The Batman: Arkham trilogy is still video gaming's best version of the DC universe

Whenever a well-liked piece of entertainment gets a questionably necessary sequel or reboot or remake, the typical way to make the new thing more palatable to fans of the old thing is to remind them that the old thing isn’t going away. That bit of stock reassurance is particularly relevant for video game fans right now, thanks to the release of developer Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. A spin-off of Rocksteady’s beloved trilogy of Batman games—Arkham Asylum (2009), Arkham City (2011), and Arkham Knight (2015)—Suicide Squad has been controversial from the moment it was announced and has pretty much only gotten more controversial since then.

Unlike the Batman games, which went from a clever beat-em-up take on a Metroid-style adventure to an open world action game covering the entirety of Gotham City (with a driveable Batmobile and endless bands of goons for the Dark Knight to beat into submission using the Arkham series’ famously satisfying combat system), Suicide Squad is a multiplayer shooter that bears more of a resemblance to BioWare’s infamous 2019 flop Anthem—or even the unfairly maligned Marvel’s Avengers—than any of Rocksteady’s earlier games.

Thankfully, those earlier games still exist. Not only is Batman himself not going to break into anyone’s home and steal their Arkham games like the Grinch, but Rocksteady and Warner Bros. have put in the necessary effort to make them accessible to modern players through various rereleases—including a new port to the Nintendo Switch that sounds… mostly tolerable.

So it’s still possible to play the Arkham games, but for people who wish Rocksteady had simply gone back to the old template rather than try something divisive and new—or for anyone who would just rather go back to Gotham than see what Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and the rest of Task Force x are up to in the new game—is it still worth revisiting the old series? In other words, does the fact that they still exist make Suicide Squad’s divisive new direction easier to swallow?

The short answer is: Yes, obviously. Arkham Asylum isn’t a perfect video game, that was true even when it came out (the final boss is famously stupid and Batman’s movement is pretty stiff and lumbering when he’s not in combat), but only the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot has really come close in terms of modernizing the Metroid-style structure of Asylum (where you explore one set location and find new equipment throughout the game that opens up new paths and recontextualizes once-familiar areas).

The combat is pretty similar in Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, with the telegraphed signals to dodge attacks, the special gadgets, and the sections where you have to take out bad guys without being seen, but those games are clearly taking inspiration from the Arkham trilogy while doing their own clever stuff to put you in Spidey’s little red booties in a way that feels completely different from playing as Batman.

Arkham City, the sequel to Asylum, is the one that few people would choose as their favorite and has aged the worst out of the trilogy. Unlike Asylum, with its specific emphasis on the eponymous “hospital” for the criminally insane, City takes place in a walled-off section of Gotham that is being used as an Escape From New York-style prison island. The Bat still lurks through vents and brutally beats criminals, but it loses the focus that makes the first game feel so unique—and like so much more than the sum of its parts.

Still, it’s a great comic book premise and a smart escalation of the stakes in Asylum. Plus, Rocksteady introduced new mechanics with Batman’s grappling hook and cape that allow you to gracefully soar above the streets of the super-fascist prison camp. Like Asylum, it has also aged well aesthetically, since these first two games in particular had somewhat stylized graphics that made every character look like a linebacker and every building look even more exaggeratedly gothic than Joel Schumacher’s version of Gotham.

Unfortunately for Arkham City, its sequel exists, and Arkham Knight is a more elaborately and fully illustrated version of the same stuff that Arkham City was doing. You can explore all of Gotham, not just one walled-off section, with not only Batman’s cape to help you glide around but also a big, rocket-powered, tank-like Batmobile. A lot of the action takes place out on the streets, which means large open environments for both punching-and-kicking and the sneaky stealth sections where Batman picks off increasingly terrified henchmen one by one, but it also means fewer fights like that in spaces that are specifically designed for it—which makes the combat feel more rote, but the fact that we’re into the third entry in this series at this point probably has something to do with that as well.

Arkham Knight is essentially the platonic ideal of a video game about Batman. You can do all of the things that Batman tends to do, the great Kevin Conroy does his voice (opposite Mark Hamill playing a hallucinated version of the Joker who hangs around Batman for the whole game), and the city is riddled (and Riddled, thanks to one villain’s penchant for hiding hundreds of green question marks everywhere) with references to Batman stories that are often just there to give fans a little treat.

It’s also worth noting that, while the Arkham trilogy is the best of the bunch when it comes to Batman, it’s not all there is. There was a prequel developed by another studio (WB Games Montréal) called Arkham Origins that wasn’t as good and isn’t as easily accessible on modern platforms, but it is more of the Arkham universe. Plus, the Montréal studio released Gotham Knights in 2022, which was basically an alternate universe version of the Suicide Squad game—it’s a multiplayer Batman game about collecting loot where you don’t play as Batman, just like Kill The Justice League, but you play as members of the Bat-family instead of villains and it has a similar mix of straight-up punches-and-kicks and sneaky stealth.

It’s also not great, but it serves a helpful purpose as the monkey’s paw version of what people might’ve wanted from Suicide Squad. You don’t want to shoot the Flash as Harley Quinn? Well, then surely you’ll want to punch Mr. Freeze as Nightwing (based on the game’s reception, people didn’t really want that either).

The lesson in all of this is that people are wary of new things and the comforting blanket of nostalgia will often be more appealing, but that’s unproductive. So maybe the lesson is to just keep enjoying the things you enjoy and stop worrying about whether or not a new thing will be too different. That’s also not entirely helpful, because it’s actually a relative rarity in the video game industry that older games like Asylum will remain playable on modern hardware. So, if nothing else, let’s leave it at: Appreciate the things you have while you have them. Suicide Squad could be good, but if it’s not, the Arkham trilogy is still out there and still good.