New Arkham Knight Trailer: Batman Rolls In With Guns A-Blaze… Wait What?

For those of you who prefer to see Batman driving around in a car with a gigantic gun sticking out at the top, blowing up tanks, shooting people and also shoving crooks' heads into electrified fuse boxes, we have some good news! For those of you who don't, well, maybe just close this window and go for a walk for a few minutes or something. See, this week brought us some new footage from Rocksteady's upcoming Batman: Arkham Knight video game, in which Batman takes on a small army of soldiers and (presumably unmanned) tanks led by the title villain to rescue a few NPCs in an all-out assault on Ace Chemical.

And just so you don't think it's all just things designed to make me grumpy, you also get to see Batman doing a straight-up Street Fighter-style shoryuken, and that's pretty awesome.

It's also nice to see that the game is bringing back an emphasis on rescuing civilians, something that helps to reinforce the idea of Batman as someone who does slightly more than just shatter face bones -- and something that Arkham City completely tanked by having pretty much everyone you were trying to rescue get violently killed at the climax of the game anyway. If nothing else, it's nice to see that the Batmobile has goofy little backwards station wagon car seats that look like they were made for giant babies that he can use to rescue people, an addition I'm slightly more comfortable with than the amount of guns they've been showing us for the past year.

Really, though, that feels like more of a function of the escalation the games have been trying for than anything else. The scale of the games has gotten bigger each time they've done one, from the relatively confined setting of Arkham Asylum and its emphasis on stealth to the larger, more combat-focused open world of Arkham City to... well, to whatever the hell it was that they were trying to do in the third one. In that respect, sending an army and tanks after Batman makes sense, and since you can't really punch a tank in the face -- they have no faces, you see -- then you have to think of a different way to get things done. Thus, the Batmobile and its giant gun. And once you have that, then sure, why not shoot a couple of the soldiers too?

Rubber bullets. Honest.

And, uh, rubber electricity, too, I guess. The same thing applies to the hand-to-hand combat as to the larger scale of the games, which is how you get stuff like Batman shoving faces into fuseboxes, something that feels like it would've been more at home as one of the environmental kills in the actually-pretty-great PS2 Punisher game than anything Batman should probably be doing.

That said, there's a lot that looks fun here, and we still have plenty of time before the game comes out next Summer and more footage to see as we get closer. For now, though, enjoy Batman's jumping car and its giant guns!