Had a much, MUCH smoother experience with the game today. No more WBID hangups, and also no more freezes.
Previous bullshit aside, this is turning out to be a kick-ass Batman title.
It has Rocksteady's fingerprints all over it in a lot of places though. There are several sequences that are almost carbon copies of experiences that I had in Arkham City. Still good, but its pretty glaring when you experience them.
Here's a few examples.
The freeze grenade and all of its uses (stopping steam valves, creating rafts, immobilizing enemies) is recreated but this game calls it the Glue Grenade.
Titan Thugs are replaced with big guys called Enforcers that do very similar attacks that the Titans did, but they are smaller and you don't ride them around. Ultra stun+beatdown into a scripted finisher.
However, despite this stuff, there is quite a bit of original content and the story itself is very good. There is also a seriously badass twist revealed pretty early on that just takes the game to another level, at least for me it did.
The fight timing is different because Bats is way slower in this one. It used to be 3 hits you could land before needing to counter someone, and in this one its only one, sometimes 2 before you get clocked.
The seemingly cheap "slide" that the enemies would do where they covered a big distance to land a hit on you in AC is present with ALL enemies in this one. You really have to play a lot more defensively in this game than in Arkham City.
Im guessing this was by design, since Bruce has only been Batman for a couple years, and he's only ever messed with mobsters and low level thugs to this point.
So while keeping all the moves, abilities, and gadgets from the last game, they still managed to make Bats feel like a rookie. Once you hit about level 15 though, you can finally unlock that takedown after five hits instead of 8, and later on you can get the criticals that do twice the damage and you start to feel more like the badass from Arkham City.
This one introduces some new stuff, the shock gloves are pretty sweet, once you land enough hits, the gloves get charged and you can activate them for a short time, and it allows you to attack any enemy head on. Armored, Shielded, Stun Baton, whatever. Really cool addition.
I haven't unlocked them yet, but there are several counters tied to the shock gloves that you can get that will allow you to counter previously uncounterable attacks, like the Shield Bash, and Stun Baton attack.
Pretty solid game once it gets rolling.