Batman: Arkham Insurgency - 11 Things It Must Learn From Asylum

6. Environmental Variation

Think back on your memories of Arkham City, Origins and Knight - it's a lot of greys and browns, right? Perhaps the airship from Arkham Knight shook things up and injected some high-tech modernity?

The problem with taking a franchise open-world, is the player is then going to spend the majority of their time in said open world, minimising the directed 'levels' or sequences and letting them get lost in a sea of interconnected streets. I'm not saying that the latter Arkham games didn't have any variety - Mr. Freeze's chamber in City and Knight's Chinatown stand out, for example - but Arkham Asylum took us on a more guided trip through a far more varied series of levels.

Chances are you still remember entering Poison Ivy's overgrown wing of the Asylum, for example, or the menacing Killer Croc sewer tunnels. Again, this sense of variation is in direct opposition to letting the player free-roam around identikit environments, but look to the likes of Horizon Zero Dawn or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Those games' maps are very clearly segmented, giving a completely different vibe per quadrant as you go, but for the latter in particular, it all rolls together to form one gigantic 'level' in itself.