Gotham Knights It’s finally here, the latest legacy of nearly two years of third-person action games that allow us to don Batman’s spandex costume to solve mysteries, beat up thugs, and face off against a slew of legendary scumbag villains. However, now Batman is dead. Gotham Knights instead let us take control of the four Bat disciples as they went to great lengths to fit all eight of their feet into Batman’s ridiculously large shoes.
What was the background of this attempt? A third-person action game where you, as part of a team, travel to Gotham City to fight crime in quintessential Batman style. With a bunch of characters helping you and Alfred Pennyworth offering some much-needed advice, you jump from building to building and fight a good fight. In doing so, you can level up, upgrade your gear, and spend ability points on various skill trees. After all, it’s 2022.
To spare you the habitually tedious backstory, Gotham Knights is a decent adventure full of mystery, revelation, and its equal parts sneaking and breaking noses. In the final hours of the game, aside from a near-narrative twist to a devastating car accident, move on from Batman and Bruce Wayne to the story while figuring out what’s going on with Playboy, to the appropriate degree you’d expect of mourning and drama to tell. The idea that Batman is Batman and that none of the remaining heroes will be caped crusaders slowly but surely establishes as they each solve their own problems and come together to take up the torch.
Major beats in the game’s narrative blend with the interactions between the four characters, whether in individual story arc animations or email exchanges between playable actors and various recipients. In my experience, this is a mixed bag. The personal journeys between Gunslinging Red Hood and relative newbie Robin are obviously very different, and you’ll care about different amounts depending on your tastes and preferences.
As for those long chains about who stole Nightwing’s pizza or saw the gang arrange a movie night…they’re silly, but they do help humanize the characters. For my money, Red Hood is a grumpy big guy who runs around hitting things with his totally non-lethal pistol and shooting them, which is true for my narrative and gameplay, but goofy Nightwing, Stealthy Robin, and Techno Batgirl all bring their own unique asset sheets.
It’s a smart move, isn’t it? Have each character represent a major aspect of Batman in previous games, brought together after his death. On the positive side, it allows players to really dive into the parts of the game they love, and has a full skill tree option that further enhances that experience. Do you like Arkham Asylum-style stealth – take out enemies one by one without starting a fight? Then Robin seems to be tailor-made for you.
However, it does have negative effects. Every character can do it well, but no one can do it like Batman. I understand the narrative reasoning for this. I would. However, it’s hard to get away from gameplay-based frustration because you have to go back to your base to manually switch to a character that can punch as many punches as possible or circle enemies like you do in Batman Like that: Arkham Knight about ten years ago. Or damn, even Arkham Asylum, released in 2009.
This problem is likely to be solved in the ideal setting of this game, online with other friends, each of whom can take on the role of a single Dark Knight in previous Batman titles. However, as a solo player, you can really feel the lack of available tools from time to time. A quick toggle option that lets you change your character at will when you’re not fighting might fix that. The skill points you earn as you level up, and the gear you craft or find, will all be shared among your four heroes, so you won’t isolate yourself from the loot you earn.
Did you know Gotham Knights only has two players co-op right now? A puzzling limitation in the game centers on individual strengths and collaboration between said characters. This means that even in an ideal world where you have a friend who can play the game by your side, you’ll still run into situations where the perfect solution is missing. Batman could have solved this problem.
While I’m a bit negative, can I talk about the bat cycle? Bat bike? Bat MX. Gotham is a dark and eerie city, and of course you’ll be forced to navigate its famous murder streets and gloomy bridges. You have the grappling hook, but not the gliding skills of Batman, so if you want to get anywhere fast, you’ll have to resort to riding the Bat Bike.
Except you don’t go fast, you stumble along the rain and blood-stained road, while the super speed line wraps around the edge of the screen like a kebab-van drunk, crowding the corners of your vision and rippling violently so that you feel like you are driving at a rhythm. The moment I unlocked the fast travel point, I damn near gave up on this bike and only used it to drive a cop a rubber bullet into someone’s face.
It’s ultimately a sad thing to sit down and think about Gotham Knights in detail, because for every great thing the team behind the game has done, you can refute it with a black mark; the taint of lessening its impact on reflections. Gotham Knights definitely showcases certain villains with optional sub-bosses. I won’t spoil who they are, but suffice to say that the third act ends perfectly with an extremely challenging final confrontation, ripped straight from the cartoons I grew up with. But the boss is too long, consisting of three stages, dragging an otherwise exciting brawl into a little bitterness.
I could write about how I thought some enemy knockdowns were violent and explosive, Robin suffocated some enemies or the red hood bombed them straight to the wall, giving off a cathartic force that made you feel like a real of an army of heroes. But the game runs at 30FPS on PS5 with no performance mode. I know many people out there won’t care, but in my hands it sucks the soul from the gnashing of teeth. It’s just not responsive enough, and the attack delays I’ve collected are designed to create an illegal sense of weight behind your attacks, but often feel like you’re fighting in turbulent water. It would be nice if you fought killer crocodiles, but you are not.
Sadly, the last few hours were a real quality roller coaster. No spoilers of course, but the game gives you a series of twists and revelations that sometimes work well and other times leave me scratching my head and bewildered by the author’s mind. This bland ending is reflected in the gameplay experience, which I can only summarize as a last ordinary journey around Gotham, the painful challenges of countless battles that feel more like a hype speed bump than a real challenge, thank goodness, The final boss fight is a success, just make it all worth it with the skin of the game fangs.
When the credits came, I was exploring the world, and I felt as if I was walking, struggling, and fighting, reminiscing about what it was like to have a good Batman game. It hits some very high highs every now and then, as if you were recalling the best moments of sparkling clarity. The rest—the minutes and hours that tie the main story moments to the battle climax—were lackluster. Aside from the filling time, their purpose is vague, and frankly, didn’t disappoint me at all.
Look, there are hundreds of other games if you want to jump around and hit people. If you’re really into DC action games to take a modern and admittedly brave step away from the Big Black Bat, then Gotham Knights will suffice. It’s just that in the shadow of the former Batman title, and in the shadow of Batman himself, it’s not that impressive. It’s disappointing.
