WARNING: This article contains spoilers. Pretty much all of them.

Batman is practically a gargoyle in . He spends the night in a predatory pose, his cape lashed by rain, far above the dire avenues of Gotham City. Such is life for the wrathful vigilante born in … CRIME ALLEY. Ok. so the only Gotham people who work harder than Batman are the real estate agents.

One man’s urban decay is another’s open-world activity, though, giving Batman the ideal setup for a crime-punching superhero game. There’s just one problem with Gotham’s crime in particular. Let's go over some of the major events in Arkham Knight to find out what it is:

Commissioner James Gordon is an overachiever when it comes to abduction, getting himself captured twice in Batman: Arkham Knight - once by the title villain and then by Scarecrow. Eh, you know what? Gordon seems like a nice, hard-working guy, and since the Arkham Knight is partnered with Scarecrow we can knock his capture to a count of just one, but with joint custody between two supervillains. It’s kind of sweet if you don’t think about it.

Either way, the true indignity of Gordon’s problem comes from cutting ties with loose-cannon Batman. After Gordon storms off to finally sort things out himself, he bumbles into super-villain clutches and learns the hard lesson of Arkham Knight’s plot: only Batman can save us, because we’ve probably been kidnapped.

Oh, ok, another kidnapping. Sure. Gotham’s most belligerent botanist gets kidnapped and locked up in an improvised greenhouse before Batman’s even left his starting perch. She escapes almost coincidentally once Batman arrives, proving that she is immune to Scarecrow’s toxin and to any sort of clothing a normal woman might wear, like pants.

The fact that she’s dragged off to prison immediately without anyone even putting a sweater on her is a lousy fate to suffer, though perhaps not as bad as being played by Uma Thurman.

Arkham Knight rewards Oracle’s whip-smart advisory role to Batman by having her … hmm … abducted off-screen. Barbara Gordon’s technical skills allow her to hack and retrieve any information from within Gotham’s clock tower, granting her an immaterial freedom after Joker paralyzed her Batgirl career, but the game prefers to dangle her like a squirming carrot throughout.

The Joker’s earlier attack on Barbara is depicted in grisly detail, but her return to Arkham Knight isn’t given the same treatment - instead, we see Oracle getting shot in two different ways, thrown off a building and then dumped in the GCPD where she gets to hack some drones from afar. Her return from the dead isn’t even spun as triumphantly as the other thing that gets killed and resurrected: The Batmobile. You know, the non-person car?

Let’s give it up for the firefighters of Gotham City, who are essentially running around a bubbling volcano with just a handful of ice cubes and the constant fear of being mugged by lava from a bad caldera.

Though Arkham Knight reduces them to a percentage of game completion to be extracted from various parts of the city, these grounded city saviors deserve the help, not to mention the savage descent of Batman upon their captors. I mean, yeah, they also get kidnapped in the grand scheme of things, but it’s not like they’ve had a lifetime of combat training to defend against that sort of thing.

Hang on, Catwoman gets kidnapped? The acrobatic, masterful escape artist with nine lives and ten witty retorts per minute gets kidnapped by… The Riddler? The same disheveled anti-Layton designing Mario Kart tracks from his mom’s basement? Ok, fine.

Though Catwoman dismisses the ‘damsel in distress’ label, she says it while having an exploding collar strapped to her neck - and she can’t get the numerous keys to unlock it without Batman’s help. So, nice attempt at self-referential dodging there, writers, but nope. To be fair, though, Bats and Cats fighting through The Riddler’s abandoned orphanage is one of the highlights of Arkham Knight, even if a collar makes Catwoman less cool than she should be. At least it doesn’t have a bell on it.

After the world’s greatest detective concludes that Scarecrow is manufacturing his spooky chemicals at Gotham’s big, huge, unmissable chemical manufacturing plant - it’s a whole thing - he swoops in to save the workers being forced to work late (in the service of evil).

Alright, this one makes sense, even though it’s yet another consolidated kidnapping. Nobody living or working in Gotham would willingly help produce a fear-inducing toxin. It’s dangerous, evil and - depending on which neighborhood you live in - kind of redundant.

The flashback to the imprisonment and torture of Jason Todd - the second person to become Robin under Batman’s tough-guy tutelage - gives you a big clue to the Arkham Knight’s true identity. And by “big clue” I mean full-on confirmation, because why else are we flashing back to this now?

