Batman: Arkham Asylum Looks Like Arkham Knight In This Unreal Remake

Aside from Camouflaj’s Meta Quest 3/3S-exclusive Batman: Arkham Shadow and Rocksteady’s highly controversial Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the Batman Arkham franchise has more or less been on ice for more than a decade. That is, there hasn’t been a new flatscreen Batman: Arkham game since Batman: Arkham Knight, and an unofficial Batman: Arkham project may be the closest we get for quite a while.

YouTube user RRe36 has recently shared footage of how their Unreal Engine 4 ‘remake’ of Batman: Arkham Asylum—but really inspiration throughout the Arkham series—has been progressing. It truly does earn the title of ‘remake’ with how much it extrapolates from the bones of Batman: Arkham Asylum, though there aren’t plans for it to ever be released.

We Need This Arkham Asylum Remake Now

The video itself provides a showcase of some of the work done recently for the Unreal Engine Batman Arkham project, including:

• An updated Arkham Asylum-style menu
• An Armored Arkham Batsuit skin showcase
• A Lord Batman skin showcase
• An Alex Ross Batman skin showcase
• An Arkham Sewers Combat Challenge with the Armored Batsuit
• An Arkham Archives Combat Challenge featuring Lunatics and the Lord Batman skin
• The Iceberg Lounge with the Alex Ross Batman skin

While the video’s combat challenge footage is spectacular altogether, it’s the clips from the Arkham Sewers and Arkham Archives that are particularly astonishing since they grant the most vivid depiction of what a Batman: Arkham Asylum remake could look like.

Interestingly, this is not a mod, nor does the project remake the entirety of Batman: Arkham Asylum. Moreover, as RRe36 states in a FAQ blog post, there are two reasons why it may never see the light of day as a downloadable, playable project:

“As of this moment no, as the assets from the original games would most likely lead to copyright issues and in addition to that this project has always been a personal passion project of mine, and the extra pressure to deliver and much higher stakes from making it a public project would inevitably ruin that.

Uploading the project files is thus obviously also out of the question, especially since it’s pretty disorganized and the total size is also far beyond what’s reasonable to upload (we’re talking about >80GB, plus the required custom engine build that adds at least another 50GB).”

Batman Has Never Looked Better

Batman: Arkham Asylum is still arguably a phenomenal-looking game, reinforced largely by how stunning its Gothic architecture and lighting are on Arkham Island. But while Batman: Arkham City would also have its own art style in the snowy and eponymous Arkham City, Batman: Arkham Knight’s graphical fidelity has shone with hyperrealistic visuals that rival those of today’s Unreal Engine 5 and current-gen console games.

RRe36’s project reimagines the earlier Batman: Arkham games with exquisite character model detail and inherits unique Batman: Arkham Knight influences, such as environmental interactions, to deliver what any Batman or Arkham fan would hope that an official remake of Batman: Arkham Asylum might look like.