Review: Arkham Knight-Season Of Infamy

Season Of Infamy is Arkham Knight’s biggest DLC yet, but is it actually any good?

Arkham Knight has had its share of DLC since release, and most of it has been pretty shallow. A new “episode” has released  every month since launch alongside some other meaningless things like skins, but they’ve all been mediocre and incredibly short, with many being beaten in under half an hour. This month’s Season of Infamy DLC is the final one of 2015 and the final DLC covered in Arkham Knight’s Season Pass. It is certainly the biggest Arkham Knight DLC to date, but is it worthwhile? Read on to find out.

Season of Infamy features several villains that are new to Arkham Knight, but have been in previous Arkham games. There’s Mad Hatter, who has kidnapped several police officers you must rescue. Iron Heights prison has crashed into Gotham bay and Killer Croc is loose on board. Mr. Freeze is back and actually needs your help. Finally, Ra’s Al Ghul has returned, and you must make a decision that will forever change the League of Assassins.

Season of Infamy adds these “most-wanted” missions to the main game. What this means (and the biggest change from previous DLC) is that the missions aren’t self-contained and have you traversing Arkham City again. While it’s nice that you are Batman again with all the extra upgrades you earned (as oppossed to other DLC where you play his extremely diminished allies), all that really means is some artificial padding as you travel from location to location, occasionally getting distracted by random thugs or side quests you may not have finished the first time around.

But is any of the Season of Infamy DLC itself actually good? Well, it’s a step up from previous efforts, but that’s not saying much. The Mad Hatter mission has an interesting visual trick, where you fight thugs in storybook settings based on the Arkham series. But before that is a boring slog of finding the officers. There’s no real trick to this, you go to a location, find a cop car nearby, and defuse the bombs inside the trunk by a really dull minigame, and you repeat this three times.

The Killer Croc DLC is just sort of there. You make your way through a ship (which you cannot do without a secret optional gadget you may not have found through playing the game normally and would have to look up online). And then you fight Croc and some thugs along with Nightwing. It’s fine, but it’s a very standard fight, nothing special about it.

The Freeze segment had the strongest writing, with a great possible wrap up of the Victor/Nora story line, but it’s a couple of decent fights with militia thugs. Though if the writing was as strong in the other segments I wouldn’t mind so much.

Honestly I didn’t even finish the Ra’s AL Ghul DLC. I got tired of trying to track drops of blood for what seemed like forever.

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Season of Infamy may rank as the best Arkham Knight DLC, but it’s a fairly dubious honor. It certainly does not redeem the season pass as a whole, and as a piecemeal offering, I can really only recommend it if you are desperate to get back into the world of Arkham Knight. It’s not terrible, but when there are so many other great games worthy of your time out right now, it doesn’t really give a very compelling reason to dive back in.