Gotham Knights: The Final Preview

ign.com:

Over the course of our month long IGN First coverage, we saw a lot about the world and lore of Gotham Knights – the crafting and gear mechanics, the suits and customization options – but there’s been one big green riddler-esque question mark surrounding the whole game up to this point: How does it play? Well, I played about three hours of it at a recent hands-on event, and the answer is… complicated. What’s for certain, at least, is that Gotham Knights is a wildly ambitious effort that feels appropriately massive and dense, to the point where even a heavily guided three-hour demo felt like just a scratch on the surface.

My demo was broken into four chunks: I played the tutorial that involved following a lead on Batman’s last case, then jumped into a new save to play the first chapter of Harley Quinn’s multi-part villain arc, then continued with several open-world challenges related to Harley’s story, and to put a cap on the event, I jumped to a late-game save that let me and the Internet’s own Destin Legarie face off against Harley in the finale of her arc.

And that leads to one of the main reasons why my takeaways from this event are complicated: Gotham Knights is a game that is centered around building up your character, setting and understanding your own skills and gear, and developing your own playstyle – something that I just didn’t get to do, since I was jumping around to different save files and trying out the different characters. Without that, the combat felt like it was missing a key ingredient.

On a very basic level, Gotham Knights’ combat is built on the foundation of the Batman: Arkham games. But once you get past the shallow waters, things go in very different directions. Here’s where things will be