My Ranking for the Main Arkham Games from Worst to Best

General Discussion Video & Board Games
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I have now you played basically all of the main Arkham games now, with Arkham Origins being the last one, and I have decided to rank the games in my personal opinion.

4: Arkham Asylum
The first one is apparently the last one on this list. It was a fun game explore by the gothic world of the gothic asylum, with all the bad guys to face against, but the reason why this is so low is that it doesn’t have as much the other games that would be made have. There is only like 5 bosses even though there would of been much more potential for fighting more in the household for where the villains are kept. Having Two-Face and Mad Hatter would have worked well for the theme, but it’s still the good game nonetheless.

3: Arkham Knight
The final one of them all, Arkham knight is the finale to what Asylum started, with Scarecrow getting the best role in the series where he is the actual main villain, and not Joker for once, even though he appears a lot. The graphics are awesome and Gotham never felt more like a crime filled city, but half of the side missions are kind of meh, and the story isn’t as good as the others higher on the list, but I think it still had the edge over Asylum.

2: Arkham City
I know what you guys might be saying. “Wait? City is number 2? Why isn’t it number 1?” Well there’s a few things. 1. It’s story just becomes a massive goose hunt where it just felt like in the end that you finally got a chore done and the only thing that made the story memorable was Joker actually being killed off. 2. The gameplay got repetitive and things like the combat felt like the same, and some of the side missions felt like doing the same thing most of the time. 3. Hugo Strange is built up to be the main baddy, but then it’s Ra’s Al Ghul all of a sudden, which is ok, but then it’s Joker then soon after, and it gets pretty much like they dumped the character they have been using as the main villain, and they dumped him with another villain taking his role, and then dumping said replacement as well soon after the dumps first main villain. It feels pretty much like it’s just Batman fights no bad guys while being Batman, while Knight and Origins had him actually going through trouble. But since everyone said why they love this game, I don’t think it need to.

1: Arkham Origins
Yes, the black sheep is number 1 for me. Why is that you may ask to me, and it’s actually for a few reasons. The first is that I think the detective work is actually used the best. There is a side mission about taking on a number of cases, both in the main story and a bonus stories, and they feel pretty cinematic with you feeling smart after you complete any of them. Second, the christmas feel is great, with all the snow and themes involving the story, about Batman being lonely while the citizens of Gotham are enjoying themselves, with him learning to trust the GCPD (mainly Gordon) and Gordon learning to trust him. There’s also the fact that there is a great cast of voice actors with Bruce Greenwood and Troy Baker as younger versions of both Batman and Joker. There’s also the Mr. Freeze dlc, with an original but faithful story that I haven’t actually played, but I would love to play it one day to see what it’s like, with positive feedback to it. So best story, gameplay, side missions, dlc, characters, is what o should just say.

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I’ve always wanted to play these games

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I suggest you play Origins and Origins: Blackgate first since it will give you a nice introduction to the characters and it well sets up the other games, and just the late Asylum, City, and Knight after that.

Note: Haven’t actually played Origins: Blackgate, but I would like to since Origins was the best to me, and Blackgate would be nice to try.

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I think Knight is my favorite, but Origins is my second favorite. An extremely underrated game that people tend to overlook just because it reuses a lot of assets from City. Plus, it has the best character designs in the series.

I’m sorry to say that’s not true of Origins: Blackgate, though. That game sucks to play. Don’t let the name fool you.

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I just want to try the game one day. It isn’t my biggest thing on my list of games I want to get and play. Maybe I won’t hate is as much as you do. People do have different opinions.

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Unfortunately I don’t have the funds to play them :sob:

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True enough. You’ve got to experience it for yourself. I will warn you, though, that it doesn’t play at all like the rest of the series. It’s kind of a side scrolling Metroid-like, by a company which really doesn’t know how to make that sort of game.

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I know about the more side scrolling experience, which is honestly a reason why I’m interested in playing it.

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Respectable list but here’s mine personally (Also it goes down from 4,3,2,1 I tried to edit it but it must be a glitch):

  1. Arkham Origins. Best Boss fights for sure. Bane, Deathstroke, Copperhead etc were all fantastic, but it was all dry tbh. In terms of no people whenever you would glide and explore. Gotham itself looked so abandoned on Christmas and just seemed empty with digital buildings. Everything just seemed dull to me. Of course there were a lot of story within the cutscenes themselves, but I want the game to reflect that.

  2. Arkham Asylum. Out of all the other games it had the best atmosphere. Spooky that it felt like an insane Asylum. Joker was absolutely one of the best when it came down to the story. The boss fights unfortunately felt a little annoying and repetitive. It was easy against Bane and Poison Ivy for example. Since it’s an older game, the graphics were not the best but it was overall enjoyable.

