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Gotham Knights is a game that fans of the phenomenal Batman Arkham series have been waiting for since the initial announcement of the title back in 2020. I remember being so excited to finally get another chapter in the Arkhamverse saga, which was, unfortunately, confirmed not to continue with Gotham Knights.
However, the premise of the new game sounded like a direct follow-up to the controversial yet grand finale of the Batman Arkham Trilogy, Batman: Arkham Knight. It hurt me a bit to know that Gotham Knights is not connected to the Arkham games but is a standalone entity.
I have been patiently awaiting the game's release and was optimistic about it, given the development was helmed by WB Games Montreal, who previously created the highly underrated Batman Arkham Origins.
However, Gotham Knight did not turn out to be the game I was expecting. It was a shallow and, often, borderline boring and tedious experience, marred by a plethora of technical issues, which completely soured the rather intriguing narrative of the game for me.
While the game is breathtakingly beautiful in its own right, its gameplay and mission design never grabbed my attention as the Arkham ones from games did.
Gotham Knights: An intriguing and well-written narrative that kept me hooked on the game
The premise of Gotham Knights is fascinating, as the game takes place right on the cusp of Gotham's fall, after the apparent demise of Batman, aka Bruce Wayne. Players take on the roles of one of the four iconic members of the Bat Family: Robin (Tim Drake), Nightwing (Dick Grayson), Batgirl (Barbara Gordon), and Red Hood (Jason Todd), as they go up against the illusive Court of Owls, a secret society comprised of some of the wealthiest families of Gotham City.
While the story mainly centers around the mystery of Batman's death and the Bat Family working together to find out the real reason behind the Caped Crusader's demise, it also features many well-known villains from Gotham City: Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, and Harley Quinn.
The game starts much like the Batman Arkham games, where players are immediately thrown into the swing of things after something tragic happens. I was shocked and impressed by the cinematography and the tone of the starting few hours of the game. It was fun, filled with some breathtaking action set-pieces and plot revelations that kept me glued to the screen. It very much felt like I was playing one of the Arkhamverse games.
While the story starts at a breakneck pace, it does slow down significantly once players get full access to the open world, from where they are free to choose which investigations and story threads they want to pursue. I also liked how every plot thread that felt disjointed initially came together conclusively by the end of the game, delivering a rather satisfying finale.
I was genuinely enamored by the freedom Gotham Knights gave when it came to the story and progression, and I was not let down by the game's plot. While the middle section of the game's narrative felt a little weak and padded, I felt more than satisfied with the story's conclusion, which featured some really exciting twists, revelations, and heartfelt moments that I definitely would not want to spoil for you.
I have one gripe with the game's narrative, though, and that is the dialog between the heroes, especially the ones between Red Hood and Nightwing. The banter between the characters feels a bit forced and out of place more often than not, which is a shame considering the otherwise excellent writing of the game's narrative.
Breathtakingly beautiful graphics and a stunning presentation make for great first impressions
Without a shadow of a doubt, Gotham Knights is one of the most visually stunning open-world games out there, and that's not taking into consideration the ray-tracing features the game comes with. The draw distance, in particular, is really impressive, given the game features the biggest rendition of Gotham City in a video game.
Everything, from the textures on the heroes' suits to the streets of Gotham, is crafted with utmost care and precision. I was very impressed with how the game displayed such a staggering amount of detail without requiring any loading screen past the ones that happened when moving from the Belfry Tower to the open world or starting up the game for the first time.
The game is a stunning exhibition of WB Games Montreal's craftsmanship in creating a breathtakingly beautiful open world that can easily work as a benchmarking tool for players to show off their shiny new graphics card. However, all this graphical splendor comes at a massive cost to performance and general stability, which I'll discuss in the review's shortcomings section.
Apart from the visuals, I also liked how minimalistic the UI felt compared to most AAA open-world games. Even the crafting and skills menu system felt intuitive, starkly contrasting to titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
Gotham Knights is also jam-packed with some iconic suits from the Batman comics and a few original ones for every playable hero in the game. The customization system in Gotham Knights is not just cosmetic but also has tangible effects in gameplay, with each suit or armor set having its own set of perks that greatly impact the game's combat.
Another big positive I found with the game was the soundtrack, which, while not as memorable as Batman Arkham City's ambient score or even Arkham Knight's soundtrack, was pretty good. The soundtrack of Gotham Knights felt like the perfect fit for a game about heroes emerging from the shadows and rising as the new protectors of Gotham City.
Mediocre gameplay loop and repetitive mission design of Gotham Knights bog down the game's stellar narrative
The marketing for Gotham Knights made it pretty clear that the new game's combat and general moment-to-moment gameplay will be very different from that of the Arkhamverse titles. However, it did not prepare me for the sheer mediocrity I experienced with Gotham Knights' combat system, which felt woefully lacking and tedious compared to any modern action-adventure title.
The combat loop revolves around attacking and dodging, with no option for parrying or counterattacking. There is also the option for ranged attacks and a special attack with a rather lengthy cooldown.
On paper, the combat system feels pretty robust, and during the first few encounters, it feels crunchy to time the dodges and landing hits without taking any damage. However, the combat system barely evolves past the basic attacking and dodging loop, and that's the same for all four heroes, who, despite having their own distinct playstyle, weapons, and skills, never feel particularly unique.
The combat system was also held back by the lack of a proper lock-on system, which made it difficult for me to target specific enemies in a group. The targeting system was never an issue in the Arkham games, where the combat was not animation-driven but was based on combos and counters.
