izigame.me

(solo review)
Gotham Knights feels like a live service game with half of the content planned for post-launch. Then the game was re-tooled to NOT be a live service, and that post launch content is simply missing. Janky animations, clumsy combat, and shallow story-telling make Gotham Knights equal parts frustrating and trite. There is appeal in the design of Gotham, and it’s fun at first to go out and patrol the city at night just like Batman did. This spoils quickly because of re-used activities (frequently at the same locations as before). Maybe Gotham Knights was going to be something else once, but now it’s a cash-grab looking to attract customers with an established IP. 4/10
Total size on my hard-drive: 45 GB
+ Gotham City is large, full of distinguishing landmarks and hidden back alleys.
+ Graphics are good, though ray-tracing is largely a waste and adds very little to the visuals (I played the game on a Radeon 7900XT)
+ Characters are generally good, though given to excessive navel-gazing.
+ The Bat-cycle drives and handles well.
+ Gotham Knights has been patched since release and performs well, with fast load times and smooth gameplay.
+ A DirectX12 game (so it still requires Windows 10 minimum), but low settings default to a DirectX 11.1 feature set, allowing Gotham Knights to be played on some ancient hardware. I managed to hold 30fps @1080p Low on a Radeon R9 270X. Need at least 4GB of vram though.
+ Classic playable arcade game Spyhunter in the Belfry between missions.
+/- Story isn’t bad, but suffers from being rushed. The whole thing is over fast. The Court of Owls is a big disappointment. Their arc is effectively over two-thirds of the way through.
+/- Social progressiveness seems kept to a minimum, but cues are there if you search. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to you.
- Epic Games Services is required to run the game and play in co-op.
- Combat is clumsy. I frequently struggled to build a combo. Then, out of nowhere, I’d string moves together without even trying, clearing an entire encounter in seconds. Almost like there’s input delay when creating a hit-string. There was input-delay in the Arkham games as well, but never like this.
- Combat was just begging for a Counter move. Almost think it WASN’T included because countering was a big part of the Arkham system, and Gotham Knights tries very hard to be different.
- Combat tries to be interesting with a “momentum” system that requires you to build combos by clicking to attack the enemy RIGHT before your current blow hits. Rarely works as it should, meaning combos don’t build, which means damage rarely stacks. This makes fights even longer.
- Combat auto-targeting is terrible. This includes the melee combat and distance quick-fire. Constantly hitting everything except the enemy right in front of you.
- There’s no way to quickly close distance to a downed enemy. Just have to sprint up to them and hope they don’t recover in the time it takes to get to them.
- Boss fights are terrible. Bosses are spongy, with unfair targeting lock-on.
- Talon fights are terrible. Mini-bosses are – again – spongy, and the minions have auto-dodge built in, so you can’t hit them directly.
- Stealth is a joke. Enemy patrol patterns are obvious, and there’s always that one guard who wanders off by themselves, making them an easy take-down. Security cameras add some challenge – until you get Batgirl’s ability to be invisible to security cameras. smh
- Change-of-direction animation is weird. The character will turn in place before moving in the desired direction.
- Collision is aggressive. Getting stuck on objects is common.
- Re-spawning activities become incredibly boring. Many re-use the same locations.
- Grinding the respawning activities is required to acquire materials for crafting upgrades.
- Loot is unimpressive. It’s mostly crafting junk, with some mods for completing more difficult encounters.
- The mod system is cumbersome to manage, with dozens of the same item of varying tiers clogging the inventory. (Why is crafting even in Gotham Knights?)
- Interactive actions (like opening a chest) requires standing in front of and holding the E key. But your character has to be EXACTLY in front of or the prompt won’t appear.
- Puzzles are annoying, and oddly cryptic at times.
- The Bat-verse has a huge cast of villains available. Outside of the main story, Gotham Knights uses exactly 3: Freeze (twice), Harley, and Clayface. In the main story, Gotham Knights uses exactly 3: Penguin (not a boss), The Court of Owls, and the League of Shadows. And Freeze is just a “revenge on the world, you can’t mess with my plan” shell of what he was in the Arkham games.
- Voice-acting has its highs and lows. Mostly lows. Not terrible, just flat. Elias Toufexis as Penguin sounds bored.
- Music score is a vapid collection of Batman-esque cues and terrible pop music.
- Gotham City might be well-designed, but it’s far too awake. Part of the atmosphere of Batman is prowling a city asleep, fighting the riff-raff that emerges into the night. There are lights everywhere, sidewalks a full of pedestrians, traffic thick on the streets. Feels like a regular city at noon, not midnight.
- To extend gameplay, the devs added the co-op mode “Heroic Assaults,” which are 30 levels of combat challenge (which repeat over and over, of course). A few special rewards don’t disguise the grind. There isn’t even a score system with modifiers (like the Arkham challenge maps).
- New Game + resets all your progress (as expected), including the fast travel points (wtf). So after starting NG+ now I have to run all over the city once more scanning drones to re-unlock the fast-travel. No thanks.
Gotham Knights is more Bat-verse content, but can’t even come close to the least of the Arkham games (Arkham Origins – which is from the same studio!). I’ll tell you why: the Arkham games are FUN. Gotham Knights is fun for a while. Then you find yourself doing the same activity at the same location for the 10th time and the realization sets in that this is the primary gameplay loop of Gotham Knights. Then, if you’re like me, you’ll turbo the main missions to finish the game and move on to something else.