Review: Gotham Knights steps out of Batman’s shadow for DC’s best gaming narrative

videogameschronicle.com:

Gotham Knights is a game about living up to the legacy of a Bat shaped icon in a world where everyone assumes that nothing you can do will ever match the standard left behind. A team of characters thought of as all also-ran sidekicks, desperate to make their mark on the world, while also coming to terms with the fact that no matter how much they excel, they’ll always be compared to the Batman.

So you can imagine why this project would appeal to a studio like WB Games Montreal. The Canadian studio responsible for the often-forgotten, but highly underrated Batman: Arkham Origins has stepped out of the shadow of Rocksteady with a game that delivers plenty of comic book fun and one of the finest DC comics stories in a game.

Batman is dead. In spectacular fashion, the caded crusader bows out at the start of the game in an incredible action sequence, leaving the extended Bat-family to be called in to pick up the pieces. The game starts with the atmosphere of an estranged family forced to reconnect for a funeral, but instead of the awkward conversations about settling a will, Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl and Red Hood have a city to protect, a city that’s becoming keenly aware that the days of Batman are over.

Gotham Knights is an open-world action game where you can play as any of the four main characters at any point in the game. While initially, we wondered if this would weaken the story, being that it would have to be written from the perspective of any of the four interacting with the cast of villains, it’s far from it. In fact, we were constantly impressed with how dialogue scenes would naturally be altered to specifically reference that character.

Speaking of those characters, they’re the stars of the show. The interplay between