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I remember playing the in-store demo for Arkham Asylum and being wowed by how cool and fun the combat felt then. It was partly because it was a non-shitty 3D Batman experience that seemed as good as a Batman game's combat should. The animations looked fantastic, and though it was basic, having a focus on crowd control kept it engaging. It was a system that stayed true to the source material in more ways than one.
Even though this combat was improved upon in various ways from Asylum onward, the approach to hand-to-hand in the Arkham games has been taken about as far as it could be. The combat had its strengths, but also weaknesses that are inherent to its design.
It's fundamentally easy. I list this as a strength because it shows an understanding of the power fantasy of playing as Batman: beating a small handful of mooks should not be difficult. Or, at the very least, there should be a quick and easy way to knock them out. In almost every iteration of Batman, he's peak-level martial artist who effortlessly takes out low-level criminals. It scales decently well to high numbers of enemies, and challenge comes from managing many enemies, and many different types at once.
It looks good, which is self-explanatory. I prefer combat where there's something close to 1:1 ratio between my inputs and what the character is doing, but "guiding," Batman and friends around can be fine (e.g. when other elements are layered on top of it). So with that in mind, seeing the animations of these characters who are defined by their fighting styles adds to the spectacle of gameplay. It's fun to see all these moves and in certain contexts, it's okay for the player to be wowed by something not directly under their control. It does leave something to be desired after a while though.
It can be mixed with other types of gameplay. This is pretty much unfeasible in Asylum, but in City on, you can use the bat claw and smoke bombs to disorient armed enemies, dive into a group of them and just beat the shit out of a few of them before retreating. The games never quite encourage situations like this, but the potential for really kinetic, aggressive stealth mixed with fighting is there.
You can knock enemies down in one hit. There's never any normal enemy that feels like they're taking way too many hits to do some damage to. Compared to action games with good combat that have some really durable enemies, Batman just knocks enemies on their asses as he should. It changes the focus of combat, and sometimes the games capitalize on that.
The negatives overlap with some of the positives though. The combat being fundamentally easy means any fight that doesn't mix things up won't feel engaging. The animations and feel of the the hits may be great, but just pushing in a direction and hitting a button can get old when fights don't demand you do anything more.
Having the system built on keeping a combo going is my biggest gripe at this point. Asylum was extremely basic in regard to combat, so having something else to shoot for beyond merely surviving a fight made sense. It's a neat little metagame, but it clashes with player agency when certain moves are locked behind the combo meter. It also then forces enemies to behave in ways that doesn't necessarily make sense — you'll never get an enemy who'll try to run away at the end because that would break a combo.
Combat doesn't translate to boss fights well either. You either have to have a bunch of mooks around to keep up a combo (which actually does fit with some Batman villains), or you change up the core gameplay to make it flashy and cinematic. Since the combat relies on fighting many different types of enemies, fighting one means you're left with just a single strike button. The one truly great boss battle in the series was fought in a predator segment, which is telling.
And of course, I'd rather attacks be more of a 1:1 ratio deal where specific inputs perform specific attacks, and right when you press/click them. I appreciate the flashy moves and how Batman (or whoever the player is playing as) never seems unskilled or lessened by less than stellar play. Even still, combat that gives the player as much agency as possible is ideal, though doing so with 3D, hand-to-hand, 1-vs.-many type fights might not be that simple. There's not much else out there quite like Batman that does what the ARkham series did, but better. All the copycats still fall into the same pitfalls of canned animations, magnetising to enemies, etc.
The different enemy types are only occasionally explored fully though, and rarely does the environment design have any real impact on the fight, whereas level design plays more into the predator segments. There are times where it feels restrictive having to deal with specific types of enemies that have to be countered with a certain ability. There are almost always at least a couple different ways to do so, but compared to predator gameplay (where the player can retreat whenever and not, say, lose a combo because of it), it can feel limiting in ways that feel arbitrary (e.g. can't use a certain move without a combat).
The predator gameplay seems to have scaled better with more additions, and allows for more player agency — there's still plenty of automation and streamlining (the inverted takedown isn't some complex maneuver, you just hit a button), but there's a higher degree of control over what you do and where you go compared to combat, which locks you into counter animations and is reliant on keeping a combo going.
