Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has many problems, but its biggest one is not being an Arkham game. By leaving the Arkham series behind, Rocksteady left its fanbase behind too, and after ten years of waiting for a true sequel to Arkham Knight, it’s no wonder fans haven’t been receptive to a co-op shooter where Harley Quinn blows Batman’s head off.
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While Suicide Squad was a misstep for Rocksteady, it’s kind of understandable that it wanted to move on from Arkham. As beloved and influential as Arkham City was to the superhero genre, Arkham Knight is not held in nearly as high esteem. It’s bigger, but not necessarily better, because it fails to meaningfully evolve from Arkham City the way City did from Asylum.
2024’s Batman: Arkham Shadow is a fantastic new entry in the series that translates Arkham’s core mechanics into VR. If the series were to continue, it has plenty of room to evolve in VR.
We could have kept getting derivative Arkham games year after year like Assassin’s Creed, but would that have been better? The Arkham Series’ legacy is secure, and maybe Rocksteady and Gotham Knights’ studio Warner Brothers Montreal had the right idea when they decided to move away from Batman – or at least that Batman.
Absolute Batman Is Batman Reinvented
The downside of making a perfect Batman game is that it’s impossible to follow it up with a better one. Arkham Knight proved that, and ever since then video games have dodged Batman or backlined him entirely. There is a legitimate risk that another Arkham game would fall short of our exceptionally high expectations for Batman. The best way to bring Batman back into games today is not to redo Arkham, but to bring to life a completely different Batman: the Absolute Universe Batman.
Absolute Batman, and the Absolute Universe itself, is a new creation. In 2024, DC Comics tapped long-time Batman scribe Scott Snyder to oversee a new imprint set in an alternate universe, not unlike Marvel’s classic (and newly rebooted) Ultimate Universe. The Absolute Universe takes major heroes like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman back to their origins and reinvents their stories from the ground up.
Absolute Batman is a very different hero than Earth-1 Batman (and by extension, Arkham Batman). In fact, three issues in, I’m not even certain we can call him a hero at all. Born to a working-class family, Bruce Wayne lost his father during a mass shooting at the Gotham City Zoo. Raised by his single mother, Bruce developed a strong bond with his childhood friendship group that carried into adulthood: Edward Nigma, Harvey Dent, Selina Kyle, and Oswald Cobblepot.
Absolute Batman flips Gotham as we know it on its head at almost every turn. Batman’s crime-fighting career begins around the time that a violent gang called the Party Animals begins terrorizing Gotham City, and Commissioner Harvey Bullock is ineffective in helping Mayor Jim Gordon stop them. As Batman becomes a one-man army against the gang, an assassin named Alfred Pennyworth working for a shadowy international cabal shows up to make his life more complicated.
Absolute Gotham is a fertile playground for storytelling. It’s a nearly blank canvas designed to subvert expectations and create conflicts Batman has never had to face before. When you take away Batman’s wealth and make the villains of Gotham his best friends, you have completely different dynamics to work with and endless narrative possibilities.
A Totally Different Utility Belt
More importantly, Absolute Batman doesn’t fight like Arkham Batman. Part of the reason the Arkham series started spinning its wheels by the third entry is that there’s only so much you can do with Batman’s classic toolbelt before combat becomes overly complicated. But Absolute Batman doesn’t use batarangs, explosive gel, smoke pellets, or the batclaw. His fighting style is more brutal and violent than anything the Arkham games had to offer.
Absolute Batman’s most iconic weapon is his cape, which he controls as though it were an extension of his limbs. The end of the cape is covered in hooks that he uses to grab people and pull them in, or simply maim from long range. There’s a Spawn or Venom-like quality to the cape that makes it seem almost organic, like when spikes shoot out of his shoulders when he’s enraged. He can also stretch out the cape and stand on it like stilts. I’d love to see how a game would represent such a unique weapon.
That’s not all he’s got going for him. In the first issue, Absolute Batman removes the blocky logo from his chest, revealing that the symbol is actually the head of an axe – which he uses to chop off someone’s hand. Unlike the tank-style Batmobile in Arkham Knight, Absolute Batman’s whip is a 50-foot tall mining dump truck powered by a pair of homemade jet engines that can run right over anything in its path.
This is how we bring Batman back to video games. The Arkham series ended ten years ago and, despite how much fans think they want it, a sequel will never live up to the originals. What we need is a God of War-style reboot, and the brand-new Absolute Universe is the perfect way to do it.
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Former Rocksteady Dev Shoots Down Batman: Arkham Asylum Remake Rumours
A former Rocksteady dev shoots down rumours that a Batman: Arkham Asylum remake is in the works.