Batman: Arkham Shadow review: the Bat’s best game since Arkham Asylum

I’m zipping through the streets of Gotham pummeling rioters when I hear a classic villain monologue. The Rat King is prattling on about his plan to eliminate the city’s elites, a speech I’ve heard so many times that he’s become white noise. Then suddenly, I’m in his crosshairs. He questions Batman’s role as a just vigilante, painting him as an extension of brutal authoritarianism. What makes Batman different from a crooked cop using excessive force? Suddenly, my beatdowns on cowering goons don’t feel so satisfying.

With Batman: Arkham Shadow, a VR continuation of Rocksteady’s beloved series, developer Camouflaj isn’t just out to create the cool superhero power fantasy that fans have always dreamed of. That would be too easy. Instead, its idea of making players embody Batman involves putting the heavy weight of responsibility on your shoulders. Is being a hero simply about beating the snot out of villains? When is justice just a smokescreen for unchecked violence? You can’t protect your community if you never stop to understand who inhabits it.

Batman: Arkham Shadow rises to its challenging position as an Arkham sequel by telling what may be gaming’s best Batman story. It does that while delivering some best in class design that smartly translates almost every piece of its console counterparts to VR. But every superhero has a weakness, and Arkham Shadow’s vulnerabilities come in the form of the kinds of bugs and finicky controls that still show that VR has some demons to fight.

Day of wrath

Arkham Shadow kicks off in the middle of a riot, as the mysterious Rat King has riled up Gotham’s “lowlifes” (i.e., its street rats) to rise up against the city’s power structures. Batman leaps into action by beating every criminal in sight into a bloody pulp to quell the unrest. That’s not a particularly effective solution, even if it lets the vigilante feel like he’s dished out justice; it only delays the Rat King’s looming “Day of Wrath” and brings Batman no closer to figuring out who is orchestrating it.

It’s a fierce opening that puts the very concept of Batman on trial. He’s painted as a flawed hero who is more obsessed with the concept of punishment than actually helping people. That sets the stage for Arkham Shadow’s excellent narrative premise: Bruce Wayne realizes that he’s out of touch with the actual criminals of Gotham and decides to go undercover, posing as a criminal and getting himself locked in Blackgate Prison. He gathers intel from fellow prisoners during the day and breaks out at night, returning as Batman to find the prison’s secrets.

Through that setup, Camouflaj tells a story that’s much kinder to Gotham’s criminals. For the most part, Batman isn’t beating up inmates; his foes are tyrannical prison guards, employed by private military contractor Tyger. Right from Bruce’s entrance into Blackgate, we’re shown guards harassing prisoners. The warden humiliates them over a loudspeaker, claiming that they’re there to be punished, not rehabilitated. As I’m exploring early on, I pass a prisoner minding his own business in a shower. He’s approached by guards and beaten in his underwear. Moments like that tell a more nuanced superhero story that aims to understand how systems of power push troubled people to become bad.

That thinking doesn’t just apply to its lowly arsonists and muggers, but its supervillains (and the ones yet to be born) too. Flashbacks dig into Harey Dent’s troubled childhood, showing his fight to escape an abusive father. We don’t meet Harley Quinn here; we’re learning about Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a prison therapist trying to do good for her patients, but who finds herself constantly belittled by her peers. In confiding with Batman, she wonders if she would finally find some respect if she put on a mask of her own. It’s not just a tease of what we might get in a sequel, but an acknowledgment that these larger-than-life heroes and villains are pushed to that point for a reason.

Set those thoughtful thematic threads aside and you’d still have a gripping Gotham detective story built around a true mystery. The Rat King may be the villain, but his identity is a tangled secret. The story smartly intersects with classic Batman characters like Carmine Falcone and Jonathan Crane to continually bring in new puzzle pieces that fit into the story in surprising ways. With its streamlined runtime that cuts off all the fat, it might just be the best Batman story ever told in a video game.

Become the bat

The narrative feels like it was especially built around VR, as Arkham Shadow is all about inhabiting Batman amid a bit of a therapy session. Almost every element from Rocksteady’s console games translates to first-person here. There’s fluid combat, ziplining, gliding, collectibles locked behind tricky puzzles, detective mode investigations, and more. If anything, the limitations of the tech are a blessing. Camouflaj opts for a concise 12-hour experience that’s much closer to Batman: Arkham Asylum than any of its other games. With no open-world distractions or a glut of side missions, the focus is solely on exploring Blackgate with the lightest Metroidvania touch.

Arkham Shadow tells a continuous story rather than one segmented into missions, but it’s one that’s smartly divided by a clean structure. Each day, I start by exploring the prison as my alter ego, Irving Malone. That’s the more narrative driven part where I get to know the inmates. When night falls, I sneak out of my cell and don the cowl, bringing in classic Arkham exploration as I unlock doors with my decoder, zip through vents, and pummel rooms full of guards. I call in new tools as I go that unlock more of the prison, like the Batclaw or Shock Gloves (why Batman doesn’t just bring all this gear with him at once is a bit of video game logic that’s beyond me). It’s a satisfying loop that lets me unlock more secrets each night, getting the most out of a compact space.

What’s especially impressive is how well Arkham staples have been reimagined with motion controls in mind. Some ideas are no-brainers. When I lift a controller to my head and press the trigger, I activate Batman’s signature detective mode and can hunt for clues. That shines in VR, as it really feels like I’m sleuthing around a room. Almost everything feels intuitive and natural in that way, from looking up at a ledge to find its zipline point to pulling a grate off a wall and sliding it aside. I hardly need tutorials for most actions; I know exactly what to do.

