Gotham Knights honest review

If you’re a DC fan mulling over the latest game release then you might be interested in our Gotham Knights honest review. It covers everything from the gameplay, story and graphics to the performance, multiplayer action and replayability to give you our sincere take on the game.

Gameplay review

There are three core elements to the Gotham Knights gameplay – combat, puzzles and traversal. They each come with their good points and bad points, but we’ll kick things off with the most important of them all, combat.

The crucial thing here is that it’s easy to miss some of the main combat features because they’re tucked away in a training sim in the Belfry instead of being built into the early campaign missions. As a result, you can easily get through a lot of the game without using it to its fullest potential.

We suspect that this is one of the biggest reasons that some of the early review scores picked holes in the combat. That’s not to say that using them will transform Gotham Knights into a God of War-like epic, but it does improve things a little.

Knowing how to pierce armor with a Momentum Ability that delivers elemental status effects is absolutely imperative to getting the most out of the game, so if you miss that then you miss a lot. It’s a similar story for timed strikes, perfect evade and perfect attacks, so if you do pick the game up then go through each of the training sim sessions to get to grips with it all as soon as possible.

However, even with all of that covered Gotham Knights is still slightly lacking in the combat department, which is the core feature of the gameplay. We’ll cover the performance issues later on, but to start with there’s no block function, which if you’ve seen any Batman movie is a big part of his MO.

If that isn’t enough, there’s also a scaling consideration, which means that no matter how much you level up or get better tech you’re still going to have a tough time of things against certain enemies in hard difficulty. This will force you to dig deep, but it means that you’ll be spamming dodge roll a lot to make it through instead of being able to bring the noise.

It isn’t a problem for the majority of the game, but there are a couple of instances where you really feel like the chips are just stacked against you and there’s just nothing you can do about it but switch to claw grip and tap dodge even faster. If you compare this to say the Valkyries in God of War the challenge was still there, but there was definitely something that you can do about it other than rolling.

Moving on to our honest review of the puzzles in Gotham Knights, we’re fans of puzzles and they’re a nice diversion that make you think without breaking your brain. The solutions are right there in front of you in each crime scene investigations, so it’s satisfying to work it out and land it.

This is really how the combat should be, and in all fairness it is sometimes, but it could take a leaf out of the puzzle book. It’s possible that there is more that you can do in combat with area of attack moves, but they’re fiddly and the problem is that there are very few tells or clues to point you in the right direction, so it’s frustrating in comparison to the crime scenes.

However, if you don’t like grey matter puzzles then it might not be the game for you. A lot of the mission will require you to complete these, so if you just want action then they might frustrate you. That being said, you can just check out this guide to them if you’re having difficulty, so you get the best of both worlds.

Finally, you’ve got the traversal and this can feel amazing to experience. It’s not quite up there with the likes of Marvel’s Spider-Man, but it comes close at times. You can check out the first drive of the Batcycle below to see how much fun it is and it’s a similar story with the grapple and glide options.

You’ll need to unlock the ability to fly to get full traversal and it’s a similar story with fast travel. The latter will mean that you don’t do as much exploration as you do in the beginning of the game, but it’s still satisfying to fast travel to an area of the map, glide close and then grapple to the perfect location to spot your criminal targets for the night.

Finally, you should be aware that there are no save files, so you can’t go back to a previous experience or back-peddle if you want to do something differently. The only way to experience anything again is to play New Game+, which you unlock once you complete the main campaign, but this is far from ideal.

Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, and you can see more on the game with the official Twitter page at https://twitter.com/GothamKnights.

Story review

The narrative setup for Gotham Knights was one of our biggest concerns for the game, but it’s better than expected. The overall plot is strong, if a little predictable, and the dialogue is much more fluid than we’d seen in earlier video footage of the game.

Each of the playable characters have distinct erh… character and it’s a similar story for the villains too. It gets a little convoluted in the end, but it’s still fun to make it through to the finale.

In addition to the core campaign story, there are also three side arcs featuring Mr. Freeze, Clayface and Harley Quinn. To be honest, they’re better than the main story and could easily have been expanded to bring even more personality to them.

These result in some cool boss fights that just don’t appear in the main campaign, so the combat in these section is more satisfying too. We’d happily take on twenty different incarnations of Mr Freeze as he develops even more ferocious tech to take you down, which is a credit to that side of the story.

Graphics review

Overall, the graphics are honestly pretty good, but they’re not mind blowing when you compare them to the likes of Batman Arkham Knight, which is a game that came out a massive eight years ago on previous gen technology. Gotham Knights looks impressive and the city is beautiful and atmospheric to explore, but it’s far from a leap forward in any sense of the term.

Performance review

This ties in with the performance issues that niggle at the edges of the game. There’s combat lag at times (playing on PS5), so you can find yourself in a tight spot and just get hit despite the fact that you’ve pressed all of the right buttons. You also get scaling and frame rate lag in exploration too, which becomes more noticeable the longer you play.

A part of the problem could be the fact that there’s online always on if you’re connected, which could add to the dips in performance. Whatever the reason, it definitely reduced our enjoyment of the game a little and made us question the next-gen status of Gotham Knights.

The lack of options in the settings around graphics and performance are a bit of a tell that the title hasn’t got it all sewn up. It clocks in at 30fps, which isn’t another bit tell, but it’s possible that there will be a performance update in the future to improve all of this, which would definitely be a good thing.

Multiplayer review

Here’s where things get interesting. Clearly the game has been developed with a big consideration for Multiplayer. It’s a bit like Marvel’s Avengers or The Division 2 where you can join up with friends or public to take on missions and progress through the game in co-op mode.

This can be a lot of fun if you have a good group, but it has a knock on impact on the rest of the game. It seems to be the chief reason for the online aspect of the game, so even if you go private it’s still online, which could be a part of the performance issues.

It also seems like it might be the reason for the scaling, so you always have a challenge to return to, but that also means that you never become a dominant Gotham Knight, not matter how much you level-up or advance your gear. Compare this to God of War where you could essentially go on to be a total package of destruction and you can see why review scores are going to be very different between this and Ragnarok.

The biggest own goal in terms of the multiplayer is that there isn’t an option to replay missions, so it’s just a co-op campaign experience. Yes, you can join forces and fight crime together, which is nice, but you can’t decide what experience to do, which is disappointing.

Replayability

The multiplayer and New Game+ definitely add to the replayability of Gotham Knights, especially the latter. However, the scaling issue reduces this a little and the lack of save files means you can’t set up a few different runs concurrently.

The lack of mission selection makes multiplayer replays somewhat superficial, and the combat and performance limitations add to that. We’ll still go back for more, but just not quite as much as we would have done if it was a little more rounded overall.

Honestly, all of these things could easily be fixed with a few patches, which would make a huge difference to our review, but we’ll have to wait and see what the future holds. Fingers crossed at least a few of these will be checked off eventually with the performance mode options, game saves, block move and mission selection being top of our list.