In short, this is a type of gameplay that seems as if it's run its course, but I'm not sure what could follow it up while achieving the positives it managed and avoiding the negatives.
EDIT: posted this before I was done, whoops
Even though this combat was improved upon in various ways from Asylum onward, the approach to hand-to-hand in the Arkham games has been taken about as far as it could be. The combat had its strengths, but also weaknesses that are inherent to its design.
It's fundamentally easy. I list this as a strength because it shows an understanding of the power fantasy of playing as Batman: beating a small handful of mooks should not be difficult. Or, at the very least, there should be a quick and easy way to knock them out. In almost every iteration of Batman, he's peak-level martial artist who effortlessly takes out low-level criminals. It scales decently well to high numbers of enemies, and challenge comes from managing many enemies, and many different types at once.
It looks good, which is self-explanatory. I prefer combat where there's something close to 1:1 ratio between my inputs and what the character is doing, but "guiding," Batman and friends around can be fine (e.g. when other elements are layered on top of it). So with that in mind, seeing the animations of these characters who are defined by their fighting styles adds to the spectacle of gameplay. It's fun to see all these moves and in certain contexts, it's okay for the player to be wowed by something not directly under their control. It does leave something to be desired after a while though.
It can be mixed with other types of gameplay. This is pretty much unfeasible in Asylum, but in City on, you can use the bat claw and smoke bombs to disorient armed enemies, dive into a group of them and just beat the shit out of a few of them before retreating. The games never quite encourage situations like this, but the potential for really kinetic, aggressive stealth mixed with fighting is there.
You can knock enemies down in one hit. There's never any normal enemy that feels like they're taking way too many hits to do some damage to. Compared to action games with good combat that have some really durable enemies, Batman just knocks enemies on their asses as he should. It changes the focus of combat, and sometimes the games capitalize on that.
The negatives overlap with some of the positives though. The combat being fundamentally easy means any fight that doesn't mix things up won't feel engaging. The animations and feel of the the hits may be great, but just pushing in a direction and hitting a button can get old when fights don't demand you do anything more.
Having the system built on keeping a combo going is my biggest gripe at this point. Asylum was extremely basic in regard to combat, so having something else to shoot for beyond merely surviving a fight made sense. It's a neat little metagame, but it clashes with player agency when certain moves are locked behind the combo meter. It also then forces enemies to behave in ways that doesn't necessarily make sense — you'll never get an enemy who'll try to run away at the end because that would break a combo.
Combat doesn't translate to boss fights well either. You either have to have a bunch of mooks around to keep up a combo (which actually does fit with some Batman villains), or you change up the core gameplay to make it flashy and cinematic. Since the combat relies on fighting many different types of enemies, fighting one means you're left with just a single strike button. The one truly great boss battle in the series was fought in a predator segment, which is telling.
And of course, I'd rather attacks be more of a 1:1 ratio deal where specific inputs perform specific attacks, and right when you press/click them. I appreciate the flashy moves and how Batman (or whoever the player is playing as) never seems unskilled or lessened by less than stellar play. Even still, combat that gives the player as much agency as possible is ideal, though doing so with 3D, hand-to-hand, 1-vs.-many type fights might not be that simple. There's not much else out there quite like Batman that does what the ARkham series did, but better. All the copycats still fall into the same pitfalls of canned animations, magnetising to enemies, etc.
The different enemy types are only occasionally explored fully though, and rarely does the environment design have any real impact on the fight, whereas level design plays more into the predator segments. There are times where it feels restrictive having to deal with specific types of enemies that have to be countered with a certain ability. There are almost always at least a couple different ways to do so, but compared to predator gameplay (where the player can retreat whenever and not, say, lose a combo because of it), it can feel limiting in ways that feel arbitrary (e.g. can't use a certain move without a combat).
The predator gameplay seems to have scaled better with more additions, and allows for more player agency — there's still plenty of automation and streamlining (the inverted takedown isn't some complex maneuver, you just hit a button), but there's a higher degree of control over what you do and where you go compared to combat, which locks you into counter animations and is reliant on keeping a combo going.
In short, this is a type of gameplay that seems as if it's run its course, but I'm not sure what could follow it up while achieving the positives it managed and avoiding the negatives.
EDIT: posted this before I was done, whoops
