Batman: Arkham Shadow is easily one of the year’s best virtual reality games. It intuitively recreates the look and feel of Rocksteady’s trilogy from a whole new perspective while telling a captivating missing chapter in the Batman ethos. And now, developer Camouflaj is making its award-winning game even better with a duo of free updates directly addressing one of the game’s only shortcomings.
Arkham Shadow update 1.2 drops for Meta Quest users this week, adding four new combat and predator challenge maps, and a character model viewer to the game. The challenge maps are based on levels from chapters three and four of the game’s campaign.
While Arkham Shadow is mostly a home run, players who enjoy its combat and stealth sections after rolling the game’s credits had few avenues to engage with those mechanics short of starting the game over. While the atmospheric, slower-paced narrative of Arkham Shadow makes for a hell of a ride the first time around, making your way through those story beats and set pieces can be a slog when you just want to dish out some justice using your fists.
Adding four more challenge maps to Arkham Shadow’s measly three finally provides players with more ways to engage with the game’s core mechanics for a quick VR session.
The character viewer on the other hand is one of the other missing features curiously missing from the game at launch. The viewer allows players to take a closer look at the detailed designs of the Arkham-verses heroes and villains, something that is a staple of the Arkham series. Being able to do so in virtual reality is a nice bonus for those swept by the game’s new villainous faction
While Update 1.2 should tide players over through the holiday season, Camouflaj already has something in store for January. Update 1.3 will add even more combat and predator challenge maps, as well as a New Game+ mode for those who actually want to experience the game’s story once more while maxing out Batman’s skill tree in the process.
Probably the most interesting addition coming to update 1.3 is a new mixed-reality experience. While Camouflaj has not yet revealed what that content will look like, we’re keen to see how the team translates the best parts of such an immersive game into players’ immediate surroundings.
Arkham Shadow is a must-play for Batman fans with access to a VR headset. But it also makes for a wonderful introduction to virtual reality due to how well it translates familiar game mechanics to such a completely different type of game. The game was enough of a critical hit to win Best VR/AR game at The Game Awards last week. It’s no wonder why Meta’s packing in the title with all of its VR headsets this holiday.
