While Batman can soak up a clip or two, prolonged exposure to gunfire leads straight to the reload screen – where, aggravatingly, your failure is further mocked by a supervillain. This time, the introduction of new, deadlier opponents is rapid, and the game wastes little time before throwing guns into the mix. Whereas the preceding game made a starker distinction between fisticuffs and stealth sections, here there is a more gradual segue between the massive brawls, which now fill the screen with goons, and challenges where discretion is key. Nonetheless, the pace, variety and craft of each lair is expertly managed. It suffers a little from recycling its locations: flimsy plot elements ricochet you back and forth between the same villains' linear lairs, and although they change a little each time, revealing new routes and the scars of the battles fought within, it does end up feeling a little like rigmarole. The central quest, when you find time for it, is a meaty thing, coming in at about 14 hours on my leisurely playthrough. The grapnel and glide are not just ways to escape combat, but the thrilling means by which you turn the environment into your playground, soaring beneath the ghostly beam of the Bat Signal.
Nonetheless, it's dense with diversions and detail, and Batman has full rein from the off, his utility belt immediately bristling with gadgetry that similar games would take hours to unlock. It's not the most expansive of cityscapes in gaming, and any distinct character for its various locales struggles to emerge – probably because you spend more time flying over them than actually being in them. Here we get an open world of guttering neon and gothic decay, a horseshoe of heavily compartmentalised urban squalor, surrounded by frigid water and barbed wire. An excuse to cram together as many of Gotham's notorious evildoers as possible in one confined space and have Batman beat the XP out of them one by one. The best Batman stories redeploy the iconic figures into larger allegories, and while this has a heavy-hitting narrative payoff in its last moment, it is otherwise nakedly a greatest hits.
The why and how are barely worth acknowledging. The focus has now shifted to a larger portion of Gotham, which has been cordoned off and turned into an Escape From New York-style prison city. The plot picks up some time after Batman's efforts mopping up the mass breakout at the maximum security mental asylum.