Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham Knight
Batman: Arkham Origins was garbage.
Agree
Although, one thing about Arkham Origins I really did enjoy; was once you beat Deathstroke, you got his weapon. One of my favorite things to do would be to use Deathstroke's grapple launcher and string people up from gargoyles and other objects. The "screams" they let out were hilarious.
Conversely, though I love Arkham Knight, one of my favorite things to do is be in the Batmobile driving around in battle mode and shocking the bad guys. Hearing them make that "shocked/electrocuted" sound as they fly backwards or off to the side, just makes me giggle every time.
Arkham Knight is an incredible game, but the thing that really hurt it in my eyes was the incredibly poor PC port they did. You had to have an incredibly powerful rig in order to operate that game at max potential and without error, but even people with very, very good PC's (like myself) were struggling to maintain good FPS and experienced a lot of lag issues. I had to keep the settings on medium and turn off all the special visual effects in order to make it work, and even then I would experience freezes every couple of minutes.
Console folks obviously won't care about that, but as an overall product, this was very disappointing.
I play on PS4.
I have heard that when Arkham Knight launched for PC in June of '15, that is was a mess though. All of the issues you described. It was so bad, Rocksteady took the game off the market and changed the release to like mid-October.
To this day, Arkham Knight is my favorite games of all time. The story has a lot of plot holes and things that make zero sense, but there were so many things that make that game outstanding:
1. Driving the Batmobile is awesome. I know all tank battles can get tedious and why didn't Scarecrow and/or the Arkham Knight just put one militia member in each tank? If nothing else, to just ride along in, so Batman couldn't destroy them?
2. The combat, the free flow focus, is just amazing.
3. Barbara Gordon's "suicide." I have played B:AK countless times, and that cut scene where Barbara commits suicide gets me every single time.
4. The side missions, I love them.
5. Being able to eject out of the Batmobile like a rocket.
6. The multi-fear takedown.
7. Taking down check points by being clever instead of punching your way through.
One thing I would love to see though is a new Batman game where it is more choice driven. For example, once you take down Two-Face, Riddler, Penguin, Joker, etc, you have 1-3 choices what to do, and how the game proceeds depends on your choices. I understand that it might not be practical, but it would be fun. They did give you a choice as Azreal on whether or not to kill Batman though. Like, imagine when you're taking Cobblepot to GCPD and Batman asks: "Your choice Cobblepot, GCPD or the morgue?" What if the game allowed you to make that choice? And make that choice not just with Cobblepot, but all the villains? What if the choices you made to investigate, or do, side missions, has consequences in the main story?
Yeah I think about stuff like this way too much.