As an infinitely wealthy martial artist looking down upon the denizens of his city, usually as he glides over them en route to his luxury tank, Batman isn’t really touched by the small indignities of living in Gotham. The rain-slick city, which recently beat out Chernobyl in a ranking of the world’s best places to live, is an ever-escalating battleground for Batman and the super-criminals always tugging at his cape for attention. In , the city is wider and in greater danger than ever before, demanding bigger and better solutions from Batman’s futuristic fanny pack. Who has time to sweat the small stuff?

Still, that doesn’t mean your quality of life, a truly alien concept within the borders of Gotham, needs to suffer in such a grand scale of things. The detail-oriented design of Arkham Knight means that keeping in mind a few tiny tricks will ultimately grant you the upper hand and an easier, smoother way to pummel the Scarecrow into a wheezing pile of creepy-straw. But, sure, having a giant tank also helps.

After you’ve been to the Gotham City Police Department for the first time, venture into the game options and set the Batmobile’s tank mode toggle to “on.” A tap of the right bumper or R1 will now switch Batman’s armor-plated city sled between drivin’ and blastin’ modes, making for a more sensible control scheme overall. The tank’s vulcan cannon goes on left trigger and its primary cannon goes on the right, just as the video game tank god intended.

Before this change, the Batmobile turns into a roving gun whenever you hold the left trigger - or whenever you want to brake in the Batmobile and mistakenly extend Batman’s cannon with embarrassing prematurity. Another bonus with toggle: The drift button is mapped to Square or X, making it far easier to handle tight corners in the Batmobile. Not that you should be too worried about threading through alleys: Batman’s car can withstand plenty of scrapes without losing speed, so don’t worry about garbage cans, benches, trees or any of the pointless attempts at obscuring Gotham’s terribleness.

You can take the shock gun, or “Remote Electrical Charge” in gadget parlance, as soon as you arrive at the Gotham City Police Department for the first time. It’s locked up in the evidence room, but it’s shielded only by a pathetic layer of glass, belongs to you in the first place and - oh yeah - YOU ARE BATMAN. Just take it.

As you leave the room you’ll overhear police officers consider and then quickly cancel the idea of stopping your impromptu removal of evidence. You can march out with confidence, knowing that you’ve gotten early dibs on one of the most useful gadgets in the game. It’s handy in solving a few of Riddler’s conundrums later on, but you’ll really want to fire it during combat (LT + Circle, or LT + B), where it will stun enemies, trigger their machine guns in undirected fire, and remove electrical shielding from the crooks you can’t normally punch.

The wonderful cadence in Arkham Knight’s combat has you flitting between numerous goons, delivering a biff here and a pow there. Some enemies are temporarily knocked down, leaving you free to deal with the others behind you, but your merciful restraint is costing you in the combo meter. If you have a chance, you can press RT + Circle (or RT + B) to lift up dazed opponents and thrust them back into the fight.

Why do we fall, minor henchman? So Batman can pick us up, pepper us with punches and extract that delicious combo juice. A well-timed pummelfest can help push you past the 8x multiplier quickly, which then lets you do an instant takedown of a tougher enemy nearby.

Brutes, the large and padded men populating every respectable supervillain’s menagerie of minions, can really trip up your flow. Usually, you need to stun them with your cape (you know, like how you were stunned and dazed as a child when you ran through sheets on the clothesline) and then punch them 15, 20 times while countering incoming blows from behind.

To speed up the process, try pushing or luring Brutes to environmental hazards, activated with Square + X, or X + A. They glow blue in unison with enemies that are in range, and they’re indiscriminate in who they knock out permanently - even a Brute at full health won’t get up after you knock them into an electrical box or drop one of Gotham’s many industrial lamps on them. The city planners must have gotten them with that bulk shipment of stone gargoyles.

The Arkham Knight’s propensity for erecting towers all over Gotham seems to hint at his true identity as a disgruntled Ubisoft game designer. His militarized towers don’t “reveal” anything other than an opportunity to punch optional dudes, though, so their difficulty tends to be higher than most challenges stemming from the main story. As such, they’re often guarded by emplaced sentry guns, which are huge pains in the bat-posterior.

You’ll come across a few of the Knight’s watchtowers early on, but don’t bother swooping through the red lights until you’ve obtained the Remote Hacking Device in the story. The wireless gidget lets you temporarily blind sentry guns, letting you tussle with tower guards without having to worry about getting shot. Even a fully upgraded batsuit can only shield you from bullets for so long, and the hassle without hacking just isn’t worth suffering through a lengthy loading screen.

