Op-ed:
There were some interesting boss fights in Arkham, where Batman is actually challenged. Unfortunately, the stealth and other mechanics are so extensive that you can cheese those all out as well. And usually they are very repetitive, and dumbed down to such an extent as to not alienate any of the very broad audience the games are intended for.
This is what I think about that era of games: first person shooters moved to console, became dramatically successful with Halo and etc, then they realized that to bring shooters to mass appeal they had to deal with the fact that controls are hard with a gamepad, so they invented the "cover based shooter". The cover based shooter mechanics are the most mindless, completely devoid of fun mechanics ever, here is how they work: take cover, line up your shot, wait for opponent to come out of cover, pop up and whack-a-mole, rinse repeat. You now have a combat system that is about as deep and interesting as whack-a-mole. The broad appeal was won, and games like Uncharted etc became massively successful with wide audiences of people not interested in interesting game mechanics.
Eventually, this became stale and boring. So the killers of game mechanics set their eyes on the next genre: hack-and-slash games. These games were based on having complex combat mechanics, deep gameplay, based on tons of movement, with enemies quickly following and being challenging and varied and diverse. So with Assassin's Creed, they said: this is far too interesting and fun and exciting and good. We want to appeal to a broad audience: let's give it the Cover-Based Shooter treatment.
Now the player character is fast and agile and mobile, like before, but absolutely none of the enemies are. Like in Uncharted, the enemies simply stand around, and then attack one by one while waiting for the player character to do a bunch of nonsense with really stylistic animations. Rather than popping one by one out of cover so the player character can pick them off one by one, like the cover-based shooter, instead the enemies just stand around and pop up one by one to attack. It is the third-person hack-and-slash instantiation of the cover-based shooter.
All these games are essentially anti-games. Games that deliberately make well-established and developed genre, where combat has been advanced and developed to a great level of depth and interest and fun, and then throw that all away for the benefit of mass-appeal to gamers who don't actually like games, they just the idea that they are playing the "TRIPLE A" "blockbuster" title with all the "very serious gaming awards". They are a curse on videogaming and humanity.
I fully suspect AC:O is doing its best to give the Soulslike genre the same anti-game treatment.