The much harder task Camouflaj had was translating Rocksteady’s fast and fluid third-person combat to VR, but the studio rises to that challenge shockingly well. Arkham Shadow almost plays like a boxing game. When I’m surrounded by enemies, I lock on to one and swing my arms to punch. I can’t just flail wildly, though; onscreen prompts show me what direction I need to hit from, how to move my head to dodge knife slashes, and which direction to punch offscreen in order to counter an incoming hit. It takes a bit of getting used to. At first, it feels a little stilted as I’m punished for hitting enemies too fast, and early enemies tend to stand and wait for their turn to attack.

Once I got the hang of it, though, I was fully on board with the physicality of it all. I feel like a prize fighter as I hit enemies with jab combos or throttle them into the ground. Later, I learn how to use my cape to stun enemies, run over their heads to leap at them from behind, and unleash brutal finishers by building up my combo meter. The same ideas apply to stealth, as I can sneak up on a guard and choke them out by ratcheting their head from side to side or perch above a guard, drop down on them, and string them up. When I learn to execute both fights and stealth encounters properly, I find I’m able to string my moves together in a way that feels as fluid as on console, but with more power behind my hits.

That physicality isn’t just fun; it’s important to making the story work. In that opening sequence where Batman goes on a criminal-busting spree, the power of the moment is born from my own role in it. I’m practically panting when I’m barreling through foes. I feel the anger coursing through me with each punch I throw. Understanding that aggression — how primal it can feel to throw a punch — is key to getting inside Batman’s own head as he grapples with whether or not his use of force is warranted or if he’s taking something out on people who don’t deserve it. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Arkham Shadow gives Batman its Last of Us moment (especially since it’s still a story where the villain has a point until they don’t), but it gets close.

VR woes

It’s no stretch to call Arkham Shadow an ambitious VR game, just as Camouflaj’s Iron Man VR was in 2020. But as any seasoned VR user will tell you, great scale comes with great strain. Even on a new Meta Quest 3S, Arkham Shadow is often pushed to its limits. Exiting a menu will sometimes send the game out of whack for a moment. Stuttering tends to pop up if steam is nearby or sometimes when entering a new room. My playthrough featured several sudden crashes, though none ever set me back too far thanks to frequent autosaving.

It’s not hard to understand why Arkham Shadow’s seams feel so fragile; it’s a visual feat. In its introduction, I’m taken aback the first time I see Gotham’s skyline towering over me, with grotesque neon lights poking through the hazy sky. Blackgate Prison is similarly menacing. Its thick metal walls tower over me when I’m strolling through the yard. A few concessions are made with textures here and there, especially in the underground tunnels connecting the prison to a makeshift Batcave, but it’s astonishing to see the gothic architecture of the Batman universe so fully realized in VR.

The truth with VR in its current state is that it’s a matter of compromises. It’s like playing a game built for early home computers. Something like Karateka could reach beyond a computer’s potential to bring rotoscoped pixel animation and cinematic framing techniques, but it couldn’t play music while something was moving on the screen. With a game like Arkham Shadow, Camouflaj is willing to play things loose with stability in order to deliver an awe-inspiring scale that pushes the medium forward. Whether or not you’re willing to live with some occasional screen tearing or resets is up to you, but the spectacle largely outweighs the pain points.

What’s harder to forgive is some finicky motion controls that are still all too common in VR. Some flaws are frustrating, but expected. All of my gear is located on different parts of my body. Sometimes I’ll reach to grab my Batarang and end up pulling out a smoke bomb instead. All of Batman’s tools can be used in combat (I can pull out my explosive spray and tag an enemy, which is sickly satisfying), but they can be so difficult to pull up in fast encounters that I opted not to use them most of the time.

Other issues feel more avoidable, but are the product of a developer with a lot of ambition. Arkham Shadow relies on as many motions as it can to keep the adventure feeling tactile, but those can butt heads at times. To glide over short distances, for example, I need to spread my arms like wings while hopping off a cliff. Unfortunately, pulling an arm up to my head level is also how I activate detective mode. I’d often find myself plummeting to my death over and over as I tried to lock down the nuances of those motions. I still don’t think I ever fully nailed it by the end.

As frustrating as these moments can be, I was willing to accept the trade-off because Arkham Shadow still feels ahead of its peers in most respects. It’s a VR game that does everything in its power to do Rocksteady’s vision justice rather than grinding it down into a bite-sized “experience” or compromising its cinematic strengths. I’m glad Camouflaj went that route even at the expense of technical perfection, because Arkham Shadow has a vital Batman story to tell that’s worthy of the scope. Even then, it’s smart about where to go big. There aren’t a lot of spectacular supervillain moments like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2; it keeps its story down on a human level to deliver a more grounded tale about how far you can push someone down before they rise up.

When Arkham Shadow was first announced, I remember scratching my head when Camouflaj revealed that its big bad was the Rat King. It’s a bit of a goofy villain to focus on when looking at Batman’s deep rogues’ gallery. After the credits, rolled, however, I realized it was an inspired choice that the story needed. We live in a world of rats, with so many people left to scavenge in the gutters while the wealthy burn the world around us. We only survive on their table scraps. One rat isn’t much of a threat on its own, but tangle enough tails and you’ll be sorry you ever crossed one.

Batman: Arkham Shadow is out now on Meta Quest headsets.