Batman Arkham Knight: Tim, stop it

Arkham Knight has six DLCs called Arkham Episodes in which you run people other than Batman through brief adventures. By brief, I mean generally in the 30-minute range. None of them measure up to the Catwoman content in Arkham City. Before starting A Flip of the Coin, which features Robin, I was warned that it was especially annoying. That warning was true. The middle part of A Flip of the Coin is a fussy little puzzle that can only be solved one way, almost certainly with many retries.

First, you must turn around, enter a wall grate, crawl through a tunnel, pop out a floor grate, walk along a corridor, plant an explosive, walk back up the corridor, enter the floor grate, crawl back through the tunnel, grapple up to the wall grate, perch on a ledge, and detonate the explosive. Repetition makes this very dull, especially because it is always accompanied by the same voice clips.

Second, you must hack the middle sentry gun (watch out, hack only lasts 30 seconds), glide down to the alcove without being seen by the surviving guards (one is standing right in the alcove), do a multi-takedown timed to avoid the left and right sentry guns, get out of their zones of coverage, re-hack the middle gun, slowly and vulnerably dismantle the left and right guns, then operate a fuse box to finally disable the middle gun.

In so much of the rest of the game, you have freedom of approach. If one method doesn't succeed, you can try another. If you prefer not to use a particular technique, you can probably avoid it most of the time. There's no invention to this sequence, though, only execution. And sadly execution too is tricky. When gliding for the alcove, you may get hung up on the wire strung across the top of the room. Despite not technically killing you immediately, the sentry guns are effectively instant death. (Even in the main game, sentry guns are one of the more unforgiving threats.)

In a way it's an interesting case study. It demonstrates that for all Arkham Knight does right, without player choice and flexibility it would suffer badly.