Batman: Arkham City at 15: Still the Best-Reviewed Superhero Game, and Steam Agrees

Yes, on the numbers it still is. Batman: Arkham City turns 15 today, and Guinness World Records still lists it as the most critically acclaimed superhero videogame, while its PlayStation 3 Metascore of 96 has not been matched by any superhero game we checked, including this year's Marvel's Wolverine and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight.

This feature is built on Metacritic's game pages, the Guinness record entry, Steam's public review and player-count data (read on 18 October 2026, between 07:02 and 07:05 UTC) and sales figures Warner Bros. gave the press in 2011 and 2012. Nobody at AFK Journal is claiming to have replayed it for the occasion: the point is what the critics and the players say, and whether 15 years have changed that.

How did Arkham City get to a 96?

It arrived with a head start. Batman: Arkham Asylum had already scored 91 on PS3 and 92 on Xbox 360 in 2009, so Rocksteady's sequel was reviewed as the follow-up to a game critics had already crowned. Arkham City took the formula out of the asylum and into a walled-off chunk of Gotham, kept the combat and stealth, and added a separate Catwoman campaign.

The scores split by platform in a way that is easy to forget now. The PS3 version sits at 96. Xbox 360 sits at 94, which is also the headline number on Metacritic's main page for the game (87 critic reviews). The Windows version, which arrived a month later, landed at 91, and the 2012 Wii U Armored Edition at 85.

That spread matters for the headline claim. When Guinness updated the record on 20 May 2025, after the review aggregator GameRankings closed in 2019, it used the 94 on the game's main Metacritic page, not the PS3 figure. Either number is still higher than any other superhero game we found.

What did critics actually praise in 2011?

Mostly the scale, without the usual cost in focus. Game Informer's 10/10 review by Andrew Reiner ran under the headline "The Best Licensed Video Game Ever Made". It described the move from Asylum's linear structure to an open district full of missions and events, noted that the side content offers more play than the critical path, and counted 440 Riddler challenges. It also put Catwoman's playable arc at roughly five to ten percent of the story.

IGN's Greg Miller gave it 9.5 and was more careful with the open-world label. His review argued that Arkham City is not an open world in the Liberty City sense but closer to a hub with dungeons, likening it to The Legend of Zelda, and he praised the opening as one of the best in modern games. One reservation was the boss fights, where he found the journey to each villain more fun than the fight itself.

That mix is the useful part of the story. Read together, the two reviews were not rewarding sheer size; they were rewarding a bigger map that kept the tight combat, stealth and detective structure of a smaller game. The later Arkham games are, in a sense, a long argument about how far that balance can stretch.

How big a hit was it at launch?

Very big, by Warner's own count. A week after launch, Warner Bros. told Game Informer that Arkham City had sold 2 million copies worldwide and that it had shipped about 4.6 million, more than Arkham Asylum had sold in total since 2009. In the US, NPD data for October 2011 put it second for the month with 1.5 million units, behind only Battlefield 3, as Eurogamer reported.

By February 2012, GameSpot reported that shipments had passed 6 million. Those are shipped units, not copies in players' hands, and Warner has not, as far as we could find, published a lifetime sales total for the game since. Anyone quoting a precise 2026 figure is estimating.

What do Steam players say 15 years later?

They agree with the critics, almost to the decimal. The Game of the Year Edition on Steam has 75,834 positive reviews out of 78,835, or 96.2%. The only Arkham game ahead of it is its predecessor: Arkham Asylum's GOTY Edition sits at 96.4% of 88,407. A 0.2-point gap across that many reviews is a tie in everything but bragging rights.

The interesting line is Arkham Knight. Its PC Metascore is 70, 17 points below the PS4 version, and its lifetime Steam rating is the lowest of the four main games at 89.8%. Yet its latest 300 Steam reviews are 96.3% positive, the best of the series in that sample. Our reading, and it is only a reading: the lifetime total still carries the weight of older reviews, and people buying Knight today are much happier than its PC score suggests.

Arkham City still has an audience, too: 939 people were playing the GOTY Edition on Steam at 07:02 UTC on a Sunday morning in Europe, against 1,065 for Asylum and 2,203 for Knight. These are single snapshots of PC players only, so treat them as a pulse check, not a ranking.

Has any superhero game come closer since 2011?

Insomniac has got the closest. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 reached 90 from 152 critics in 2023, the highest Metascore for a superhero game we found after the first two Arkham games. The 2026 releases did not threaten the record: Marvel's Wolverine sits at 75 from 153 reviews, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight at 83 from 89.

Two things stand out. Players and critics broadly line up, with one exception: Spider-Man 2 is the second-best-reviewed game in the table but has the weakest Steam rating of the Insomniac games at 83.6%. And the two lowest rows are both Batman-universe games made without the Arkham formula at their centre, Warner Bros. Games Montréal's Gotham Knights and Rocksteady's own Suicide Squad.

Is a 2011 Metascore really comparable? The case against

The record has softer edges than the headline suggests. The 96 is a single-platform score built from a 2011 pool of outlets, while Spider-Man 2's 90 comes from 152 reviews in a much larger, more varied critic pool, so the two numbers are not measured on quite the same ruler. Guinness itself uses the 94, and a four-point lead is narrower than a six-point one.

On Steam, Arkham City is not even the top Batman game: Asylum is 0.2 points ahead, and Spider-Man Remastered is only 0.2 points behind on almost twice as many reviews. Steam reviews also come from people who chose to buy a game, often years later and often at a discount, which flatters older classics. So the fair version of the claim is narrower: Arkham City has the best critic score of any superhero game, and it shares the top tier of player ratings rather than owning it.

What does it mean for Batman games now?

It explains why fans keep asking for the old formula back. After Arkham Knight and the short Batman: Arkham VR (2016), Rocksteady's next full game was the live-service Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and Warner took a $200 million loss on it. In February 2025, a Bloomberg report covered by VGC and PC Gamer said Rocksteady is reportedly returning to a single-player Batman game, one that was then described as years away. Warner has not dated or formally announced it in any source we checked.

In the meantime, Rocksteady's name has turned up on a Batman game again: VGC reported in May 2026 that the studio is credited as a co-developer on Traveller's Tales' Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which has the best Steam rating of any superhero game released since 2021 in our table, at 95.4%.

What we don't know

Three gaps are worth stating. Warner has not published a lifetime sales figure for Arkham City that we could find, so the 6 million shipped by February 2012 is the last firm number. Steam data covers PC players only, and the PS3 and Xbox 360 audience that made the game a hit has no comparable public rating. And Rocksteady's next Batman game is, for now, a report rather than an announcement.

If you like this kind of critics-versus-players comparison, we used the same method for every Gears of War game ranked by critics and players, and another 15th birthday got the sales treatment in our Dark Souls at 15 feature.