank with the Cloudbust.
Before that, Batman still has Dr. Pamela Isley aka Poison Ivy from the Gotham City Police Department brought to the Botanical Gardens for her giant blooming plants to neutralize the gas. However, due to the sheer volume of the gas, further, ancient trees in the underground of the city have to be freed. When these don't seem strong enough, Ivy sacrifices all of her life force in order to filter the gas out of the air before she dies in Batman's arms.
In the meantime, the Arkham Knight Commissioner has kidnapped Gordon and Batman first confronts him in an unfinished subway tunnel, where the Arkham Knight destroys the Batmobile with a tunnel boring machine . Then he reveals his true identity to Batman: It is Jason Todd, who was not killed by the Joker and now wants to take revenge on Batman. However, the midnight detective can defeat him and remind him of his former role as Robin. Batman and Gordon, who now knows that Bruce Wayne is wearing the Batman mask, place Scarecrow on the roof. There it turns out that Oracle's death was just a hallucination and Gordon had to lure Batman into the trap to save her. His shot in his body armor is also a sham and while Scarecrow falls Oracle from the roof and kidnaps Gordon and Robin, Batman can save them with a newly delivered Batmobile.
After a failed large-scale drone attack by the militia on the Gotham City Police Department, Scarecrow calls on Batman to surrender and take off his mask in front of the world. Otherwise he threatens to kill Gordon and Robin. Batman, in whose mind the Joker has now almost completely taken control, agrees and allows himself to be taken to the destroyed Arkham Asylum psychiatry . There, to protect Robin and Gordon, he agrees that his mask will be removed in front of Scarecrow and the camera is running. Batman surrenders and now everyone knows that Bruce Wayne is hiding behind the mask of the Dark Knight. In his head, through an injection of Scarecrow's toxin, a final fight between him and the Joker takes place, at the end of which Batman comes to terms and banishes the Joker from his mind for good. When he comes to his senses again, Scarecrow wants to kill him, but Jason Todd returns - now in the form of the Red Hood - and saves his old mentor's life. Scarecrow goes insane from an overdose of his own poison, and Batman can eventually turn him over to the police. The exposed Batman knows that Gotham City needs him one more night so that order can be restored.
After Batman has neutralized the criminals who are still active in the city, he instructs his butler Alfred Pennyworth to prepare the so-called Knightfall Protocol. At the time , hundreds of onlookers and reporters were gathering in front of the Wayne family, Wayne Manor , when Bruce Wayne lands unmasked with the Batwing on the property and disappears into the house with Pennyworth. Moments later, the mansion is destroyed in a series of explosions. As at the beginning, Commissioner Gordon's words can be heard at the end, which already opened the game: “That's how it happened. That's how Batman died. "
The following scenes can only be seen after the credits, when Batman defeated and imprisoned all remaining criminals before "Knightfall", thus securing Gotham City 100%. This includes B. also collecting all 240 trophies of the "Riddler", who can only be defeated afterwards in the final battle. Alternatively, you only have to defeat some of the criminals for "Knightfall", but then you see a "reduced" end of the game.
After the events of that night, James Gordon is elected Mayor of Gotham City. Tim Drake and Barbara Gordon get married. In the final scene you can see a family in a dark alley being robbed by thugs from Two-Face and threatened with death. A Batman figure enveloped in smoke then appears on a nearby roof, to which the thugs become aware. While the perpetrators are still making fun of the figure, it suddenly goes up in flames and the Batman logo starts to glow on its chest and the thugs start screaming in panic.
Gameplay
Like the other games in the Arkham main series, the gameplay is similar to the gameplay of Arkham Asylum , the first game in the series, with numerous optimizations. As in the other Arkham games, the game is presented to the player from a third-person perspective . The player steers the protagonist through the openly designed game world , which, in addition to the main missions, optionally also offers side tasks and hidden puzzles.
