With the recent rise in quality standards surrounding AAA superhero games, Gotham Knights stood out as one of the more promising pursuits to further explore the world of DC Comics within the games medium. Developed by WB Games Montréal and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Gotham Knights set high expectations with its initial announcement and gave players high hopes for a new game in Gotham City. WB Games Montréal had their work cut out for them and it’s apparent a lot of love and passion was poured into Gotham knights.
Story
Let's just rip the bandaid off. Batman is dead! Upon starting the game we get thrown into a really well-done cutscene of Batman's final fight with Ras Al Ghul. This sets up the narrative really well and gives players the right amount of motivation to start caring about the Bat Family cast that we are introduced to. Riding the heels of Batman's death, the Bat Family including Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin seek to understand and complete Batman’s final ongoing case along with protecting Gotham as a whole. This naturally leads to conflicts and run-ins with iconic Batman villains with the likes of The Penguin, Harley Quinn, and Clayface showing up to name just a few, leading into the big narrative focus, The Court of Owls.
Overall the story felt quite lacking in terms of substance, there was nothing I could really grasp that was truly interesting. This only began to change when the Court of Owls started to get more delved into but even then it quickly loses its strengths as a high stake villain organization. The main issue here is that we barely get to see anything of Batman and while this isn’t a Batman-focused game or story, knowing who he was as a mentor and his style of crime fighting in this telling is a major part of the characters we get to play. For a story that’s not about Batman, we are constantly reminded how much the Bat Family doesn’t hold up to his legacy and while that has been used here as an interesting plot point, it ultimately falls a bit short. I would have much preferred to see more of Batman through flashbacks with each individual member of the Bat Family showing how their relationships were different and how that reflects their current attempts at living up to the legacy and expectations Batman left behind.
The chemistry between the Bat-Family members is something the story does very well. They all are great renditions of these iconic and beloved characters, and all react exactly how you would expect. A lot of the time stories can get a cast with this much personality confused and written strangely but it all works here, and you can’t ask for much more than for beloved characters to be represented accurately. Similarly, most of the villains are quite well done as well, The Penguin is written and voice acted perfectly whereas Harley Quinn is quite hit or miss. Overall the quality of character dialogue and interaction is really well crafted and when the game is very conversation/story heavy it’s always a huge plus to enjoy even somewhat menial tasks.
Gameplay
When presented with a huge city to explore and move around in, we expect to see some forms of traversal that make this process fun, seamless and accessible. Unfortunately, Gotham Knights doesn’t really hit the mark here. Gotham City is wonderfully recreated here and is genuinely awesome to run around in as a superhero but I often found myself wanting a lot more when it came to traversal. Being spoiled with Spider-Man’s swinging and Batman’s gliding really made me excited to traverse Gotham as one of the Bat Family but it feels like Gotham Knights is still trying to figure out if it wants to be a fully open-world game.
You start with two main forms of traversal (not including fast travel) which include running around and grappling rooftops, and the Batcycle. Running around and grappling on rooftops is very jarring to get accustomed to with the grapple icon not always going where you want it to and the animation having an unsatisfying break in momentum. It also happens to be the slowest way to usually get somewhere which led me to try out the Batcycle to see if that was a more fun experience.
Turns out it was actually quite fun to drive around Gotham and with a very clear set of arrows showing me the way to my waypoint it actually left me quite satisfied, except for one thing. In a superhero game about vigilantes sneaking around in the cover of the night, I don't want to be driving around the streets in a super loud motorbike announcing my presence. I want to be running across rooftops and gliding around the city to get to my vantage point and plan my next moves. This was where I asked myself, where the hell is my gliding ability? I couldn’t find it in the button map so I continued on my way through the story only to be confronted with a very annoying choice. As you progress you eventually meet Lucius Fox who essentially builds you a drone that you can use to glide, but because of some plot device, you can’t glide in any area until you complete a set of challenges. For each area. Just to glide. This really bothered me and essentially took away one of the most fun elements of traversal and locked it behind a boring side quest chain. They know we want to glide and I'm sure they know traversal isn’t much fun without it, so why lock it up? It’s quite a puzzling decision and a very frustrating realization when you get to it.
The big gameplay element in a game like this is obviously the combat. We’re playing as superheroes so, of course, we want to throw some punches and send some bad guys flying. While the combat here works well enough and is functioning, it leaves much to be desired and gives off the impression that the developers may have needed some more time to really hone this aspect of the gameplay. Here we have all the makings of a good combat system foundation, we can punch, heavy punch, use a ranged attack, a heavy ranged attack, use abilities, and dodge. This all sounds pretty great but the main issue here is the situations the game puts you in aren’t always designed to work well with a combat system like this.
Aside from its general clunkiness, the combat here works, and that's fine, it’s great for taking on a few enemies at a time and can actually get really fun when taking on enemies or bosses one on one. The problem here is that this game tends to throw a lot and I mean a lot of enemies at you which inevitably means enemies will sneak up on you in your blind spots. While usually that's fine with a handy press of the dodge button but there is no obvious display when an offscreen enemy is throwing an attack. Yes, there is a display but it is very hard to notice amidst a packed and stressful fight. So you don’t know when you’re going to be sneak attacked until you’ve already been hit. This tends to leave the exclusion of a parry option sorely missed and often leaves me annoyed that I had to dodge rather than parry a move, especially when dodging breaks your momentum unless you do it at the very last minute in specific situations.