It’s easy to forget the Batmobile’s other flourishes in the roar of its fiery exhaust. It’s a valuable puzzle-solving tool throughout the game, thanks to its sturdy winch and cable, but it can also help you deal with tougher gatherings of goons. Sometimes it’s best to think of it as another gadget in Batman’s arsenal.

If you’re about to descend on a batch of buffoons, take a look around and see if they’re near a road or a window. Chances are you can remotely summon the Batmobile and leave it parked nearby. Now, after building up your combo meter and spotting an outline of blue on your target, you can press A + X (or X + Square) to uppercut them into the air and marvel as your car blows them out of the sky like a crooked clay pigeon. This cool maneuver, like many others in the game, continue to show Batman’s questionable grasp of the words “non” and “lethal.”

If you intend on completing the majority of sidequests in Batman: Arkham Knight, there’ll be plenty of points later on to upgrade Batman’s suit, fists and gadgets. At the outset, it’s better to focus on beefing up the Batmobile’s cannons. The Arkham Knight has more drones than a militarized Amazon warehouse, and taking them out with fewer shots will help battles breeze by and just seem more fun.

Bruce Wayne’s friend and inventor Lucius Fox will also offer a choice of upgrades to the Batmobile as the story progresses. The most useful of these, which you should get as soon as possible, is the EMP, short for Electro-Magnetic Pulse and even shorter for “I’d like to destroy some drones while they’re immobile and defenseless, muahahaha.”

Because urban planners desperately wanted to add “drowning beneath a bridge” to the long list of horrible things you sign up for when you move to Gotham, the city is split between three major islands. You start on Bleake Island (seriously, why does anyone live here?), but from there you’ll venture into Magiani and Founder’s Islands as you track down the Scarecrow and his debilitating fear toxin.

Your video gaming impulse will be to clear out an island of sidequests as soon as you get to it - and before you move on - but you’ll run into a lot of dead ends this way, especially for tasks that require the Batmobile. To avoid wasting time, and to pursue sidequests organically, whenever, play the story missions until your beloved butler Alfred lowers the bridge to that island. Once that’s done, the Batmobile has access to the roads and can bail you out if you get in trouble with drones. It also gives Alfred something to do beyond listening to Batman batsplain every little thing he’s doing. YES, sir, of course you’re using the deep tissue scanner. I get it, it makes sense.

Batman’s predatory style is more refined than ever in Arkham Knight, thanks to the new Fear Multi-Takedown system. Provided you’ve taken enough foes out in silence - just enough to induce a little panic in the rest - you can instantly take out several clustered thugs back-to-back by popping out of a grate or dropping in from the roof.

You can only incapacitate three enemies at a time in the beginning, but bumping this number to 4 and 5 via Waynetech upgrades makes later story missions much easier, especially when the opposition is armed (plus: a sequence of fear takedowns is guaranteed to succeed unless you fail to point the camera at the next guy). This maneuver is especially powerful if you’re foiling Two-Face’s bank robberies across Gotham, which must be completed before his troops make off with all the cash. With vault alarms drowning out the sounds of gunfire and punching, quickness is better than silence.

Batman typically enters the scene from an elevated gargoyle perch, so you might as well use your bat’s eye view to cause some consternation. The Distruptor gadget returns in Arkham Knight with a wider variety of ways to induce malfunction in enemy weapons, so always consider using it before you swoop down and start flailing.

For instance, the Disruptor can disable enemy medics before you join the fight, thereby stopping them before they wake up thugs you’ve already knocked into next Tuesday. You can also set ammo crates to go haywire, giving you a KO’d enemy before they can bring a gun into the fight. In fact, if you booby-trap them and toss a batarang into the crowd from afar, they’ll panic and get themselves electrocuted before you’ve even touched the ground. Now that’s the classic Batman way.

Even if you love the Batmobile’s wrecking ball approach to fast travel, gliding is still the preferred method of travel through Gotham. Though you can often save time by driving through sewers and other secret passageways, going up and over the city is more fun, liberating and - get this - informative.

Batman: Arkham Knight’s storytelling tricks include the clever use of audio cues, some of which you simply won’t hear over the growling of the Batmobile’s engines. As you swoop through the city, you’ll hear signals of nearby sidequests, some of which won’t even be available on the mission menu yet. In between the light patter of rain you’ll hear a ghastly screech, wafting opera music and even the obnoxious beep of a roadside mine - all little distractions that lead to something more. If you’re playing Arkham Knight this way, you’re doing it right.

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