^ Stay tuned for our large review chat ad featuring tons of cute footage from every version of the game.
Aside from the annoying but probably fixable and hardly deal-breaker performance issues, Gotham Knights‘ The biggest sin is that it doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. That’s pretty surprising for a game that boldly kills Batman in the first two minutes.
It’s not all bad: there are some good ideas scattered around. Taking the clock tower between missions keeps the game’s overall pacing nice and allows you to spend time with the characters in some moving, backstory-filled cutscenes (but note that these clips are aimed at Arrowverse fans, a group of people if possible would infuse mediocre stuff like heroin). The survey game also has some neat touches, such as micro-examinations of people’s workspaces and personal skills.
It also tells a useful story, set in the new Bat universe, separate from the Arkham universe, and piecing together the layout of the land (and your inherent familiarity with DC characters as being in the 21st century) through the exhibition drops is a slap in the face. Pleasant aspects of people.
But an open-word superhero game should be something that lives and dies, traverses and fights, with just a little spool. This is canned video game soup. Familiar, if nothing else, but impossible to get excited about. No one spends an entire day looking forward to spending some time on it, just like no one looks forward to opening a can of Heinz Minestrone. And, to repeat: It’s a shocking state of affairs for a game where the central theme is that Batman is dead and his kids are grappling with his legacy.
It’s quite possible, and I doubt very likely, that a performance patch will be implemented at some point to put this crap about it being next-gen to bed so that it’s impossible to run without a 30fps cap (it won’t do remotely anything) which was impossible in the age of PS4). So, if that’s the main issue, I wouldn’t be too concerned about Gotham Knights: optimizations that can always come in post-release patches. But no amount of tinkering can fix the aggressive blandness at its core..
Gotham Knights Available tomorrow on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
