Gotham Knights Review
Ali Hasan October 22, 2022
Gotham Knights has fought an uphill battle from the get-go. Not only is this the first Batman game since 2015’s Arkham Knight but it is also the first game not to feature the titular hero as a playable character. As such not only has the game some big shoes to fill but it also faces a lot of pressure in nailing a Batman story without the caped crusader directly involved. Gotham Knights, for all intents and purposes, gets a lot right but fails at some of the fundamentals, and frustratingly so. At its core, it ticks off all the right boxes for open world superhero co-op game complete with an excellent game world and characters but some design choices leave a lot to be desired.
When the Knight Falls… A New Guard Must Rise
Gotham Knights picks up immediately in the aftermath of Bruce’s death following a big blowout with Ra’s al Ghul it is then that the player is promptly introduced to the four main playable characters; Batgirl, Robin, Red Hood, and Night Wing. The game is set several years into Batman’s crime-fighting career and consequently, you can feel the history and relationship between all four of the knights.
Whether it’s the standoffish relationship between Dick and Jason over Dicks guilt following what happened to the former Robin or the more deep and friendly connection between Barbara and Dick, built over years of fighting alongside Batman, it lends a sense of nuance to the team dynamic very early on in the game and one that only develops over the course of the story.
Each character feels distinct not only in their gameplay but also in their personalities, dialogues, and emotions as they come to terms with Bruce’s death. The character-driven nature of this game is what I found to be the most striking feature from the get-go and the absence of Batman quickly becomes this game’s biggest strength. In the past, the Bat family has always been relegated to supporting roles, and to see them shine in their own light and without Batman’s shadow was a real treat.
The Game Does a Great Job of Leveraging Decades Worth of Stories
The story combines elements of mystery and familiarity by leveraging Batman’s excellent rogue’s gallery including Harley Quinn, Penguin, and the Court of Owls who have seldom been explored outside of the comics. It is disappointing however that there aren’t a lot of boss fights featuring these villains. With only four main baddies including the Court of Owls, it just seems like a lot of wasted potential in what could have been very interesting takes on popular Batman foes like the Riddler and Two-Face.
Like the Arkham trilogy, however, this game leverages the deep and decades-long history of the Batman comics to deliver a narrative that’s emotional, rife with mystery, and just plain fun, the court provides an excellent overarching and omnipresent threat that is further accentuated by all the other villains. I don’t want to talk too much about the story because the surprising twists and turns are really something you should experience on your own.
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Gotham Knight’s Combat is Fun, Flashy but Unresponsive at Times
Each Knight has their own unique combat strengths and weaknesses. Robin is more adept at stealth while Red Hood feels more like a tank and Nightwing like an acrobat. Each character also has their own unique melee and ranged weapons. Red Hood wields dual guns firing non-lethal rounds and batgirl uses the more traditional Batarangs coupled with her rotational tonfa. The combat feels unique between characters but similar enough overall that you won’t have trouble jumping from knight to knight.
Combat starts off relatively basic with a ranged attack, light attack, heavy attack and evade. As you level up you unlock more and more abilities and tricks. To me, the combat evolved into being more enjoyable through these unlocks. What was once button mashing and evading quickly turned into timing my dodges to build up my momentum bar, using Batgirl’s grapnel to pull enemies towards myself to quickly take them out, having increased attacks or attaching a concussive grenade to an enemy before hurtling him towards his allies as Red Hood, it quickly started to meld together and became something more akin to the recent Spiderman game.
In saying that the buttons do feel unresponsive at times. While Arkham Knights snappy combat made sure that each button prompt elicited the corresponding action on screen straight away, there were many moments during my time with Gotham Knights where I took damage because the buttons took too long to respond, this was a common issue switching from melee attacks to ranged attacks and can be quite a nuisance in the heat of the battle. This could be due in part to the game being locked to 30FPS on consoles but other games of similar nature have made combat at such a frame rate work.
Additionally, the game places a heavy emphasis on combat abilities that you can use once you’ve filled up your momentum bar. The momentum abilities feel like they’re straight out of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey but for what it’s worth it adds a nice bit of variety to the gameplay and is probably my favorite part of the combat.
Batgirl can summon a drone that repeatedly fires on targets around her while Robin can spin his staff around swiftly for quick crowd control. Night Wing can shoot up a trail of electricity with his batons. There are a total of eight unique momentum abilities per knight and I think this is what makes the combat shine. While the unresponsiveness of the controls can be a letdown the cool and sometimes over-the-top abilities and their spectacles can make up for it.
