What each Gotham Knights character is best at
Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, or Robin? Decisions, decisions…
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It’s not long now until the Gotham Knights release time. The Steam page for the latest DC superhero game now has one of those fancy countdown timers until it unlocks. You, and perhaps a friend, will soon be able to play as one of four heroes who inherit the responsibility to protect the citizens from criminal gangs and supervillains hellbent on taking over Gotham City.
Remember that while the Gotham Knights release time draws near, you can get ahead by pre-loading the game right now if you have pre-ordered it. It’s a reasonably chunky game at 41.3GB, so depending on your connection, it may take some time to download. If you’re still trying to decide if the open world game is for you, you may wish to read our Gotham Knights review, and if you were hoping to play it with friends, you definitely need to check out our Gotham Knights crossplay guide for more information.
RELATED LINKS: The best superhero games on PC, The best RPGs on PC, What if Batman: Arkham Knight 2 had happened?
^Stay tuned after the ads for our big review chat, featuring loads of lovely footage from every version of the game.
Aside from its performance issues, which are annoying but potentially fixable and hardly a dealbreaker, Gotham Knights’ biggest sin is that it just doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. And for a game which boldly kills the Batman in the first two minutes, that’s pretty astonishing.
It’s not all bad: there are some nice ideas dotted around. Occupying The Belfry between missions gives the game a nice overall pace, allowing you to spend time with the characters in some touching, backstory filling cutscenes (though, note of caution, these bits are laser-targeted at Arrowverse fans, a group of people who would inject mediocrity like heroin were it possible). The investigation gameplay also has a few neat touches, like the micro-examination of people’s workspaces and personal tech.
I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the Gotham Knights review as an avid Batman Arkham series fan, but Warner Bros Montreal endlessly throws gameplay mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, making it feel like the open-world RPG version of Frankenstein’s Monster. Rather than distilling what makes Rocksteady’s Arkham series so popular, it believes that bigger is better. The result is a bloated game, but one in which a colourful cast of characters tell an engaging story that’s worthy of its predecessors.
RELATED LINKS: The best superhero games on PC, The best RPGs on PC, What if Batman: Arkham Knight 2 had happened?
I watched a badminton match where one player was so dominant, his opponent looked like he’d largely given up. The commentator said, “Yep, the belief has all but vanished”, as it panned over a guy who simply wanted to be anywhere but that court. At the time, I’d already sunk some hours into Gotham Knights and taken a quick break from the action to keep tabs on a tournament and collect my thoughts. But as I turned away from the telly to dive back in for another session, I couldn’t help but think that if the same commentator had been in the room with me too, they would’ve repeated themselves. I’d simply had enough.
Gotham Knights is finally here, the latest in a nearly two-decades old legacy of third-person action titles that has allowed us to jump into Batman’s spandex attire to solve mysteries, beat up thugs, and face off against a legendary collection of dastardly villains. Now, however, Batman is dead. Gotham Knights instead puts us in control of four bat proteges as they try their best to fit all eight of their feet into Batman’s comically large shoes.
The background for this attempt? A third-person action game where you, as one of the team, head out into Gotham City to fight crime in typical Batman style. With a cast of characters to assist you and Alfred Pennyworth to provide some much-needed advice, you leap from building to building fighting the good fight. In doing so, you level up, upgrade your gear, and spend ability points on a variety of skill trees. It is 2022, after all.
To spare you the customary tedious backstory, Gotham Knights is a decent adventure filled with mystery, revelations, and equal parts sneaking around and breaking noses. Bar a near narrative swerve into a devastating car crash in the later hours of the game, the story of moving on from Batman and Bruce Wayne while figuring out what happened to the playboy is told with the appropriate levels of mourning and drama you would expect. The idea that Batman was Batman and none of the remaining heroes will ever be the caped crusader is slowly but surely established as they each resolve their own issues and come together to take up the torch.
Batman is dead. With so few words, Gotham Knights is instantly intriguing. What does Gotham look like without its Dark Knight perched over the rotten city? What do his nemeses–many of whom exist in some way because Batman did–do without him? Most importantly, what impact does his death have on Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing, and Red Hood, the so-called Bat-family? Their leader’s sudden demise leaves a massive hole in the heart of Gotham, and Gotham Knights is the story of sidekicks stepping out from his shadow. Although the new guard fares well from a narrative standpoint, the gameplay systems built to serve their 30-hour campaign to reclaim Gotham let the team down.
This isn’t an Arkham game, though Gotham Knights does use the beloved series as a jumping-off point. In a totally open-world version of Gotham City, the Bat-family will still spend much of their time swooping down on enemies from gargoyles overhead and chain attacks with stylish combat moves as they dispatch packs of gangsters. They’ll still crawl through vents to get the drop on baddies who are feeling empowered by Batman’s sudden departure. The open world is also structurally familiar in the way it carries the player through the game. It is full of icons ranging from main story beats to one-off time trials and challenges, so at first glance this version of Gotham doesn’t seem all that different from other versions of it, or other open-world games for that matter.
Though it looks the part, with its stark class divide, constant crime sprees, and neo-noirish intentions, patrolling the urban sprawl is sadly a chore. Because Gotham Knights trades the tried-and-true action-adventure roots of recent Batman games for a loot-focused brawler, the cadence of action foregoes compelling storylines that complement the main campaign for rote and repetitive street brawls that reward you with crafting resources. The game starts really strong, with several authored story missions that feel nearly as big and bold as you’d expect, given the last 15 years of Gotham-set games. After that intro, however, the game settles into unremarkable and unfilling gameplay loops driven by awkward games-as-a-service design principles.