If it ain't broke, don't fix it

Had to do a full review on this one because I have a lot of thoughts.

With the first two entries, those games were just immediate slam dunks. They were fun, engaging, creative and the perfect amount of comic book campiness.

And I think I know what went wrong with this game.

The bad: This game was made by a different studio (WB Games Montreal) instead of the studio behind the first two series entry (Rocksteady) and I think that lead to an identity crisis in the game. This game felt like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be something new and inventive for the franchise, or repeat the success of the past. In conclusion what happened is that this game felt like "I'm gonna copy the smart kid's homework but change it a little." This game clearly tries to make its own identity my slightly modifying and reskinning things from the prior entries which just felt silly to me. Why change it? Why make it different when it does the same thing? And I think its because of the dev studio change and it took me out of the experience a bit. I also was not a fan of the "rank system". It felt like another feature to through in just to try and make its own identity from the other series installments.

Don't get me wrong, I do love innovation and growth throughout a franchise but this one felt like its innovation was uninspired and just different for the sake of being different.

Combat also felt a little slower than previous games and not as crisp but that's just a personal opinion.

My playthrough of the game was also littered with bugs and glitches (I played on PC, no mods). Bodies would rag doll into the stratosphere and break up combat. The first couple times it was funny but it happened almost every fight I was in and just became annoying and not really charming. I also experienced a lot of invisible walls for some reason that were almost game breaking. Invisible walls that would stop me from exploring areas that I NEEDED to explore for the main story. A couple times I had to restart and it still didn't fix the issue and I had to somehow parkour my way around the non-existent wall. There were also a couple other small ones with traversing that weren't game breaking but did taint the experience ever so slightly.

The good: The good is that I still had fun. I enjoyed my playthrough of this game. I only did a few side missions and mainly blitz the main campaign and it took me around 9 hours to do so. I also really liked the story. A year 2 Batman being hunted down by 8 of his rogue gallery villains on Christmas Eve? That sounds awesome and is awesome. The fast travel system across Gotham was also a really nice addition that helped with the tedious task of traversing back and forth across the city map. I also really enjoyed almost all of the boss fights. They were new and creative from the last games and added an in elements that broke up the repetitiveness of the normal/standard combat against normal goons.

I know that my list of bad seems longer than my list of goods, but me still having fun trumps all those things and that's why this game still gets a B-. Is it as good as its predecessors? Not in my opinion at least, but still enjoyable. This is my first time playing this installment where as it was a replay for me on the first two installments. I am having a lot of fun with this game series and going through it in release order. I have one more to go before finishing the series and I am super excited to see it through.