Batman: Arkham Knight Isn’t a Driving Game. So What?
Batman: Arkham Knight developers Rocksteady Studios have repeatedly tried to distance their upcoming game from the racing genre, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be worth checking out for racing and driving game fans. Though there’s all of the usual Batman jumping about and fighting, Arkham Knight also puts you behind the wheel of powerful Batmobile as one of the main gameplay mechanics.
Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo broke down what’s cool about the game’s Batmobile in a post today:
You can drive it, of course, which is a first for the Arkham series, screaming down the streets of Gotham to get to your next mission and hunt down another villain. That, you expected.P
You can summon it at any moment with the press of a button as you would your horse in Red Dead Redemption.
You can eject out of it and switch into a glide or leap to the ground right into a fight.
You can stay in it, chase a car full of bad guys down Gotham City’s streets and shoot the car to a standstill with “immobilizer rockets”.
There will be some sort of progression with new gadgets becoming available for the Batmobile as players plunge deeper into the game.
And you can ram through stuff. Lots of stuff.
Totilo also described the Batmobile as a “rocket-fueled, speed-limit-crushing bulldozer that players will be using to smash through concrete barriers, rip off the facades of buildings and pulverize trees, all in the name of catching the thugs and villains.”
Okay, now I want to drive it even more.
Dax Ginn, marketing producer for Rocksteady, told Kotaku that a bolted-on driving mode would have been a “real failure” for the game, and they stayed away from driving game gameplay mechanics as much as possible.
“I think there are a lot of driving games where we could have kind of borrowed gameplay mechanics just because they’re easy,” he said. “For us, the focus was: ‘What’s the Batmobile all about? How do we make the experience feel really unique?’ And so destruction is a big part of that—the power and speed of driving the Batmobile.”
Even better. You aren’t scaring racing fans off, guys. In fact it sounds like the Rocksteady team’s desire to consciously stay away from driving and racing game tropes might just be leading to one of the freshest driving experiences yet.
