The first thing the developers of Gotham Knights want you to know is that it is not an Arkham game. The problem is, they made an open-world stealth/brawler set in Gotham City starring Bat-adjacent characters fighting members of the Bat Rogue’s Gallery. When you do that, you’re going to get comparisons to the Arkham games. Aside from not being in the same continuity, the developers didn’t want to be placed side by side with such an iconic series because there were a number of ways they didn’t measure up. In all fairness, one can fail to meet a high bar and still make a decent product. So lets give them a fair shake.

So, if this is not in the Arkham series, what’s the premise?

Well, in the ten minute long opening cutscene, we get a protracted fight between Ra’s Al Ghul and Batman in the Batcave which results in both of them dead and the cave destroyed. Now this isn’t an ambiguous “are they or aren’t they” kinda ‘dead’, the cutscene ends with the main characters finding the bodies and then wraps up with the funeral for Bruce Wayne. So, we finally get handed the tutorial mission, and the objective is to find Kirk Langstrom (Manbat). Only one problem, as we arrive on scene, the coroner is wheeling him away too. After the tutorial you eventually get to free roam the city. There you find a memorial to Commissioner Gordon. Wait a minute… nah, that can’t be a pattern.

The gameplay loop is set up such that each night of patrol there are a certain number of ‘premeditated crimes’ as well as random criminal activity littered around the map. These go away if not resolved in that night, under the presumption that the criminals succeeded without your intervention. The main plot and side mission objectives stick around night to night. When you return to the home base in the ‘Belfry’ (The Clocktower), the night ends.

In terms of playable characters there are three Robins (Grayson, Todd, and Drake) and a Batgirl (Gordon). What, no Stephanie Brown? She was both a Robin and a Batgirl… but then they’d have to address the fact that she was Drake’s girlfriend and maybe pay someone additional royalties. Anyway, the four do play slightly differently, with the differences becoming greater as you level up and unlock more abilities. Ironically, the one with the largest character model (Jason Todd) has the shortest melee reach because his melee weapon of choice is a pair of handguns. There is one scene later on where they are tuning the propellant and projectile composition so that he doesn’t just perforate the people he shoots, thus explaining why twin pistols do tickle damage to enemies. At the other end of the spectrum, Drake’s staff gives him the longest melee reach of the lot, so I ended up defaulting to him for most of the game with specific exceptions. Hence why all of the screenshots show the one character still using the Robin identity.

It is raining in this scene

The game leans heavily into playing dress up with multiple outfits for all of the playable characters and a system for customizing the coloration. You can also apply some preset appearances to override whichever one you have equipped in case you wanted the stats but disliked the appearance. A lot of these costumes have bright color schemes and even when they’re darker tones, tend towards a higher saturation. It is as far as you can get from the Arkham aesthetic as you can get without even stretching canonicity of appearance. I do have to give credit to the art team for their character models and animation. They did a fantastic job, and in cutscenes, the characters look more like actual people than in the Arkham games. For an accurate comparison I did play through the entire Arkham series when I got fed up to provide a fair comparison. I several cases, I got Deus Ex Deja Vu, that is my mind went to memories of dialog scenes from the original Deus Ex when watching a poorly lip-synced, very stiff Batman talking to someone. It did get better, but it did highlight where Gotham Knights deserved some credit.

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Fight Scenes

Where they earned demerits is in the writing, but I’ll come back to that. The combat is… passable. I play on keyboard and mouse, and the default control configuration shows the hallmarks of a shitty console port. One of my key gripes is that ranged attack and stealth takedown are on the same key, with the context deciding which happens. I went to look, and there was no option to bind them to separate keys, so if you mistime your stealth takedown by so much as a pixel, instead of just failing, you order a very attention-getting ranged attack. In the gallery of combat screenshots (sorry about the lighting, the setting tends to be very dark) you’ll note in the lower right an array of seven abilities bound to the keys 1, 2, 3, and 4. A quick tap triggers the bottom row, while holding the key triggers the upper. Since movement is on W, A, S, and D, this leaves them in reach, but tends to cause me to stop moving while I trigger the ability. So I never use them and opt to rely on mobility instead. There are even more depths to the combat system that I simply never engaged in – because the control schema of a keyboard made it awkward to impossible to execute deliberately.

At the intersection of combat mechanics and character animation we came to one of the first problems. The context-based animations don’t always work. In particular, getting off the roof of a truck in combat to engage the goons has more than once failed, resulting in the character dancing in place on the roof – while getting shot at. I did manage to dislodge the character eventually each time it happened, but the delay allowed the goons to gather into a large mob, making the brawl a bit more troublesome than it otherwise would have been. The second intersection of combat and character animations rendered Grayson so annoying to use that I basically left him in the tower all game. You see, in order to help the four characters who all had a basic melee attack, a heavy melee attack, and a ranged attack feel different, each was given bespoke combat animations that reflected their style. This is before we got into the special moves on keys 1-4. As the last of the Flying Graysons, poor Nightwing was given a very acrobatic and showy move set. The problem is, you couldn’t interrupt the acrobatics to take a new action, and he would often take his next move against a seemingly random enemy, often on off-screen. Plus some of his attacks simply didn’t execute if you were under a low ceiling such as any indoor area or under an overpass. Being harder to control, I simply didn’t bother and stuck with the others.