Though the Arkham Knight persona isn’t the one who’s kidnapped, it’s his drawn-out and humiliating captivity that leads to his festering lust for revenge against Batman. Maybe that’s why Batman’s running around rescuing everyone properly, hoping to avoid a small army of Arkham Knights nipping at his cape.

Aww, man, Lucius Fox gets kidnapped? Fox stays behind in Wayne Tower, despite a city-wide evacuation notice, working late to beef up Batman’s gadgets and deliver new Batmobile upgrades. He’s charming, he’s enjoying the absurdity of designing toys for a billionaire vigilante, and he’s collected. Later, though, he’s collected at gunpoint in the office by Thomas Elliot, a Bruce Wayne doppelgänger going by the name of Hush.

Batman doesn’t tolerate kidnapping, of course, and with barely a biff or a pow he manages to negotiate Fox’s freedom.

Whoops. In negotiating Fox’s release in Wayne Tower, Batman reveals his face to Hush as a reminder that they used to be childhood friends, and that one of them grew up to be an armored weirdo who breaks arms and probably doesn’t appreciate hostage situations in his damn office.

After bludgeoning him into unconsciousness, Batman decides it’s probably best not to send Hush straight to the Gotham lockup. Instead, Hush is locked up somewhere in Wayne Tower. An unsanctioned, corporate acquisition of a person against their will and without the police’s knowledge? Suuuure sounds like a kidnapping, Mr. Wayne.

Le sigh. Batman’s initial protege, Dick Grayson, graduates from the role of Robin to pursue a career as Nightwing in a town called Blüdhaven (it sounds lovely). The pair briefly team up to foil a weapon smuggling plot by Penguin, and are then separated when Nightwing gets kidnapped off-screen.

Being bailed out by your master could be some kind of spandex-clad Karate Kid moment, but the snappy dialogue between Batman and the former boy wonder clearly just serve as a smokescreen for embarrassment. Being rescued from a waddling man with a semi-automatic umbrella is worse than having your dad come get your sorry shoplifting self from a Hot Topic backroom. Oh well, at least Robin doesn’t get kidnapped.

Well, here’s an ironic case where Batman actually helps out in the kidnapping, locking Robin 3.0 up in a futuristic cell in order to protect him. This not only leaves him in a prime spot to be collected by Scarecrow later, but acts as prelude to the future Batman who has to worry about empty nest syndrome.

To be fair, this is one of the more sensible kidnappings in the game. Batman makes a mistake for once, blinded by his fear of losing another partner in the collateral damage of all the supervillain crap he has to deal with, and has to fix it in a way that echoes Arkham Knight’s overall message: being friends with Batman is the worst. It would have been better to let Robin decide and act on this point, though, rather than being appended to a staggering list that relies far too much on one kind of peril. But that’s it, right? We’re done with kidnappings, surely.

As we edge closer to a new chapter in , now feels like a perfect time to burrow down to the roots of the series and see exactly how the legend began. We spoke to Jim Brown, the lead level designer at Epic Games, to find out some of the secrets behind the original Gears of War.

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Between the original reveal trailer and the game appearing on shelves, Marcus’s character model and voice actor were both changed entirely. Cole and Baird’s roles were entirely reversed at one point – with Baird’s original sports star persona partly inspired by David Beckham. Look at the haircut, and it all makes sense. Eventually the team decided to swap the two, using Jamie Foxx’s character from the film Any Given Sunday as their archetype for Cole.

The original plan for Gears of War was very different. The initial concept was based on large-scale multiplayer warfare with an emphasis on vehicle combat. This was dumped in favour of the cover-based shooting style eventually seen in the final game, while the original concept eventually morphed into Unreal Tournament 3’s Warfare mode.

General Raam was a last-minute addition to the game, and almost didn’t make the cut. Due to production deadlines, the development team didn’t have time to entirely explain how Marcus and the team ended up fighting him on the back of a train. His story has since been fleshed out and is being completely revamped for the Ultimate edition

Many of the characters in Gears are inspired by the lives of the Epic development team. Damon Baird was named after a childhood friend of Cliffy B, and ‘The Cole Train’ was named after Epic’s level designer Phil Cole. Best of all is Raam, who was named after the owner of the team’s favourite Indian restaurant. We’re not sure we’d have the balls to ask General Raam for a lamb bhuna, if we’re honest.

The third Gears game was the first to include playable female characters, but it’s something the team had been thinking about for a while. At one point during development, the team considered letting players choose the gender of Dom – opening up the opportunity to play as Dominique Santiago.