Ok… so the gameplay itself is actually pretty fun. Guns feel solid, melee and counters are all relatively satisfying, and excluding King Shark, traversing around Metropolis is intuitive and streamlined. Rocksteady’s touch for gameplay hasn’t ceased in the 9 years since Arkham Knight.

Now the missions themselves, on the other hand, are extremely repetitive and very clearly designed to fit the game’s “live service” grind structure rather than investing in genuinely fun and interesting story missions (excluding a couple Batman sections). The enemies also falter in this department with very little variation between them and very quickly drop and chance of being challenging. The boss fights are also super weak. I mean come on. This is the Justice League and not a single boss fight achieves more than just countering a move, spamming bullets, and repeat.

Now here’s where we get serious: the story. To put it simply, and even without the context of the previous Arkham games, it’s dogshit. Annoying characters forwarding a nonsense story of running around killing Gods through repetitive point capture missions and boring and unsatisfying boss fights. Lazy multiversal implementation in an era where jumping from one universe to the next conjures nothing but an eye role was a fun bonus too. All of this wrapped up in genuinely one of the most unsatisfying and nothing endings I’ve seen in a while transitions the game’s whole poor excuse of a story from bad to just an absolute joke.

A story on its own? Yeah it’s bad. But as a continuation of the Arkham games? Bafflingly frustrating. After nearly a decade, following up one of the most celebrated versions of Batman with something as poorly thought out and antithetical to what made those games so loved and appealing in the first place had got to be one of the most pig-headed moves in recent memory. This game will be studied in future for how hard they dropped the ball. Love the characters from the Arkham games? Too bad. They’re all either used minimally or so mischaracterised that they’re unrecognisable from when you saw them last. And of course there’s no way they could have known, but the untimely passing of the great Kevin Conroy really doesn’t help either.

Oh what I would do for another proper Arkham game man, and maybe we might still get one, but if this is the end of the Arkhamverse, then it quite possibly be one of the biggest fumbles in Batman history.