Gotham Knights
Developer: Warner Bros Games Montreal
Publisher: WB Games
Platforms: Xbox Series X , PlayStation 5, PC (Reviewed)
Release Date:
Price: 109.95 AUD – Available Here $59.99 USD – Available Here
Overview
What would be the most ungrateful job in the comics universe? Being a cop in Gotham City. Just think about it. A city is ridden with crime, and supervillains and heroes are duking it out on the streets on an almost daily basis. They leave millions in property damage, and half of your precinct is corrupt (maybe even you included). Superheroes and vigilantes get all the praise and at the end of the day, you don’t even feel like you made a difference. Can you imagine what a depressing game that would be, playing as a Gotham City cop? Thank heavens that I have a game in my hands that offers the complete opposite of that.
Story
To quote a certain someone from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: “The Bat is dead. Bury it”. And that’s what happened here. It is how the game opens. Batman dies following a fierce battle with Ra’s al Ghul and leaves a final message for the members of the Bat-family. I mean, it’s Batman. He has a contingency plan for everything. Those members are Batgirl (aka Barbara Gordon), Robin, Nightwing, and Red Hood. It is up to them to pick up where Batman left and take over as protectors of Gotham. You know what they say, four heads are better than one (jk, nobody actually says that).
Gameplay
I’d imagine a good number of you have played most of the Arkham games so you would know what to expect. And you’d be wrong. For one, this game isn’t even set in Arkhamverse, and gameplay wise it is drastically different from all of the Arkham games. The first hint that this game isn’t even set in Arkhamverse is that you get to play as Batgirl without being wheelchair-bound. While the story of Gotham Knights is an accidental continuation of how Batman Arkham Knight ends, everything else is its own thing.
In any case, after a few opening cutscenes, you get a choice of who you can play in Gotham Knights. There’s Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin, and Red Hood. All of them have unique skills and some are better suited for stealth and guerilla tactics like Batgirl, some for crowd control like Robin and Nightwing, and Red Hood is an expert at dealing a lot of damage to single targets. Belfry tower is your base of operations and a place of planning before every patrol night in Gotham City. Aside from story missions, you’ll have optional side stuff, challenges, random encounters, and a bunch of well-hidden collectibles. There are also loot-based drops such as equipment mods and crafting materials so let’s talk more about that.
Equipment is divided into three things; suit, melee weapon, and range weapon. since I reviewed the deluxe edition of the game, I got some exclusive skins for suits and crafting materials as a nice starting boost. You can insert mods (that you get from enemy drops) in your equipment to raise equipment stats past its limit and all of the crafted suits can be customized visually to your liking or you can use the transmog option anytime on your equipment for some iconic comic book visuals.
One thing that I have to emphasize is that progress in the game and leveling up are properly tuned. Despite having a loot-based system and exp mechanic, I never got to the point where I had to grind and grind because I was under-leveled or anything like that. Crafting is also necessary since you never get equipment from defeating enemies, only occasionally after finishing some missions and optional content. So while crafting is kind of mandatory for proper progress, you’re never suffering a lack of materials (which would lead to a resource grind).
Visuals
On the surface, Gotham Knights could be summed up as “nothing breathtaking, but it does the job”. However, every once in a while the game might catch you by surprise with some of the visual gimmicks such as random lightning flashes as you glide around Gotham City and some areas of it do stand out with its saturated neon lighting. Player characters (all four of them) are exceptionally modeled with all of the variations of costumes but the same couldn’t be said for most of the enemies. While there is a decent number of enemy factions in the game all of the enemies come from 3-4 of the same molds, just different skins. A couple of melee fighters, one or two enemies wielding a gun, and a miniboss here and there, their visuals only different depending if they’re henchmen working for Harley Quinn or Mr. Freeze and such.
Audio
A whole lot of steps forward, one step back. Let’s talk about the forward ones because they sure are impressive. Currently, I’m on my second playthrough of the game, the first one was with Nightwing and now I’m cleaning up Gotham City as Batgirl. One impressive thing I noticed is that all of those four characters have unique dialogues in missions and unique interactions (depending on who you play as at the moment). Remember that you can switch your playing character at any point (you’ll just need to level up their skills accordingly and allocate skill points). But yeah, all of them feel unique. While Red Hood is dark and mostly grumpy, Batgirl is the complete opposite and Nightwing often acts as a voice of reason within the group. But they all have mutual understanding and respect for each other despite their differences and you can feel that in their interactions and by extension – voice acting.
As for the step back, while my complaint can be seen as minor it still bugs me. Despite being dead, Batman often makes appearances through some cutscenes, training missions, and flashbacks. While this new voice actor does his job well, the voice is really hard to get used to. I know he’s not Kevin Conroy but the voice is just terribly distracting and emotionless at times.
Overall
I respect Gotham Knights for trying to do its own thing and not just seem like they’re riding on the coattails of Arkham games. The combat in general is not as fluid as I expected but it does the job. As long as you follow the story and don’t stray from it too far, you will be fine. But if you do (especially when you grapple with some side content) you might notice some design cracks here and there. Controls also feel kinda iffy at times when cornering with a bike and gliding around. There is still a lot of room for improvement here and I hope there are some lessons here that could be learned and errors to be corrected for a potential sequel.
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