Bosses

Both of the fights on this page are predator encounters rather than brawls, and neither one is won by fighting well. What decides them is what is already true when the fight starts: which gadgets you own, which moves you know, and how much of that list the difficulty setting is going to make you use.

So they are ordered here by prerequisite load, from the fight that asks for nothing you do not already have to the fight that audits your entire inventory. Deadshot is gated behind a three-crime-scene side mission and then wants only patience. Mr. Freeze is gated behind main-story progress and wants the Disruptor, the Remote Electrical Charge, Explosive Gel, the Line Launcher and most of the predator move list.

This page covers the two fights we walk in full, so treat it as a readiness check rather than a roster.

Before you start either fight

The asymmetry in that last column is the whole point. Deadshot punishes a single lapse of attention and costs you thirty seconds. Freeze punishes a shortage of options and cannot be recovered from by playing better.

Deadshot, the fight that only tests patience

Getting the fight to appear

The fight is the last objective of Shot in the Dark, and the side mission is considerably more work than the boss is. It becomes available the first time you leave the Steel Mill, when an S.O.S. Broadcast waypoint appears in Amusement Mile near the bridge into the Industrial District.

There are three crime scenes. The first is the political prisoner on that rooftop, who is shot while you talk to him: scan the bullet fragments in the chimney, follow the trajectory, and scan the casing on the fenced rooftop it leads to. The second and third arrive on their own schedule: a shot rings out somewhere in the city, and only then does your map narrow down roughly where it came from. Our Shot in the Dark guide has the exact scan targets for each, and the fix for the known bug where the second victim never spawns.

The last step before the fight is a race. Hacking Deadshot's PDA reveals his remaining targets, one of whom is Jack Ryder, and the window is two to three minutes, set by your difficulty, to reach an alleyway in the Bowery.

Winning it

You open behind cover with his laser sweeping the room, and the entire fight is one instruction: move only while the laser points away from you. Go cover to cover, gaining a little ground each time he looks elsewhere, and work your way down to the vent underneath him. Position yourself below him in that vent and the takedown ends the fight.

There is no damage race and no combo to learn. Getting caught in the beam does not hurt you, it kills you outright and reloads the encounter, so the only real mistake available is impatience.

What hard difficulty changes

Nothing mechanical. The laser sweeps faster and that is the entire difference. Worth stating plainly, because it is the exact opposite of what happens to the other fight on this page.

Mr. Freeze, the fight that audits your gadget list

Before the accident, Victor Fries was a celebrated cryogenicist looking for a cure for his wife's illness. What it left him with is a body that cannot survive outside a suit. In Arkham City he has the cure you need for the Joker's poison, and he wants Nora found before he hands it over. You refuse, and that is the fight.

Reaching the Forensic Lab

Once the main story has taken you through your conversation with Mayor Quincy Sharp, head for the GCPD, which sits to the east of Amusement Mile. Get onto its roof with the grapple, take the eastern gargoyle, then use Detective Vision on the thugs gathered below, and glide down onto them, watching for the shield enemies mixed into the group.

With them handled, hit the switch above the frozen GCPD gate with a Remote Electrical Charge, slide underneath, and take the Forensic Lab on your right. Turn immediately left, through the doorway, and a cutscene starts the fight.

Why every method works exactly once

Freeze learns. Every takedown you land is countered permanently afterwards, so if you have already used a silent takedown, walking up behind him again just gets his jetpack fired in your face. There are twelve methods in total and the fight is really a question of how many of them you can produce on demand.

Two things follow from that. First, a takedown only stuns him, so you still have to beat him down afterwards to actually do damage. Second, he stands back up inside an immunity shield, and touching him while it is active damages you rather than him.

His armoured front makes a straight attack impossible, and he tracks your footprints, sends up scout drones, fires the freeze gun and throws grenades. The environment is what beats him: shelves for cover, an electrified puddle, a wall you can bring down on him.

All twelve takedowns

What the fight punishes

• Sitting in cover. Stay too long and he releases Heat-Seeker Drones that track your body heat, which means he can find you anywhere on the map.
• Sitting in Detective Mode. Same idea, worse penalty. He drops Sensor Jammers, and Detective Mode is gone for the remainder of the encounter.
• Spamming Batarangs. They do nothing to his health and they announce where you are. Use them when he is already down, or to bait him somewhere.
• Reusing the grates. Going back under them after a grate takedown gets the entire area frozen.
• Standing still. Grapple to the balconies to reposition, and lure him by making him track your footprints or by stepping briefly into his line of sight.

How difficulty changes each fight

That jump from 5 to 8 is the whole difficulty curve of this game in one number. On Normal you can win with the five easiest methods and never touch a gadget you find awkward. On Hard, two thirds of the list has to work, and with hints switched off nothing is going to tell you which ones you have left.

Where these takedowns come from

Our combat guide lists every Batsuit, combat and predator move by name but never says which fight needs it. This table is the other direction.

Read down the Freeze column and the shape of the fight becomes obvious. Six of the twelve methods are predator moves that cost you nothing but positioning, and the other six are gadgets. If you are short of methods on Hard, the six free ones are where the missing takedowns are.

What each win opens up

Beating Freeze unlocks Heart of Ice, which drops a large marker on the Industrial District and sends you looking for Nora. She is in Storage Warehouse 5B, behind a destructible wall you reach by making a floating platform with a Freeze Blast, pulling yourself in with the Batclaw on the wall's metal rings, and blowing the wall with Explosive Gel. Our Nora Fries guide has the route and the door password.

Beating Deadshot simply closes Shot in the Dark, though the third crime scene along the way is what unlocks the Forensic Expert achievement.

One correction worth making here, because it costs people a completion run. The Freeze Cluster Grenade does not come from the Freeze boss fight. It comes from Hot and Cold, a missable side mission Harley points you towards in the Steel Mill, and the upgrade sits in the Boiler Room. Miss it and you cannot complete the Predator Challenges, or the Fully Loaded achievement, until New Game Plus.

The full fight guides

Our Mr. Freeze guide walks all twelve takedowns individually with the lure and positioning detail for each, and our Deadshot guide covers the cover-to-cover approach and the vent finish.