However, in Gotham Knights, every action has a lengthy animation, whether attacking, dodging, or using special abilities and gadgets. The special abilities of each hero are the highlight, like Robin leaving a holographic clone that deals elemental damage to enemies when hit or Red Hood bombarding enemies with a flurry of charged bullets capable of dispatching a group of enemies in an instant.
However, these abilities lose their novelty after the first few hours of playing the game. While I understand that combat in action games cannot be fresh for the entire duration of 15-20 hours of playtime, it still needs to be either challenging or fun to engage with, and Gotham Knights' combat system is neither.
Combat in the game is also very slow and feels unresponsive at times on mouse and keyboard, it feels a bit better using a controller, but that should not be the case for a AAA title released on PC.
Most of my playtime was with Red Hood and Batgirl, as these two characters are my personal favorites from the Batman Arkham games. I did try out Robin and Nightwing for a few missions, but I never felt like I was playing a completely new character since the core combat loop remained the same.
The combat did improve exponentially by the end of the game, after having unlocked most of the skills for the heroes, giving me enough incentive to try out different characters and experiment with different skills. Still, the time it takes to get to that level is more than enough for a player to lose interest in the game.
One thing I did appreciate about Gotham Knights was the leveling system not being the game's main focus; instead, the game relies mostly on skill and armor perks to dictate player progression. This means that as long as players upgrade their favorite armor, weapons, and skills, they will not have many issues tackling the hordes of enemies the game throws at them.
I appreciate when games with mild RPG elements do not gatekeep content in the game behind some arbitrary level restrictions. That's the only positive I found in the gameplay of Gotham Knights. I also liked the late-game skills and perks, which gave me the incentive to try out different characters to keep the combat fresh, but that took a lot of time before it felt somewhat enjoyable.
Another big issue with Gotham Knights was its mission design, which at first felt like a breath of fresh air, given how much freedom the game gave over to the main story missions and progression. However, I quickly realized that most missions in the game are just the same few activities repeating ad nauseam.
The repetitive loop of initiating an investigation, which in itself is a chore, is followed by a stealth or combat encounter. I could've overlooked the sloppy combat if the stealth worked as it did in the Arkham games, but it never did. The AI in Gotham Knights is not designed with stealth in mind, which makes the stealth system in the game completely unusable, for the most part.
Although the missions do get substantially more exciting in the second half of the game, it is more due to the strong narrative of Gotham Knights instead of its gameplay systems. The intriguing story and well-written characters of Gotham Knights are what carried me through boring and repetitive missions.
The beautiful but shallow open world
Gotham Knights is marketed as a single-player open-world action RPG featuring a densely packed, richly detailed, and biggest map of Gotham City ever created for a video game. The first time I stepped foot into the streets of Gotham City in the game, I was mesmerized by the open world's sheer scale and graphical fidelity. Still, it was immediately obvious to me that the open world is as shallow as any of the Arkham games.
Roaming through the streets of Gotham on the Batcycle is fun, although handling takes a fair bit of time to get used to. Once I started getting the hang of the bike's controls, I never felt the need to use the grappling hook or the borderline supernatural traversal abilities of each playable character.
Although the open world is a graphical showcase, with all the effects work, lighting, reflections, and genuinely impressive draw distance, it is nothing more than a shallow husk that players will need to contend with while going from one mission to another in Gotham Knights.
The technical shortcomings
Gotham Knights is not an easy game to run on PC, especially for players with lower-end CPUs. The game is built on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, with support for modern visual techniques such as ray-tracing, advanced global illumination, and upscaling solutions like AMD FSR 2.0, Nvidia DLSS, and even Intel's XeSS.
The system I used to play the game had an Intel Core i5 8700K CPU paired with Nvidia GTX 1660 super and 16 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, with the game being installed on my NVMe drive. While not top-of-the-line specs, the system can run the most modern titles at 1080p and 60fps, with some graphical adjustments.
However, I struggled with Gotham Knights, having to tweak the game's config file to get a playable experience. Suffice to say, the game is not well optimized on PC, which is evident by the lack of proper memory management, leading to frequent framerate drops into the low teens and a multitude of crashes.
Crashes are easily the most infuriating aspect of Gotham Knights, which happens regularly while exploring the open world. The game crashed a few times while I was using the in-game photo mode, which is very strange and reflects a lack of proper optimization for the game's PC port.
While I can stomach a few frame dips below the targeted 60fps, crashes take me out of the immersion, and when they happen at a frequency of 5 to 6 times per session, it makes the game borderline unplayable.
Apart from the crashes and frequent framerate drops, the game is fairly bug-free, with only a few visual glitches in the open world, such as pedestrian NPCs T-posing or disappearing and enemy AI freezing in place for a few seconds before detecting my character.
Conclusion
Gotham Knights is not the follow-up most fans were expecting it to be. However, even when judged as a standalone entity, separate from Rocksteady's Arkham trilogy or WB Montreal's own Batman Arkham Origins, the game falls short in almost every aspect, from quests to open-world exploration and even combat, which makes the whole experience feel more like a chore to play.
The game is a graphical showpiece and is something players can definitely use to show off their brand-new graphics card or console. However, that alone cannot justify the lack of fun gameplay systems and enjoyable enough combat. WB Games Montreal brought some intriguing ideas to the table with the game's premise, light RPG elements, and seamless co-op but failed to properly capitalize on them.
While the story was superb, knowing that every cut-scene would be followed up by a mediocre and downright boring gameplay loop never allowed me to get fully invested in the game. Add to that the multitude of technical issues I faced with Gotham Knights soured the whole experience for me.
Gotham Knights
Reviewed On: Windows PC (Review Code provided by Warner Bros. Games)
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC
Developer(s): Warner Bros. Games Montreal
Publisher(s): Warner Bros. Games
Release Date: October 21, 2022
