Gotham Knights Review (PS5)

Gotham Knights is in many ways a game whose name pretty much tells you everything you need to know before even playing.

Batman is dead, so a team of four members of the Batman family is now in charge of defending Gotham City. Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin, each with their very own skills and superpowers, must defeat the freaks, occasionally fight with the police, and make sure the criminals don’t harm citizens.

In many ways, Gotham Knights sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-world version of Gotham City, four heroes to choose from, lots of mysteries to solve, and plenty of action. This is how Warner Bros wants to steal the hearts of gamers across the world.

The game starts with a long cinematic, which I really enjoyed watching for whatever reason. The dialogs aren’t bad either, and you shouldn’t skip this video because it shows you precisely how Batman dies and how the Gotham knights enter the scene.

You can choose any of four heroes to play the game, and I have a feeling most people will go for Batgirl. After all, she’s a hacker, and who doesn’t like a hacker, right? However, I also enjoyed playing with Red Hood, as the muscle is always welcome, especially when fighting against enemies.

+6more

The mix of missions and mysteries that need to be solved every now and then somehow reminded me of Uncharted, though the two are completely different beasts. And unfortunately, what sets Gotham Knights aside is the broken gameplay.

Let’s elaborate on this and see how WB can further polish what could be a pretty captivating title.

First and foremost, the player control is rough, to say the least. You can’t duck a punch when fighting against more powerful enemies, and the health bar drops like crazy. You can’t jump when you want to jump, but only when the game tells you so. For instance, when you want to jump over something, you need to get close enough until the game lets you do the whole thing.

The camera is often going crazy, and finding the right angle takes time. If you want to move around with the camera, which is something that I typically do especially when fighting against enemies, there’s a good chance you’re going to lose control completely.

I’m not going to complain about the 30 fps thing, but I do admit that I’d want the gameplay to be smoother overall. During fast-paced action, everything feels rather slow, and this is something that shouldn’t happen at all, especially when riding the Batcycle, for example.

The combat system isn’t necessarily bad, but the AI clearly needs more polishing. I played the game on a medium difficulty setting, and on more than one occasion, the freaks were just standing there, watching me kill one of their comrades without doing anything.

+7more

The special attacks, however, sometimes feel clunky, but it depends on your expectations. For instance, I’m seeing many Batman fans complaining about the current optimizations, but I still think that Gotham Knights is much more polished than Arkham Knight, for instance.

Obviously, comparing it with other Arkham games doesn’t make much sense, but naturally, gamers out there look at other Batman titles to see where Gotham Knights is standing. And in many ways, it all comes down to how each developer tried to make the most of a super-popular franchise. Warner Bros used a different approach, so it probably takes more time before hitting all the right spots.

At this point, I think the biggest problem is the performance, as otherwise, Gotham Knights is a very enjoyable release that has a lot of potential to become a lot better.

The Good

The Bad

CONCLUSION