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This game is, literal, garbage. Its entire design screams of low quality and it has really bad gameplay. I don't even care that its performance isn't good because that stuff can be easily patched. You can't fix a game that's simply bad by design.
- This co-op-centric caped adventure made my interest Wayne.
- Every IGN Batman Game Review
- Do you play campaigns that have co-op with a friend or do you like to solo them?
- Gotham Knights Screenshots
- Verdict
By Travis Northup
Updated: Oct 29, 2022 3:24 am
Posted: Oct 20, 2022 11:00 am
From everything I’d seen up to this point, Gotham Knights appeared to have all the makings of the ambitious, action-packed smash hit that it was clearly intended to be. I mean, who wouldn’t want a new, co-op-centric take on Rocksteady’s spectacular Batman: Arkham games that’s built for the current console generation? But then, as I played it for 30 hours, it just kept hitting me with bad news: WHAM! Underwhelming combat. POW! A weak, predictable story. BIFF! Puzzling progression design choices. THWACK! Sub-30 frame rates. I’m left wondering how it went so wrong. Some good parts manage to shine through, like the impressive open-world Gotham sandbox, but its problems never let me enjoy the moment-to-moment crime fighting nearly as much as Bat-family fans deserve.
One key difference is that here you get to play as your choice of the four mostly lovable heroes (Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin) as you zip around an open-world Gotham, delivering justice to all manner of superstitious cowards and unraveling a troubling mystery in the iconic city’s murky streets. That mystery revolves around the death of none other than the Batman himself, which serves as a solid kicking-off point for a new generation of crime fighters to take the spotlight. In the wake of the Dark Knight’s demise, Bruce Wayne’s ragtag gang of current and former sidekicks step into the fray to fill his formidable shoes, and serves as a strong premise to what ultimately turns out to be a lackluster story full of foreseeable twists and unsurprising turns.
As various criminal elements rush in to fill the power vacuum left by Batman, the ancient order known as The Court of Owls supposedly becomes the biggest threat facing Gotham, even if they don’t live up to that threat in practice. I quite like The Court as an enemy within the pantheon of Batman rivals, but for a secret society that’s supposed to have pulled the strings of Gotham’s leaders for hundreds of years, it’s pretty amusing that they never really exert that power even as a group of young adults easily foil their plans with a pocketful of gadgets and a couple karate moves. I kept wishing that their far-reaching influence and resources would be wielded in a way that would give me a reason to fear them, but they couldn’t be bothered to do more than send some well-dressed goons after you and shake their fists as you infiltrated their ranks. They just never pose any kind of threat, instead serving as punching bags for you to take out your aggression on the caviar-guzzling, bow tie-wearing, Eyes Wide Shut upper class.
The oddly brief campaign is padded out with busywork.
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But the story’s biggest issue is that it tries way too hard to squeeze an entire rogue’s gallery of potential suspects into its murder-mystery premise, and feels completely disorganized as a result. You spend most of the surprisingly short campaign’s eight story missions jumping from one villainous cabal to another, before arriving at a conclusion I was able to predict practically before the end of the opening credits. It’s devastating to see such an underwhelming plot unfold after the Arkham series included some of my favorite Batman stories of all time, which often left me speechless with their stirring twists and turns. Gotham Knights, by contrast, includes a masked character whose identity is immediately apparent upon first sight and whose inevitable unmasking is laughably anticlimactic. It’s followed up with an ending that’s foreshadowed so frequently and unsubtly that I involuntarily cringed when they actually went through with it.
It doesn’t help that the oddly brief campaign is padded out with busywork, like repeated sections where you have to wander around Gotham interrogating a string of different criminal factions headed by everyone from Harley Quinn to Mr. Freeze to gather clues about the next story development, and side quests to unlock table stakes features like fast travel. (That one has you visiting every part of the map to stand around and scan drones for no discernable reason.) In between all those chores, you’ll also have to contend with the RPG elements that force you to grind and min-max equipment before the next story mission can be tackled. All of these things do little more than drag out a story that’s rarely worth the squeeze, and make the pacing even more of a drag than it already is.
Solo every time
With a friend to the end
A mix of both throughout
It depends on the game
Even if you are just running around Gotham aimlessly or tackling minor crimes, though, exploring the city can at least be a highlight. It may not get a lot right, but WB Games Montréal succeeds at capturing the fantasy of exploring a crime-ridden city as a caped crusader, and I spent hours just grapple-hooking around and exploring the area. Doing so with a friend is also rewarding, especially since there are no limitations for how far you can be from one another; you can fight together or split up to search for clues to unlock the next main mission, or tackle optional quests twice as fast as you’d be able to do on your own. It’s really nice to not be tethered to another player when you join their world, especially if you’re like me and don’t enjoy playing the role of the sidekick who can’t peel off to investigate when I get easily distracted by shiny objects in the distance.