We also get treated to multiple mini-boss fights which have interesting premises but poor execution. One, in particular, puts you up against two heavy bruisers each with different attacks and abilities. This, while sounding fun was a very frustrating experience to have to soldier through. The combat on display here is a great foundation but not quite polished which leaves a clunky feeling. These types of fights do not play to the combats strength at all and feels a lot like a ‘Batman Arkham games did it so we can too’ moment, which honestly sucks because the combat is very different from any other Batman-based game and there are ways to make this combat work well that they just don’t utilize here.
Being a Batman-related game, we are given a bunch of puzzles in the form of little detective sequences that involve a lot of nice details. From exploring the crime scene to linking up evidence, the detective puzzles are very fun and offer a very nice break from the action sequences. This gives Gotham Knights such a unique personality and really sets it apart from other superhero games.
While the detective puzzles are super fun, the environmental puzzles aren't nearly as well crafted. More often than not, environmental puzzles put obstacles or deadly challenges in your path for you to react to and avoid accordingly. This sounds like an absolute blast on paper but in reality, is pretty tough to navigate. Movement in Gotham Knights is designed to feel natural meaning there is a slight delay between moving your thumb stick to walk and your character actually being in the motion of walking, similarly with changing direction, there's a slight delay due to the animation transition. These animations look great and where you’re just running around they feel great too but they aren't designed for the level of tight navigation that some of these puzzles demand.
One instance where this is particularly obvious is during a deadly trap escape sequence. You have been captured by The Court Of Owls and have been thrown into a pit that requires you to escape while avoiding and timing a plethora of deadly mechanisms. This is a nightmare to navigate and actually made me stop playing for a few hours out of frustration. The game isn’t designed for this and is another one of those moments where it sounds really cool so they put it in the game without actually weighing up how it works with the systems at play. It’s an unfortunate addition and honestly adds so little while taking away so much.
Lastly, we need to talk about a big issue that caught me by surprise during my playthrough. I played Gotham Knights on my PlayStation 5 on a QLED TV. I have optimized my setup to be the smoothest and crispest I possibly could and yet for some unknown reason I encountered frame drops. Now I would understand if it was only during some crazy vista moments in Gotham City while exploring but no, this is during controlled fights, small cutscene moments, walking around a level, etc. It's everywhere. Frame drops like this aren’t becoming of a AAA title with the team and budget that Gotham Knights has and leaves me wondering how this shipped with such quality dips. It’s an issue that will likely be patched out but gets hard to recommend to friends until that patch potentially comes out.
Audio and Visual
The art and graphics are on display at an incredible AAA standard and offer some truly stunning environments and characters. Gotham City looks amazing and is one of my top favorite recreations of the city in a game, potentially my absolute favorite. The city feels alive at night and actually feels like a city where actual people live. So many Batman games in the past have forcefully emptied or changed Gotham for a story point but here it feels so natural and seamless. The Bat Family all look incredible as well, every character on display here shows a level of quality and detail that we tend to take for granted in these big AAA titles. Even down to the villains we get some really amazing reimaginings of these characters.
My personal favorite aspect of the visuals/art is the costumes and their various designs. These are the highlights of the game for me. Being able to scroll through and take a look at all the different costumes and all the immaculate detail and design that went into each one, is just awesome. When you finally get to unlock the ones you want, running around and playing the game just feels better. They add so much to the game and I think generally can get quite underappreciated when in contrast to the gameplay systems, but these additions kept me motivated to play through the game.
The sound and music here work really well and don't get in the way. This is actually a huge compliment because music in action games like this tends to try to steal the stage a bit and come off as some crazy masterpiece. It doesn't need to do that and in this case, works better when it doesn't. The music and audio here set the stage for what's happening on screen and that's all I could ask for when playing through a title with such a temptation for a sound team to lose that control when presented with the cultural gravity behind its license.
Replayability
The replayability here is through the roof. You can experience the entire story as any one of the four Bat Family members and can switch between them at almost any point throughout the game. It is designed to be replayed and more importantly replayed with friends. This is a co-op game at its heart and while I choose to play solo, I know that people who prefer playing with friends will have an absolute blast with this game.
What It Could Have Done Better
There's a lot here to be refined but that doesn't mean its systems were completely bad. The combat needs refinement as well as the combat situations you are placed in. But the most important adjustment needed is to make gliding through Gotham an ability we either get from the start or naturally unlock through the story. This is needed and important, it halts the fun of traversal and takes soo much away from the experience. Lastly, this game needs to run at a solid 60fps. It's an industry standard at this point, especially with a AAA title and it is so jarring when other games with an often smaller development team are smoother to run than this.
Verdict
Gotham Knights is by no means a bad game but definitely has some issues to improve on. I would highly recommend this to DC or Batman fans, even with the game's issues you will still most likely find a lot of fun here especially if you can jump in with some friends. Give this game 6 months to patch out a couple of small fixable issues and we’ll have a really nice package here. If WB Games Montréal ever decides to make a sequel or another game in this universe we will have quite the experience on our hands given that all the foundational pillars are in place with this entry.
Gotham Knights is available now for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.
