"Simple to learn, difficult to master". If I've seen anything that fits that saying, it's Batman's fighting engine.
I find the Arkham games' (I can't emphasize enough that I'm excluding Origins here, and have City first in mind when saying this) combat to be some of the best designed and most enjoyable I've ever played in any game out there. It's fluid and dynamic: always changing, and always unpredictable. The main difference about Batman's combat from many other games is that the focus--the scope of Batman's engagements--necessitate a certain degree of, for lack of a better word, "casualization" to be able to make a crowd control system a manageable feat....both from a designer and a player standpoint. The combat's been broadened for scale but that doesn't mean it's any less enjoyable or less competently done than other fighters. The focus is just different. Batman is about efficient crowd control and prioritizing, and it's here where the engine's brilliance lies and which its critics seem to be oblivious to.
Of course it's just button mashing against one thug, way to miss the forest for the trees. Seriously, you'd have to be extremely myopic to even attempt to claim these games just button mashers.
Think about it as if you were designing a brawling system that demanded incorporating 12, 24, 36, or more combatants all at once to be dealt with, all while keeping it feasible for the player: it would be nigh impossible to implement a fighting engine that most would deem acceptably complex dealing in such numbers. I have yet (and would love) to hear someone lend an idea as how to execute a better system given such context. People bitch and moan about Batman's combat, but they never actually go into how they'd go about it otherwise. Each enemy is fundamentally very simplistic in the obstacle they present, and taken in and of themselves I can see someone looking at Batman's fighting and outright dismissing it as nothing but button-mashing tedium when held in light to systems that take the focus down to the individual (or few individuals). But the fighting's not about the mechanics, and to focus on that alone in dismissal is to entirely miss the point. The mechanics simply afford a framework to the player to evolve the battlefield to their advantage and preference given the thugs' weapons and Batman's abilities, and in that, they work nearly flawlessly.
Pulling off a seamless combo from start to finish through a variety of enemy types that need to be neutralized in differing ways (and in a particular order if one wants to be successful), with every enemy needing to be taken into consideration in terms of the threat they present at any given time takes a good deal of skill and huge amounts of practice to get good at. Anyone who claims different has absolutely NO CLUE what they're talking about. None. I simply laugh when people use "button masher" as a criticism towards these games, because it means nothing. It's 100% irrelevant to what constitutes the combat's enjoyment or skill-set. It's like criticizing Mario because you push a button to jump. It's not about the jumping, it's about the manner in which it's done to achieve the greater objective. Look at the larger picture. I can look at any single game mechanic under a microscope in the attempt to lay the claim of simplicity at its feet.
Personally, I think Rocksteady's work in this area is utterly brilliant and I can't wait to see what Knight has to offer in terms of new abilities and enemies for Bats to conquer.
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