It’s fortunate that each of the four protagonists are fairly likable and well-written too, and there are plenty of amusing quips to help you get through the letdown of a plot. Sure, Red Hood mostly just keeps talking about how he died that one time like the edge lord that he is, and Robin (the Tim Drake version) swings wildly between being deeply depressed by his mentor’s death and making silly jokes, but it’s still impressive that these B-listers and sidekicks manage to step up to the plate as much as they do. (They’ve all had their own stories in comics and TV shows, but few that hold a candle to Batman’s.) That said, glitches do occasionally cause otherwise-touching story moments to instantly transform into comedies, like one cutscene where Jason Todd’s hoodie drawstrings decided to defy gravity and threatened to poke his friends’ eyes out during a tense conversation.
Crafting isn’t much of a help because its options are equally limited to your random drops and come with significant resource costs that you’ll run dry on if you make use of crafting often (a problem for which the only cure is even more grinding of mindless activities). It’s perplexing to me that non-legendary equipment cannot be upgraded or modified, and even so-called “mods” actually just enhance existing equipment capabilities as opposed to letting you swap in new attributes. The incredible inflexibility of these systems mean that, unless you’re a masochist, you’ll mostly just shrug like I did and say, “Well, my loadout sucks, but let’s go do the mission anyway,” and slog through it.
It’s worth noting that there is very little endgame content to warrant building toward. Content runs dry the moment you close the final case file, and you likely won’t ever need to reach the max character level to take on any particular challenge. I’m not sure if Gotham Knights is setting itself up to have a live-service model, a la Marvel’s Avengers (2020), which might justify building out an endgame build to tackle more challenging content, but the RPG landscape would need major overhauls to facilitate that – as of now it, barely squeaks by as a passable system with which to finish the fleeting campaign. Gotham Knights does have a New Game+ option, so you could definitely take your hard-won loadout with you to a tougher version of the campaign… but given how numb my first playthrough left me, I can think of precious few reasons why someone would choose to do so.
Many missions feel like they’re balanced specifically for two crime fighters.
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I’ll say this though: Gotham Knights totally nails gear when it comes to cosmetic customization. It comes with lots of costume options for each hero, and different color schemes available so you can make your outfit your own, including some dope Batman Beyond-themed outfits and other classic costumes pulled from throughout Batman’s colorful history. And if you don’t like the look of whatever armor has the best stats, you can use the transmog system to apply any style you’ve unlocked and ensure you never leave the Batcave looking anything less than suave. There aren’t many things that made me want to return to Gotham Knights after completing the story, but searching for new ways to up my swag game was definitely one of them.
If you can conscript someone into joining you after they’ve read this review, playing with a friend is undoubtedly a better experience – and not just because you’ll have someone to show off your outfit to. For one, combat tends to go by much faster with someone else at your side, and pulling off stunts like team attacks where two characters work together to execute a sweet finisher is one of the better things combat has to offer. Unfortunately, many missions feel like they’re balanced specifically for two crime fighters, leaving anyone hoping to treat this as a solely single-player game in a little bit of a lurch. While fighting alone often made me wonder if maybe I needed to grind more first, when I had a friend join my game I usually thought, “Oh, this is why the encounter felt bad before – they wanted me to bring backup.” One example is a fight against some of Harley Quinn’s goons where she sics two beefy bosses on you – I don’t recommend going into that one without a sidekick.
Gotham Knights is a consistently disappointing return to Batman’s troubled city and a distinct step backwards from the past decade-plus of Batman games. Even if running around Gotham in two-player co-op can be decent fun and each of the four playable crime fighters are well executed in their dialogue and distinctive moves, too many of the fundament...
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20 de oct. de 2022 · Reviews. Gotham Knights buries a great Bat-family under a combat slog. A solid romp that can’t quite live up to its Arkham predecessors. By Cameron Kunzelman Oct 20, 2022, 7:00am EDT. Batman is...
20 de oct. de 2022 · Batman is dead. Four heroes are left to defend Gotham from countless enemies. It's an intriguing start, but despite inheriting the legacy of Rocksteady's acclaimed Arkham game trilogy, Gotham...
20 de oct. de 2022 · Here’s what Gotham Knights reviews are saying: IGN. But then, as I played it for 30 hours, it just kept hitting me with bad news: WHAM! Underwhelming combat. POW! A weak, predictable story....
