Gotham Knights Review
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.
Since Gotham Knights is Batman-adjacent, we need to cover its origin story. Like Bruce Wayne it was born to a well-respected and rich family, in this case the four third-person action games in the Arkham series. That’s not to say that this is a sequel to those games – WB Games Montreal decided to splinter off into a separate version of DC comics canon – and in a lot of places it goes out of its way to chart its own vigilante-based course. But when you’re stealthily grappling from ledge to ledge, crawling through ventilation shafts, and beating up groups of criminals in a rhythmic combat system, it’s impossible not to compare it to the vastly superior Arkham games.
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
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