The character has a number of weapons and gadgets that Batman carries with him. After fighting criminals, the game character receives experience points that depend on elegance and efficiency and can vary accordingly. For the first time in the Arkham series, it is possible for the player to control a vehicle with the Batmobile . The game world is about five times the size of Batman: Arkham City .
development
Batman: Arkham Knight was announced in March 2014 and is set to act as the final installment in Rocksteady's Arkham franchise. Rocksteady stated that they would not develop the games for the seventh generation of consoles , but only for the eighth generation , as the performance of the next-gen consoles can thus be better exploited. As the first video game in the series, Arkham Knight uses the APEX Physics simulator, which is supposed to make the game more realistic. Warner Bros. helped Rocksteady develop the game. However, both companies wanted to release a game from the Arkham series earlier, so Warner Bros. Batman: Arkham Origins released in 2013 as a gap filler. Arkham Knight was designed as a single player game and will not have any multiplayer features.
For the first time in the Arkham series, the Batmobile is playable, which Rocksteady was unable to realize in the previous games due to limited technical possibilities.
Publication and reception
The game was originally announced for October 14, 2014 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC; however, the release was postponed by almost a year to June 2, 2015 and then again to June 23, 2015, as Rocksteady needed more production time. The game was presented at E3 back in 2014 and was named best action-adventure game at the Game Critics Awards .
The reviews for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were mostly positive. IGN rates Batman: Arkham Knight with 9.2 out of 10 points, GameSpot with 7 out of 10 points and GamePro with 90 percent. The Metascore of the PlayStation 4 version is 89%.
The PC version was rated significantly lower due to massive technical problems. The Gamestar evaluates Arkham Knight to 75%, and calls it a "technology fiasco". The graphics, the limitation of the frame rate to 30 frames per second and performance problems are criticized . Metacritic calculates a Metascore of 63% for the PC version. The overall customer rating of the PC version is 16%. As a result of the technical difficulties, distribution of the PC version was temporarily suspended on June 25, 2015. However, these should have been resolved by October 28, 2015.
In 2016, a novel adaptation by Marv Wolfman was published by Panini Verlag under the title Batman Arkham Knight .
synchronization
literature
- Leon Hurley: Fright Knight in PlayStation Official Magazine Issue 95, pp. 48–59 (Future plc, April 2014, English)
- Bryan Vore: The End of Arkham in Game Informer Issue 252, pp. 47–57 (GameStop, April 2014, English)
Web links
- Official website (English)
- Official website (German)
- Batman: Arkham Knight at MobyGames (English)
- Batman: Arkham Knight in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Arkham Knight - PC version on sale again on GameStar , accessed October 29, 2015
- ↑ a b Tamoor Hussein: Batman: Arkham Knight detailed: Batmobile gameplay, new villain, combat tweaks and more. Computeradventuregames.com, March 4, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ a b Vore: The End of Arkham Knight , p. 53.
- ↑ Jason Schreier: Will Rocksteady's Next Batman Game Be Revealed Next Week? Kotaku.com, February 28, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ GameCentral: Batman: Arkham Knight is next gen game from Rocksteady - trailer now live. metro.co.uk, March 4, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ^ The New Batman Game Is Batman: Arkham Knight. IGN Entertainment , March 4, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ a b Vore: The End of Arkham Knight , pp. 47-48.
- ^ Vore: The End of Arkham Knight , p. 50.
- ↑ Arkham Knight Has No Multiplayer, Kevin Conory Returns As Batman. IGN Entertainment , March 4, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ Randolph Ramsay: In Batman: Arkham Knight, the Batmobile Is More Than Just a Car, it's a Tank. Gamespot, June 3, 2014, accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ 2014 Winners. Game Critics Awards , accessed February 15, 2015 . (English)
- ↑ Batman: Arkham Knight Review - Good Knight and Good Luck on IGN Entertainment , accessed June 25, 2015
- ↑ Batman: Arkham Knight Review - Only as good as the world allows it to be on GameSpot , accessed June 25, 2015
- ↑ Rating for Batman Arkham Knight (PS4 / Xbox One) on GamePro , accessed on June 25, 2015
- ↑ Metascore Batman Arkham Knight on Metacritic , accessed June 25, 2015
- ↑ Rating for Batman Arkham Knight (PC) on GameStar , accessed on June 25, 2015
- ↑ Batman: Arkham Knight in Metacritic, accessed June 11, 2015.
- ↑ Warner Bros. draws conclusions: Sale of the PC version discontinued on 4Players , accessed on June 25, 2015