The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is an Arkham City Lite, one whose problems are more often due to hardware restraints than laziness on behalf of the developers. The combat may not be on par with Arkham City Lockdown, but no other mobile game has delivered a sandbox experience that looks as good as this. An incredibly ambitious project, but one that sadly fails to fulfill all of its goals.

The Dark Knight Rises, like The Amazing Spider-Man, is a game that I desperately want to love, but I'd be fooling myself if I didn't say it could be a good deal better. Add in additional hand-to-hand combat options, debug the crashes, and diversify the missions and you'd have a perfect game.

Overall, The Dark Knight Rises overcomes a few minor issues and provides fans with something worthy of the Batman name in a suitably shadowy Gotham playground.

Do we really need in-app purchases that effectively over-simplify (even break) the game early on?

Like most Gameloft's titles, it's a small-scale rendition of a bigger console experience that's worth playing for all the collectibles, missions, and upgrades, despite several shortcomings.

Even though it's fun to level up and the graphics are drop dead gorgeous, The Dark Knight is hard to control and Gameloft has added all sorts of help to compensate this. Therefore, it lacks challenge and just feels bland in the end.

While The Dark Knight Rises doesn't quite live up to its cinematic namesake, Gameloft deserve credit for capturing the feel of the Arkham titles if not the depth and challenge. It's very true to the film without being a classic in its own right, so the so-called Nolanites will no doubt find something to appreciate here.

Prowling around a fully-realized, open-world Gotham City is impressive and can be very fun. But stiff controls, boring combat, frequent bugs and aggressive in-app purchases mar the experience.

Dark Knight is a pale imitation of the Arkham games, with boring combat, cheap presentation, and dull missions. It works, but it never thrills.