Garrett Funk

I preordered this given Rocksteady's reputation with the all time great Arkham series. I found out the hard way that the team working on this is not even in the same league. By comparison, this might as well have been a fan made project - astounding after 7(ish) years in the making. The dialogue is stale, cliche, and cringeworthy sometimes - Saturday morning cartoon kind of stuff. Shark is essentially Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy. The story is also akin to a Saturday morning cartoon script, the story missions feel more like the lowest tier of side missions in better games of similar genres. They are extremely generic and meaningless tasks. The combat is totally unsatisfying, especially after having played Arkham or Insomniac's Spider-Man. It's also very chaotic, unrewarding, and poorly thought out. The "super" abilities are incredibly boring. The traversal is similarly a drag, compared to counterparts in which you'd just spend time traversing the city, just because it was fun. This just trashes the legacy of the Arkham series and makes a mockery of Batman (and Kevin Conroy). They astoundingly took cues from the Avengers Game flop and made it a live service looter/shooter, reducing it to a cheap, grindy money grab. When you get a new game, you often dig in for many consecutive days, excited about what comes next. Somehow I found myself not able to last more than an hour at a time, before just stepping away for a couple days, without motivation to play. To really make matters worse, the game crashes frequently, saying the connection to the server has been lost. Wonderful live service.

This show is probably the biggest disappointment of any adaptation Ive seen. There's absolutely nothing that even reminds you of the franchise that many of us fell in love with other than the 6-7 minutes over 7 episodes we actually saw Chief in armor or actually doing what Chief does. His mystery/myth is removed, the space epic is stripped away, and we might as well just be watching an amnesia drama. A couple of the characters share names with characters from the game. It wastes entire episodes on characters that aren't compelling, despite some good acting from the girl, and have nothing to bring to the Halo story. I can't even believe the scripts made it past the cutting room so to speak.