If you were paying attention you might be going “But you said you mostly used Robin”. Mostly. You see, in addition to the main plot (a war between the League of Shadows and the Court of Owls), there are a couple of side plots involving several supervillains from the classic Rogue’s Gallery. You can play each segment of these side plots with whichever character you want, but what irked me was the dialog always acting as if the currently active character was the one who did everything in that plot up to that point, even when you changed. So I decided I would play through the side plots with a particular character dedicated to each. Jason Todd got to chase Mr Freeze, Barbara Gordon went after Clayface, Tim Drake dealt with Harley Quinn, and Dick Grayson got… nothing. There were only three side plots. Aside from those three, the only classic member of the Gotham villain’s club was the Penguin, and only because Grand-ma-ma Cobblepot was a member of the Court of Owls. You never fight Oswald, though you do break into his office three or four times.




Stealth Mission

That leads to the next big issue with the game design – the repetition. There are only so many mission types for the premeditated crimes, and only so many locations where they might spawn. So you get very familiar with these arenas and the approaches, and it gets very samey as the game wears on. If you think you can just start skipping them, well, you need the loot and experience to keep your gear and character level up to par with the story missions. So get grinding those repetitive patrols.

By contrast, the hand-crafted story missions are fairly well done, but most are linear with only a few opportunities to pick your approach. You are required to be stealthy for that part and fight in this arena, and anything off the beat path is typically a short run to a secret. Fortunately, most of this linearity is only visible in a few spots, or in retrospect. The environmental design usually feels like it could really occupy the space it’s supposed to be in – except the Court of Owls’ underground bases. I kept going “How is this area not flooded? Gotham is a string of islands. The rock can’t be that impermeable”. But that’s neither here nor there. There was no room on the overworld map for these huge set piece dungeons to be secret, so they had to be buried. The Court set pieces didn’t tend to end with a boss fight, but did usually contain instakill deathtraps. Most of the boss fights came during the side missions. The boss fights were another major letdown. With a handful of notable exceptions, I defeated the bosses but running in a circle around them, waiting until they had committed to an animation that couldn’t rapidly rotate towards my current location, firing off a few ranged attacks and resuming running around them in circles. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. The exceptions were A: whenever they summoned a goon swarm into the arena, B: when the Clayface fight became a motorcycle chase, and C: the first Freeze fight where the weather machine provided indestructible cover, and he couldn’t figure out the tactic of just walking around it.

Yeah, the boss fights in this game were pretty subpar.

The final issue I ran into was the writing. It was inconsistent to the point of being obvious where the different writers/teams worked. The main story writers managed to remain the most politically neutral, the dialog writers less so, and those filling in the text for the emails couldn’t seem to help themselves. Emails? Yes, on the batcomputer interface there is an email tab. Some of the emails are plot relevant, but there is a bunch of fluff, including communications from various members of the various iterations of the Titans as well as the Justice League. So there was familiarity with the comic book canon. But some of them are just so mischaracterized that it hurts. Take for example the email in this screenshot:

They actually left this in.

That is the kind of message a company puts out in response to a cancel mob Rhee-ing at them online, and it’s directly addressed to one of the main characters. That means there is a message in little Timmy’s outbox somewhere Rhee-ing at this movie website about an article talking about movies starring a guy who later went on to become a tragic mass of animate clay. You don’t have to cancel Clayface, everyone knows what he did. But the writers made our protagonists into terrible twitter people. It’s most prevalent in the emails, so you can ignore it, but it does creep into the edges of the dialog, and some parts of the set design for the Belfry.

Now, if the game were great, I could look past that. But it’s not great. It’s mediocre. I actually abandoned it after they killed off Jacob Kane (Bruce Wayne’s maternal uncle. I hadn’t heard of him before the game either, but it looks like he was created for the Batwoman comics). Plot-wise the game was already overstaying its welcome, and I couldn’t help but notice that the named characters who were outright killed so far – Ra’s Al Ghul, Bruce Wayne, Kirk Langstrom, James Gordon, Jacob Kane – were all from an oddly narrow demographic. I think both Harveys (Dent and Bullock) are in hiding to avoid these writers. And for those of you familiar enough to point out that being dead is typically an inconvenience for Ra’s, well, they pushed his body into a crematorium oven in Mission Two. So, yeah.

You’ve stretched my suspension of disbelief in your neutrality, writers.

Still, if it’s on sale, and you’re not expecting much, it’s playable.

“You start calling me ‘Robin’, and I’m outta here” – Max Gibson
“Okay, Alfred.” – Terry