  3. Arkham Knight. Nearly everything about this game I absolutely loved. Out of the entire Arkham franchise, Knight has the best graphics and gameplay hands down. Riddler became one of my favorites after playing this for the 3rd time. The only two things I will point out that I wish they changed was make the batmobile a tiny bit less playable. It was obvious that it was needed due to the war against Jason Todd and Jonathon Crane, but if this is the last Batman Arkham game then I want to fully 100% enjoy playing as the Dark Knight. On top of with all the playable characters such as Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl, Harley Quinn, and Catwoman, adding a free roam for them to the story could’ve been awesome instead of just staying as Batman. Perhaps also strengthening the time length of the DLC. Catwoman and Harley Quinn’s for example were very good but I would’ve liked for them to be longer.

  4. Arkham City. Perfect. Just perfect. The story was rich. Having to stop the plans of Ra’s al Ghul, Hugo Strange, and the Joker himself all mixed together in such a gorgeous way that it was like Rocksteady really took their time to deliver a game to fans that up until this day they’ll STILL be talking about. The gaming is memorable. The boss fights and atmosphere was just all around exciting. From Mr. Freeze, Solomon Grundy, and Penguin took the stage against the Dark Knight. Harley Quinn’s Revenge was just amazing. This is the definition of what a single player game needs to be.

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I agree with most of what your said, except Asylum. Asylum had the best, mood, aesthetic, and a more contained story so nothing got away from you and it didn’t feel choppy like later games with too many side missions taking you away. With games like these it’s best to have either no side missions and focus on the main story or weave the side missions into the story.
Also, Scarecrow was not the main villain of Knight. You barely see or deal with him. His only appearances are in the first and last like half hour of the games. Everything else is the Arkham Knight. The story for that game was god awful.

For me it has to be Knight >> City = Asylum > Origins

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I believe that Asylum had the most gothic appearance, but I think that Origins had the best story, City and Origins had the best gameplay, and Knight had the best open world and exploration mechanics.

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Yeah Asylum had the best mood/aesthetic/spoundtrack, Origins had the best story, Knight actually had the best gameplay with the innovations it brought to its combat and predator systems in using the environment as a weapon, the dual character combat, and evolving predator AI. City is actually pretty mid.

I need remakes of all the games. Like put in all the cut content, update all the graphics, animations (cuz that horrendous animation of Harley swinging down a chain in Asylum needs to be fixed :face_vomiting::face_vomiting: still gives me nightmares), physics, and use all the gameplay innovations Knight brought in.

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Love all of these Batman games! I thought Knight was fun but the batmobile scenarios weren’t that great sitting through - but customizing my skin to pretty much whatever Batman era was fantastic haha.

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Nuclear take for you guys. City is the weakest of the four games.

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I’ll be honest. You’re not the first one to tell me that.

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Having finally played Origins (despite the apparent effort to make that one go away and be forgotten), I can finally do a proper ranking of the games. Well, I can’t rate Blackgate or VR, but, you know, who cares about those two?

  1. Origins

The main strength of this game is its story. It never has any truly absurd plot points (except perhaps for Bane losing his memory), which is more than I can say for its two predecessors. But the main problem is space: there’s too much where it’s not needed and too little where it’s essential. The open world is a big void, and traversing the bridge to get between locations is possibly the most tedious thing in any of these games. (Yeah, you eventually get fast travel, but if I’m eagerly using fast travel in an Arkham game, something is terribly off.) Meanwhile, so many of the fights are the most cramped in the series, which means that you can kiss that freeflow goodbye as you lightly brush against a tight corridor.

  1. City

The best compliment I can give City is that Origins makes it look brilliant in retrospect. But if WB Montreal’s glorified DLC was too wide and empty, Rocksteady’s map is a little too cramped and cluttered: less open world and more gated-off neighborhood. And that brings up the premise, which almost makes one think that the studio had to abandon a licensed Escape from New York game but didn’t want to throw out the work they’d done so far. The story is so contrived that it threatens to spoil my enjoyment of the gameplay, which admittedly does a very good job at adapting the first game’s mechanics for a larger setting. But it was a very sick person who decided that including 400+ Riddler trophies was a good idea.

  1. Asylum

If you ignore everything about Titan in this story, it’s a wonderful opportunity to play out the “Batman trapped in the asylum” scenario that has shown up in a number of notable comics. The setting is appropriately creepy, even if the idea of indoor gargoyles is utterly goofy. The fighting is just a tad too slow in this first entry, and all of the sequels improved on the gadget variety, but none of them can match the perfect simplicity of this game’s narra–why did Joker just become the Tim Roth version of the Abomination? Ah, well, it was fine except for the Monster Men. (Why was the game with the Monster Men not the game with Hugo Strange?!)

  1. Knight

I hate making turns and jumps in the car. Okay, complaints over. Otherwise, this final entry gets the open world map exactly right: it’s big, but it’s also impeccably-designed. Traversal is at its most satisfying here, to the point that it’s the only one of these games that I might be tempted to turn on simply to glide around for a while. The story is fine–nothing too cartoonishly silly–though they really should have just called the villain the Red Hood from the start instead of trying to dupe long-time DC fans into thinking that it was a new character. If the audience was happy to play through a loose, loose adaptation of Grant Morrison’s graphic novel the first time around, why wouldn’t they be fine playing through a reimagining of Under the Hood this time? No need to make it a secret: that’s a selling point!

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