To me, the place where the combat really worked was during co-op play. Teaming up with friends or randoms is the best way to play Gotham Knights especially because the game tends to throw a dozen or so enemies at you all at once and they tend to be pretty spongy. Gliding or riding across the city with random players on the bat cycle gave me hours and hours of fun and is a good distraction and deviation from the main story.
What I especially liked about co-op was that it allows you to jump into another player’s session at any point in their story even if you aren’t caught up with them. This makes the entire process of co-op super smooth and accessible and means that you don’t constantly have to be in sync with your partner.
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Gotham Knights Nails it’s Take on Gotham City
All of this is set in what is probably my favorite rendition of Gotham city to date. There is a clear contrast between the gothic architecture of the past to the more modern buildings of the present. The city feels layered between the old and new and it works beautifully. Furthermore, Gotham is not as grim and dull as it has been in previous Batman games and movies.
There are pops of neon-colored lights from billboards and signs that get caught in the mist and smoke around buildings that add another dimension of visual splendor. Overall, it’s just a lot more colorful but not overbearingly so. This Gotham City is a visual treat and one that I can spend many hours exploring.
There are plenty of collectibles around the city that will keep you occupied when you’re not beating up criminals. One of them involves you picking up Batman’s scattered Batarangs throughout Gotham city while another collectible has you visiting historic landmarks of Gotham, the latter of these two was definitely my favorite and further added to the historical aspect of the city. they aren’t anything special though and kind of just exist for the sake of existing.
Gotham Knights also features procedurally generated crimes that refresh every time you exit the Belfry (the heroes’ base of operations) there are a few different kinds including a hostage situation, bank robbery, and a scuffle between enemy factions and the GCPD, they’re fun when you’re just starting out the game but they tend to get old and monotonous really fast.
As you level up these events regenerate but with more difficult enemies that inflict elemental damage. They are fun but when you visit the same bank robbery five nights in a row it feels extremely odd. Side content and open-world activities are definitely lacking in Gotham Knights, it would have been nice to see more work put into them because as good as the atmosphere of Gotham city is the activities are definitely lacking. However, the game adds a very interesting detective mode which has you linking together pieces of evidence at crime scenes to determine your next plan of attack, to me this is such a welcome addition to a Batman game, it makes you think and reason just like these characters would and I absolutely love that.
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Crafting and Looting Feel Very Out of Place
Perhaps the most jarring part of Gotham Knights is its emphasis on crafting and looting. Part of me thinks this system is a remnant of the game’s previous ambitions of being an Avenger’s style live-action brawler that was reworked to be a more traditional co-op game. Looting isn’t hard as you automatically pick up materials when you kill enemies but having to craft new weapons every time I leveled up felt very tedious, especially considering that I couldn’t even equip my newly crafted equipment until I was back at the Belfry.
Additionally, the entire crafting and looting system just seems out of place for a game like this. A better solution would have been your equipment scaling with your level while also unlocking mod slots that you could then use for elemental damage and other passive buffs.
Most of the time it felt like the game was having an identity crisis. Does it want to be a looter-brawler with crafting or does it want to be a co-op Batman game? the answer I think is both with the former being a half-baked implementation. In saying that, this system didn’t bother me all too much but considering the amount of time that the developers had on this game I expected a much more streamlined experience.
Something that did bother me though was the game’s transmog system. As someone who likes to have their characters appear a certain way and with games like Assassins Creed having a very well-made system in place, the one in Gotham Knights seems extremely counterintuitive. For every suit you unlock, you can apply a colorway to it and change around the cowl, gloves, boots, and insignia, which adds a ton of customization options and hundreds of different permutations.
The transmog system however has a set colorway and accessory design for each suit and doesn’t let you change it according to the way you want, when you have such a robust customization system present in the game it only makes sense that you have an equally as robust transmog system to go with it, I feel like WB Games Montreal really dropped the ball here and I hope there’s a patch in the future that addresses this.
Verdict
Gotham Knights manages to turn in an excellent narrative in a beautifully realized Gotham City, accentuated by well-rounded characters but is often marred down by its out-of-place crafting system, unreliable combat, and a lack of meaningful side content. Co-op is fun but it doesn’t live up to the grandeur of recent superhero games however it’s still a solid Bat family game that is sure to be a hit amongst DC and Batman fans.
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