Like its former-sidekick heroes, Gotham Knights struggles to live up to Batman‘s legacy
Gotham Knights isn't a sequel to the Batman: Arkham games, but it undeniably toils in their shadow
Games Reviews Batman
It’s been seven years since the release of Batman: Arkham Knight, the final installment in Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s shockingly good Arkham franchise of Batman-based video games. I mention this fact both because it’s always good to be reminded of the grim and relentless passage of time—but also because that fact, the sheer gulf of years between now and the release of the last pretty good Batman game, is the single greatest selling point that WBIE’s new offering, Gotham Knights, has to its credit. Certainly, the game itself struggles to make a more compelling case.
Developed by WB Games Montréal—whose last foray into Gotham City was 2013's lackluster prequel Batman: Arkham Origins—Gotham Knights isn’t actually a sequel to the Arkham games at all. Instead, it takes place in a slightly tweaked version of Bat History, albeit one familiar to even passing fans of nearly a century of Bat-Lore: Bruce Wayne is still The Batman, he’s still got a butler, and he’s still got a knack for recruiting teenagers and twentysomethings with a taste for high-impact acrobatics and nocturnal crime-fighting. The only real difference between this Bruce, and the one you might be more familiar with, is that this one is dead—slain in the game’s opening cutscene by one of his classic foes.
It’s a decent enough hook for a Batman story, as Wayne’s four surrogate children—Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon, Dick “Nightwing” Grayson, Jason “Red Hood” Todd, and Tim “Robin” Drake—come together to untangle both their grief, and the mess that their formidable Bat-Dad has left in his wake, a sprawling mystery that encompasses both the standard rogues gallery of baddies, plus an enigmatic secret society known as the Court Of Owls. (Lifted, pretty much wholesale, from Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman comics from the early 2010s.) Choosing one of the four heroes (with the option to switch out periodically), players dive into the Gotham, uh, nights, hoping to honor their slain mentor’s legacy and bring the forces that killed him to justice.
Despite that big, fancy shift in continuity, though, players of Gotham Knights will still find themselves doing a lot of things that will be very familiar to anyone who spent much time with any of the latter Arkham games, and Origins especially. To wit, expect to spend hour upon hour beating up crooks, grapple-hooking your way across Gotham—and wondering why you’re not just playing 2011's Batman: Arkham City again, instead. That last point is, perhaps, unkind, but not inaccurate: Rocksteady Studios’ masterpiece, which opened the focused gameplay of their own Arkham Asylum into a city-wide exploration of Batman’s skills and abilities, is clearly the template for much of what Gotham Knights sets out to do. Except, here’s the brutal truth: At almost every point where WB Games Montréal has tried to expand that decade-old blueprint, possibly chart some new ground for themselves with this high-profile new release, they’ve instead made choices that almost inevitably weaken the eventual structure.
Take, for instance, the game’s combat, which still carries many of the hallmarks of the original Arkham formula. There’s the fluidity of motion, which sends your Bat Hero of choice bounding across the battlefield. There’s the focus on multi-opponent melees, forcing you to use gadgets and special moves to control the momentum of the fight. There’s the emphasis on avoiding damage, engaging with a series of dodges and counter-moves to confer that precious hint of Bat-Invincibility. It’s all there (if feeling a little stiffer, and a little simpler, than in memory.) What’s also there, though, is a new series of RPG-style experience levels that have been bolted over the top of the whole apparatus, and which heavily impact the damage you both take from, and dish out to, enemies. The result is to create absurd situations in which, say, an “under-leveled” Nightwing can beat on a regular mook for a minute straight, without successfully knocking them out. (Enemy levels are generally set to grow alongside the player’s while out in Gotham proper, where you spend much of your time foiling procedurally generated crimes. Engage in a more formal mission that’s above your characters’ level, though, and expect the frustration to swiftly set in.)
As with many of Gotham Knights’ worst ideas, it’s not hard to squint and see the logic behind the choice. Whereas the Arkham games presented a Batman fully formed (give or take a few tweaks to the tech tree), Gotham Knights is a story about heroes on the rise. It makes sense, then, to chart their growth in a more formalized, and maybe even a more number-crunchy, way. But the end result is confused, and sometimes miserable; nothing craps up the basic power fantasy of a superhero game like watching a cape-clad hero dive across a room, fist-outstretched to lay out a gun-toting thug…only to have a paltry “20" damage float up above their head when the strike connects.
See also the game’s loot system, which elevates itself above the worst such offenders in superhero gaming—*cough* Marvel’s Avengers *cough*—mostly by not ever becoming actively burdensome. Instead of shoving loose Bat-Suits or bo staffs into their crime-fighting pajamas, players in Gotham Knights pick up crafting materials and blueprints in abundance, bringing them back to their home base, The Belfry, for later production. Again, there’s the core of a good idea here—the various suits and sticks allow you to customize your gear and prepare for future challenges, a very Batman thing to do. But they also encourage that same spirit of number-hunting (got to keep that Destiny-style “Power” rating up!) while also creating absurd situations in which, say, Batgirl goes out of her way, mid-saving-lives, so that so she can pilfer a chest full of loot that’s been tucked away down a random side corridor. (To the game’s credit, it also encourages exploration by sprinkling, with some frequency, discoverable snippets of lore and DC Comics in-jokes throughout its missions—a reward that’s easily a dozen times more motivating than popping the lid on your hundredth component-stuffed chest.)
