Five games. Fifteen years. One ranking that will, inevitably, make a quarter of you angry. We re-played all five entries this winter on PS5 Pro and Steam Deck, including the VR outlier, and ranked them by the metric that matters most: do you still want to be playing this in hour twenty?
Spoilers ahead for plot beats up to Arkham Knight. Let's get into it.
Batman: Arkham Origins
An honourable misfire. Origins arrived between Arkham City and Knight, made by a WB Montreal squad, and it has the energy of a band on tour without their lead singer. The combat is identical-but-stiffer; the city is sumptuous-but-empty; the boss fights, Deathstroke aside, feel like homework. It is, by every objective measure, a competent Arkham game. It is also the only one you can skip without missing anything.
Batman: Arkham Knight
A spectacle that buries its best ideas under a tank. Arkham Knight is technically the most accomplished entry, the rain still looks better than most 2026 releases, but the Batmobile sections turn what should be a stealth-action game into a vehicular puzzle parade. The closing third recovers, dramatically. The first ten hours are the longest in the series.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
The one that proved a great superhero game was even possible. Asylum's Metroidvania-inflected layout, the Scarecrow sequences, the Tim-Sale-by-way-of-Frank-Miller art direction, every Arkham since has been a riff on the structure this one invented. It loses points only for what came next.
Batman: Arkham Shadow
The VR entry nobody expected to land, and it lands. Shadow turns the FreeFlow combat system into a physical performance: you punch, counter, and grapple in space, and the result is the most embodied Batman has ever felt. Story is leaner than the mainline games. The combat alone is worth the cost of entry.
Batman: Arkham City
Still the high-water mark, fifteen years on. Arkham City took the toolkit Asylum invented and gave it scope, a city to glide across, side missions that respect your time, a final-act reveal that elevates the entire series in retrospect. It is the rare game-of-the-year winner whose status only solidifies with distance.
Disagree? You should, that's the point of a list. Send us your ranking, or tell us which entry you'd cut entirely. We read every reply, even the angry ones.
