Gotham Knights Review (A1S)
Teenage Gotham Ninja Knights.
TL;DR:
This is all you need to know about the state of the game approximately one year after the release:
https://youtu.be/iAK1HUi9wq4
My impressions of the game are based on a full playthrough of the campaign in co-op on “Hard” level of difficulty. I have not encountered any technical issues on my R9 5900X + RTX 4090 rig while playing in QHD resolution (2560x1440). I played as Red Hood, my bro picked Nightwing.
Just an awful game.
Any form of justification of its flaws would come off as an attempt to shift the focus onto some other aspects of the game that are half-decent. It is true that under certain circumstances there is some fun to be extracted. By playing it in co-op for instance. However, even that doesn’t grant the solemn guarantee that you will enjoy it. I can hardly fathom how one is supposed to execute that task by playing solo. I presume that an ardent fan of the DC universe or one of the characters would have a better shot at that. With that said, I feel like Gotham Knights has a number of underlying flaws buried so deep inside the game’s foundation, that they cannot be remedied. They entirely negate the potential of those other aspects of the game that could’ve actually shone. These issues are critical, fatal and unacceptable. Such cancerous design choices shouldn’t exist. Let’s list quite a few:
The progression of the story and even side missions is constantly blocked off by the enforced subpar open world activities. Far too often you reach certain points in the game where your main objective literally tells you to go and do a bunch of low-tier, uninteresting and soulless open world tasks in order to progress the story. In general, anything that can be acquired or unlocked would have you grind for it in most cases.
Aside from the story progression, the grind wall also imprisons quite powerful, so-called “Momentum Abilities”, that are valuable both in terms of their usefulness in specific situations, and also creating a more complex and varied combat system. These abilities are off limits for those who prefer to play the game the way they want to, unfortunately, and instead they’re locked behind the grindy challenges. Therefore the grind is a must for unlocking the full power of the characters.
The game doesn’t shy away from punishing the players by making them vulnerable to damage while performing actions that immobilize them. Just as an example, if you were to deploy a portable turret (which is a Momentum Ability by the way), it would initiate a roughly 3-second-long animation, which is quite long for a beat ‘em up game. In case you slightly mistime the turret ability, yet you refuse to cancel it, then you’re in for the world of hurt as you eat up all the damage coming your way in the process. Now if you do realize that you’ve made a bad decision, and cancel the turret deployment, then your alternative option is to use the “evade” button, and, as a result, waste 2 Momentum Ability bars (these can be spent only on the MA abilities) on an unfinished action or send it into cooldown. It depends on the ability. None of this looks like a good design choice for an action game. There are massive crowds of enemies in Gotham, so it is unreasonable to expect the players to have even a few seconds to initiate the snail-paced animations of the Momentum Abilities, and the appropriate moments for them are few and far between. The penalty for an unfinished action is far too severe in my opinion, as these abilities individualize each of the main characters. Did the devs even intend the players to use them? I’ll avoid the verbiage about the Momentum Abilities that simply don’t work. It is what it is.
However, the worst offenders for me personally are the situations where you have no option to cancel the animation at all! For instance, upon grabbing an enemy, your character is presented with 2-4 options: strike, throw, interrogate, team-up attack. The horror lies in the fact that whatever you choose, the animation that follows is unskippable, therefore there’s nothing you can do to avoid taking damage while executing these attacks, apart from ALT + F4. You will constantly take hits throughout the entire game. It’s gravely infuriating. Apparently, the devs just want you to accept it and roll with it.
Speaking of throws, they simply go down the drain by the end of the game, yeah. The new enemy types that are introduced just about halfway through the campaign cannot be grabbed. What makes things worse is that there is no substitute for this suddenly-forsaken mechanic that just vanishes from your moveset. Substitutes are nowhere to be found for Red Hood either, even though he has an entire branch in his Skill tree that is dedicated to grabs exclusively.
Sometimes the number of enemies on your screen can be overwhelming, yet the camera angles don’t allow the players to see the incoming attacks, let alone react to them.
The game absolutely fails to consistently preserve the serious tone, that it allegedly sets and aspires to convey. Dark, troubled and criminal Gotham on one side of the coin, and then 4 rugrats on the other, whose behavior doesn’t exactly represent them as adults (technically there’s only one factual teenager among them), let alone as the Bat-heir.
I recommend against falling for the first 2 hours of gameplay. It is probably one of the most polished chapters in the game, that surely isn’t representative of the rest of the following content. I hope that this game remains the only one, that makes me happy that commissioner Gordon and Batman are killed off in the story. At least they didn’t have to put up with these imbeciles. I advise you not to touch this garbage with a ten-foot pole. And if you’re still willing to give it a shot, then get it on a sale and invite a friend. You never know, maybe some fun is in the cards for you.
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