izigame.me

The awkward thing about this game is that it isn't bad per se, just painfully average when compared to the other games in the series. The marginal improvements it makes over Arkham City is nowhere enough to make up for the step-backs it takes.
So what does it do well? The story is well-written, well-voice-acted and well-presented. The murder investigations are stylish, interesting, and give you the feeling that you're the world's greatest detective.
But other than that, pretty much everything in the game is a dumbed-down version of the same in Arkham City: The combat is more sluggish and less responsive. The world is copy-and-pasted with none of the charm and easter eggs. The riddler trophies are lazily placed and for the most part too easy. The predator sections don't feel nearly as satisfying because of slacker designs and the annoying bug where the prompt to do a silent takedown does not always show up reliably resulting in Batman constantly parrying no one behind enemy backs and being detected. The traversal too is made more tedious by having fewer grappable surfaces.
It is simply baffling why these design decisions were made when a copy-and-pasted Arkham City would've actually been the better game. The story while interesting ultimately would not matter to the greater Arkham plot even if you hadn't experienced it. It is just difficult to recommend this game even to fans because even if you play these games for the villains, the dialogue this time around outside of the main story is worse for some reason. The audiologs don't hit as hard, you wrap up most of the villains in uninspired sidequests. And the lines uttered by random thugs are fewer too resulting in more reptition.
If it is Rocksteady's attention to detail that makes the Arkham games, this has all the looks and features of the Arkham games but none of its soul. Gamers like to redeem games that was hated on release but are looked on more favourably as worse games get released and people could enjoy them for what they are. This one, however, is neither a No Man's Sky nor an AC Unity, it does not do anything new that backfires because it's "ahead of its time". If anything it is a symptom that is all too prescient for what is to come in gaming, i.e., companies releasing products for PURELY commercial reasons (because there has to be an Arkham game to cash in on the craze). It is something that happened for all the wrong reasons.