And that’s Gotham Knights in a nutshell, really: Good ideas on paper that rarely, if ever, result in good experiences in practice. Want to glide across the expanded, massive version of Gotham with your cape, instead of firing your grapple every couple of seconds to bounce across the rooftops? Easy: Just complete a long-ish set of random fights (only as Batgirl, mind), go home to the Belfry for the night, watch a cutscene, and there you go: Basic movement commands unlocked. (The other three characters have their own specific movement upgrades to unlock; would it shock you to learn that they’re both cumbersome to acquire, and more complicated to play with than actually fun? It’s pretty much gothamknights.txt!) Want fast travel points? Sure: Just make your way through several hours of story, then individually unlock each one by hunting down hostile police drones floating around the map. It’s all like this: More characters, more points of friction, more stuff, all intended to enhance the still quite good base gameplay lurking underneath here, and all doing little more than getting in its way.
It is not, to be clear, all bad. The game’s writing and storytelling work more often than not—especially in the quieter moments that play heavily into its themes of found family and legacy. (The voice acting, not so much; the four main characters, and Alfred, are all basically fine, but Michael Antonakos’ take on Batman, who pops up regularly in flashbacks and recovered recordings, is one of the snooziest takes on The Dark Knight I’ve ever heard.) The driving, which puts you in the seat of the Bat-Cycle, is actually pretty damn fun, maybe the one place where Gotham Knights unambiguously triumphs over its semi-predecessors. The four characters all distinguish themselves play-wise at least a bit, with more differences cropping up the further into their skill trees you get. (Go with Batgirl, by the way, if you want the most traditional Arkham experience—although not even the gun-toting Red Hood is all that different in practice in the early game.) And while I wasn’t able to fully put the game’s online co-op through its paces ahead of release, I got enough of a taste to see that it actually, genuinely works: Two heroes running around a massive city in tandem, teaming up (or not!) to take down the bad guys together.
And that might, honestly, be enough. I often found myself frustrated, in the 40 hours or so I’ve spent with it, with the decisions that Gotham Knights makes. (Really, WB Games Montréal? You’re going to bring out not just one, but two boss battles with Mister Freeze—whose Arkham City incarnation is still a regular on lists of “Best Boss Battles Of All Time”—and have them be such dull, Video Games 101 slogs?) But all these unforced errors are being applied to a framework that’s so solid that it’s still hard not to have fun with it for a decent proportion of the time. The worst thing you can say about the game, really, is that in reviewing it, I’ve been unable to avoid mentioning what’s ostensibly a whole separate series of video games in pretty much every paragraph. That’s how beholden the good in Gotham Knights is to Rocksteady’s work—but that good is still present, nevertheless.
Besides: It’s been seven damn years since Arkham Knight came out. I gotta get my Bat-Fix somehow.
41 Comments
This game just looks mediocre and the combat did not look satisfying. When the game was first announced, I was so excited for it, and then as more and more information and gameplay footage was revealed, that excitement waned.
“Wayned”? 🙂
Damn it, take your star.
Martha?
This is heading straight to Gamepass by Spring. I want to play it, but im not paying for it, lol.
“Besides: It’s been seven damn years since Arkham Knight came out. I gotta get my Bat-Fix somehow.”I suspect this will be enough to lead me to a purchase sooner rather than later………..
Same! But on the bright side(??) it’s reviewing poorly enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was $20 by Christmas(or on Game Pass), so at least it would be too big of a purchase for a so-so game.
That is my thought too. I think this will be on sale around the holiday season, and then I will bite.
It reminds me a little of last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy (which was great and apparently much better than this). I’m pretty sure it came out in this timeframe, ahead of some of the bigger fall releases, so in a couple months you could find it relatively dirt cheap.
That was exactly what I was thinking of when posting the original comment. And I agree it was pretty great! The story and voice acting especially were a lot of fun. And yep, it lined up pretty perfectly with this, out in October and I bought it for ~$20 during the winter Steam sale. It came to Game Pass two or three months after that. I’d be happy enough to do the same for this one.
Yea, timing-wise, this one is going to get buried pretty soon, so perfect springtime/summer fodder.
Oh yea thats right! I got it for half off in December but it went to game pass anyways just a couple months later. D’oh! Hate when that happens.
To a certain degree, I really appreciated the linearity of GotG… sure, it’s no better than Uncharted (IN SPAAAAACE), but at the same time it’s no worse than Uncharted.
My worst criticism of the game is that the save system doesn’t allow you to iterate, so you can’t keep a save that’s right before a really fun part of the game and go back to experience it more than once, without replaying the whole game to get there again. It’s really unfortunate, because I’d love to replay some of those moments but I don’t want to play for 4-6 hours of the same stuff I’d seen before just to get there.
