Fantastic game that meshes silly comic book vibes with far more serious characters. Graphics still hold up, gameplay is as good as ever, characters are fantastically engaging. Replaying this after Arkham Knight brings a whole new layer to Batman's desire not to involve his friends for fear of them dying alongside him. Engaging story throughout, fun boss fights. Genuinely almost everything you could ask for out of a Batman game (Just misses the Batmobile, more Robin and Bat Family, and a Killer Croc sidequest GIVE MY BOY MORE REPRESENTATION HE DESERVES IT HE'S THE BEST)
Just a fantastic game overall with an engaging story and great pacing which makes it all the more regrettable that it treats female characters like Catwoman, Talia, Ivy and Harley as afterthoughts and, tbh, pieces of meat to dangle in front of players. Harley fails the Bechdel test though tbf that's kind of her character, but Talia fails it just as hard. Catwoman is barely featured despite being playable (probably for the best cuz I did not vibe with her traversal mode and hated beating Two-Face with her) and instead of giving us more time focused on her attempts to get rid of Harvey Dent, we get three measly missions and a 15-min long post-main story mission that rewards you with a single line of dialogue. Ivy from City to Knight is unrecognizable. In Knight her character gets the spotlight a whole lot more and she's more fleshed out than any of the four women featured in this game. Every single one of their designs has badly aged, unfortunately. They come off less comic-booky and far more "13-yo's-wet-dream". I get being sensual and having sex-appeal is a part of their characters but the way said sex appeal is turned into an almost character defining trait that overshadows everything else is pretty upsetting. Glad to see Rocksteady seems to have somewhat moved away from that kind of representation of women.
And my second and only complaint is Hamill. I said the same thing in my review of Knight, he's an incredible Joker but when he openly supports a genocide, I simply refuse to separate art and artist. He's one of the many reasons that I hope Rocksteady moves away from Joker as a main antagonist if they ever make a sequel. Or at least bring back Troy Baker, he did a great job in Origins!
These two stains have to be acknowledged, just like how brilliant the rest of this game is has to be acknowledged. One of my favorite games as a teen and it has aged graciously except for the two aforementioned parts.
