Gotham Knights: basic Batfamily action

polygon.com:

Batman is dead, and it takes four people to do his job. That’s the central conceit of Gotham Knights, the new third-person action game from WB Games Montreal. In the opening cinematic, which drags on for what feels like an eternity, long-time villain Ra’s al Ghul uses some magic, a sword, and his general annoying demeanor to essentially badger Batman into a heroic, yet sacrificial death. To keep the heroics of Gotham going, Batman’s four protégés – Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin – pick up where he left off in combatting, and investigating, the criminal underworld of Gotham.

Notably, Gotham Knights is not a follow-up to 2015’s Arkham Knight. While there are many shared characters between the games, this is fundamentally a different story in a slightly parallel universe. I have to say that directly here, if only because it could be quite confusing. That game ended with a dead Batman and a Gotham city in need of a new generation of saviors – that’s not this dead Batman, and these saviors are not the ones that city needed.

This game does share a substantial amount of game design substrate with that franchise, however. This is an action game based on one-vs-many combat encounters. There are heavy and light attacks that get better the more you commit to rhythmically punching them out, and you charge a meter that allows you to unleash special Momentum attacks that can instantly KO an enemy or stun a group. If you have played an Arkham game, and you pick up Gotham Knights, you will not feel alienated; if you’ve never played one of these before, you’re probably going to pick it up fairly quickly, anyway.

What sets Gotham Knights apart from those previous outings in the Bativerse is the ensemble setup. Instead of playing