Gotham Knights (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review
Product Information:
- Developer: WB Montreal
Game Features:
When Assassin's Creed II launched well over a decade ago, it changed the gaming landscape, defining the open-world genre for years to come. Although it might have innovated a little too well--to this day, there are games that try to clone that exact style of Assassin's Creed; climb the towers, find the collectibles, run around a way too large open world, craft new items, and upgrade your skill tree. It's such a tired formula, and once you've played one of these kinds of games, you've really played them all. All this is to say, when I saw Gotham Knights for the first time, I was overjoyed by the concept of a Batman game that put more focus on his protegees, until I saw the gameplay, and knew this would just be yet another open-world game like all the others before it. But hey, don't knock it til you try it, right?
So, having tried Gotham Knights, I can confidently say that it isn't a very fun game, but at the same time, I wholeheartedly enjoyed my time with it. While that kind of statement might seem bizarre, I can boil down this game down to a simple comparison: Gotham Knights is like a McDonald's hamburger at 3 AM. You know full well that it isn't good for you, but sometimes you just have a craving for something familiar, where you know exactly what you're getting, even though you could totally live without it. It's not great, but that familiarity is something you expect; you know that you're playing a mediocre game at best, but sometimes you just crave trashy junk food, and that's what this is.
Rocksteady really left its mark on the Batman IP with its Arkham series. It's a tough, if not impossible, act to follow for developer WB Montreal, who has only ever really developed one other AAA title, which so happened to be a spinoff in the Batman: Arkham series. Notably, one that didn't do nearly as well critically, and mostly got by using the foundations built by Rocksteady's prior entries. While Gotham Knights does have a lot in common with the Arkham series, it tries to set itself apart in just as many ways. Here, you don't play as Batman--in fact, Bruce Wayne dies in the very first scene of the game. This sets up a controversial, if not interesting premise: this is a Batman game with no Batman in it. You play solely as the other Gotham heroes, or rather, "knights": Robin, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Batgirl. Whether or not that idea excites you is all you need to tell if you'll either love or hate this game.
This is a game that lives and dies on how much you enjoy the "Batfamily" and their interactions. Yes, all of these characters were in the Arkham series, but they never got the spotlight as much as they do here, and their dynamic is completely changed by not having Batman around. The story itself is predictable and even boring at times, despite the inclusion of two of the coolest Batman villains, The Court of Owls and the League of Shadows. It really only exists to give the cast a reason to band together and so that they can have something to talk about. A good majority of my interest in this game came from listening to the idle chatter between Nightwing and Robin and how these characters, with all their history, are brothers and bond as human beings, not just as superheroes. There's hundreds of lines of dialogue that reference certain comics or serve as easter eggs, and while the writing is nothing outstanding, it's fun to see nonetheless. Gotham Knights knows its audience, and it caters right to it. Of course, it has its fair share of dumb moments too, like a completely random fight scene that has an awful cover of Livin' La Vida Loca.
As for the gameplay, if you've played a third-person open-world game in the last 10 years, you know exactly what you're in for here. It plays near identical to Horizon Zero Dawn, or Sunset Overdrive, or Shadow of Mordor, or Just Cause, or even Arkham City. It's the same cut-and-paste gameplay you should be well accustomed to. That's not to say it's bad; clearly, this genre works, and it's downright fun, because so many games rely on it, but if you're looking for something new or innovative, you're not going to get that from Gotham Knights. In fact, just like how most Dynasty Warriors games are just the same game with a different anime skin, Gotham Knights is just Assassin's Creed but with Batman characters. It doesn't try anything new, it retreads the same water that most open-world games do, but at least it's a tried-and-true formula.
Given how much this game likes to borrow elements from other AAA games, you'd think WB Montreal would at least be able to copy them well, yet that's not the case here. You traverse Gotham by doing acrobatics off of rooftops and flinging yourself from place to place via a grappling gun. It sounds a lot like Spider-Man, but Gotham Knights is nowhere near as fun. Movement from rooftop to rooftop feels stiff to the point of making it difficult to move even in a straight line. A lot of the time, the grappling target will lock you on to something you weren't even looking at, flinging you in the opposite direction you were going. For a game that wants you to explore a city map that clearly has a lot of effort put into it, it misses the mark, and by quite a lot. There are plenty of collectibles to find in the open world, but they're too hidden to ever be seen while grappling, too, so there's no incentive to just wander either, unless you enjoy slowly walking from place to place. Fast travel takes way too long to unlock, as do the unique power-ups that each character gets. Eventually, Red Hood gets the ability to infinitely jump--think the Knuckles jump glitch from Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric--and while that sounds super fun on paper, in execution, it's awful to control, and barely works half the time because the game just drops your inputs, killing your momentum and letting you plummet unceremoniously to the ground. Even zooming around on the Bat-cycle is a chore, because rather than act as a cool way to quickly travel, it really only serves as a framerate killer. Outside of the tutorial on how to use the bike, there are never any chases or fights on it, or really anything to do while riding it other than drive in a straight line to your destination.
Which is another thing: Gotham Knights only runs at 30fps on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. This is a compromise in order to get the Series S version of the game playable, but that leaves the Series X and PS5 versions of the game feeling unoptimized and disappointing, both visually and performance-wise. We're barely into the latest console generation, so choices like this should be unacceptable by game developers, given that these platforms run far better-looking games flawlessly. This doesn't even factor in the PC port, which has been a nightmare, rendering the game unplayable after "bugfix" patches that made the game crash on launch.
Gotham Knights is a definitively mediocre game. It's yet another churned-out AAA title that tries to tick all the checkboxes in an effort to fit in with all its other AAA brethren. I can't say that I love Gotham Knights, but I still like it, while I can't say that I hate it, I have plenty of problems with it. If you set your expectations low and go in looking for some Batfamily goodness combined with some mindless fun, it hits the spot, just like the video game junk food that it is.
Verdict
- Lots of fun references
- The core gameplay is pretty fun
- Online coop is cool
- 30fps with stutters on "next gen" is unacceptable
- City traversal just flat-out sucks
- There's a lot of padding, both in gameplay and the story