Yea, I’d agree there. I only did one playthrough because the pacing was a little off at times. I also got tired of the combat by the end. It did a nice of job of mixing together the team, but for console players, it was a little unwieldy hitting so many commands on the gamepad. I remember there being some awkward contortions to hit certain moves. That and some enemies were bullet-spongey so eventually I just bumped down the difficulty so I could focus on the story. Still, breath of fresh air to have a single-player only title after Square’s misfire on Avengers.
Yup. I think it was released in August. By Thanksgiving it was already 50% off on Amazon.
They fucked up by yanking the previous gen console versions at the last second. Game only runs at 30fps on the new consoles anyways. Seems like they ended up with the worst case scenario; compromised performance only available on the new consoles without the additional sales they could have gotten by releasing it for Xbone and Ps4.
I’ll probably grab this on a sale in a few months or next year. Seems like a good game to spend a weekend with for cheap
Like I’ll get…eventually.There are so many great games on PC to play that I hardly ever feel the need to purchase a new, single player game, on release. Wait a few months, it goes on sale for 50% off or something, then grab it.
My new tactic is wait for the holiday sales then stock up. It ensures I always have a backlog, but it also gives me the year to play through stuff.
The game’s writing and storytelling work more often than not—especially in the quieter moments that play heavily into its themes of found family and legacy. I could see that. Batman: Arkham Origins was sort of the best written of the Arkham series. Too bad about the rest of it….I’m probably still going to buy it at some point.
I liked the part of Arkham Origins that I played, which wasn’t very much. The repetition was just too grueling (but I had the same issue with Arkham City, suggesting that open-world games just aren’t my jam). Arkham Asylum is almost a perfect game (give or take some repetitive “Bane, but not Bane” fights), and it really benefits from the claustrophobic setting and the tight structure.
Glad to see it’s not just me who doesn’t think they ever topped the first one. City was a dang solid attempt, just had some questionable character beats, Riddler taking the smeg with the sheer amount of stuff, and that I never quite got to grips with the wing suit.
This game has “gamestop discount bin” written all over it. Just wait a year or so and you’ll be able to pick it up for a song.Its reception is reminding me of Square Enix’s Avengers title, another big budget superhero game which shipped in huge quantities and ended up as a letdown. In July (less than two years after it released) I bought a new copy for less than ten bucks.
This game will be $35 on Amazon by Christmas.
I never finished Arkham Knight because I hated the fucking Bat-Tank stuff SO MUCH.
I do not blame you. There was so much I liked about Arkham Knight-the combat and moving around the city were refined to perfection, and the story worked well (if a tad predictable if you are familiar with the comics). But the Bat Tank was one of the worst, most boring mechanics I have ever seen in a game. Driving around in the Batmobile and ejecting into battle is fun, but all the combat/racing/platforming was absolutely the worst.Rocksteady came so close to making a perfect Batman game, but the Batmobile and having so many collectibles to unlock the true ending (thank goodness for Youtube-I was fed up with Riddler trophies half way through the third game) were major stumbles. Still a game worth playing but man-tank battles and stealth sessions(!) were a big swing and miss.
I bought Arkham Knight a few months ago and started it, but didn’t get that far in before my enthusiasm waned considerably on realizing just how much of it involved using the Batmobile. It’s an okay enough idea in theory, but good lord is it terrible in practice. (Like having to gun it up a ramp and over a gap to get into some place, and then having to do it like nine more times because I didn’t hit the afterburner button at the exact right millisecond.)
Oh, man. It gets so much worse than that too.
You read my mind. I ended up early on getting stuck on a Riddler racing track that was the actual worst. I never picked up the game after that.
To hell with that Bat-Tank!
Same. I loved the game up to the point you had to do that Bat-tank maze. Tried over and over but the controls sucked so bad I could never pass it. So…game over there I guess. Bummed me out.
I rarely game anymore to the point that Arkham Knights is the newest game I own. I was getting pretty into it and actually playing on a regular basis until that Riddler tank maze. Since I was never a great gamer, I assumed I was just a terrible now due to my lack of frequency for getting stuck so early in the game. Maybe that’s not the case…
We are a fractured society, but at least hatred for the Bat-Tank still unites us.
Nah, we’re fractured even there cause I feel like I’m one the few who actually *enjoyed* the bat-tank sections. Maybe it was partially lowered expectations and also I was like, 18? Either way, it wasn’t the crime against humanity I had expected it to be.
Absolute same
Finally, you get to play as Batman, fighting Deathstroke. IN TANKS!
I loved the tank stuff, and thought every aspect of the batmobile was well implemented. It probably helps that I was actually good at it; people often dislike aspects of games they’re bad at.
*writes down as “wait for gamepass release”*
As soon as I read “underleveled Nightwing” I was out. They can fuck off if Dick isn’t good enough in this game to whip everyone’s ass!
Why is this on AV Club instead of Kotaku?
I’m not interested in the Bat-Family for the most part and there’s some weird, unsettling fandom around them that will likely make me steer clear of this one.
Asylum is the best Arkham game, just because you can toss motherfuckers off roofs to kill them