by Aaron Schweitzer, Editor
Reviewed on Xbox Series X
The Arkham Trilogy is my favorite video game series of all time. I even really love Arkham Origins, but Arkham Asylum, City, and Knight are all 10/10, and I can’t pick a favorite between them. After I beat Arkham Knight, I felt completely satisfied with the series, but also upset because I knew it would be a while before we would get more games like these. At pretty similar times, right after I finished replaying the franchise, both Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League were announced, and I became immediately interested in both. Even though the studio behind the core Arkham trilogy was making the latter, I was more interested in Gotham Knights.
I mentioned my love for Arkham Origins, a prequel made by WB Montreal, so I did not have any concern when it was announced they would have another project based on DC heroes. Then I saw that the game would feature Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Tim Drake’s Red Robin. The Bat-Family was well featured in the Arkham games and in the animated films and shows, but they are still secondary characters. I love each of them, so I was excited to spend time with them in the spotlight, as opposed to minor roles. Then it was announced that the main antagonist of Gotham Knights would be the Court of Owls. The Court of Owls is a narrative that hasn’t gotten a mainstream adaptation (although I pray every day that Matt Reeves tackles it with his iteration of Batman). The hype train was real for me, and as the game got closer to launch, all the gurus of the video game industry were concerned about it for a multitude of reasons, mostly a major game delay, a change to next-gen exclusivity, and an announcement that the game would max out at 30 frames per second. I still had faith that Gotham Knights would be a good game, but then I started playing it.
Let’s address these three issues first. I do not care about game delays all too much. I’d rather have a game release when it is ready, as opposed to rushing it to hit a deadline. With that said, I didn’t think Gotham Knights was buggy at all. It certainly had a more stable release than Arkham Origins, so I was satisfied on that front. I already owned an Xbox Series X, so the next-gen exclusivity is not an issue for me, but I know it is to a lot of my friends who haven’t gotten their hands on a next-gen console yet. Especially for a game that has co-op play, it is a decision that baffles me. Lastly, I do not care too much about frame rate, so 30fps doesn’t bother me. The game visually looks great, and I never experienced any frame rate drops. It doesn’t look game-changing, or as impressive as Arkham Knight looked when it came out, but it still looks great. Overall, I’m a pretty easy gamer to please, so none of the main issues bothered me. And still, I did not have a great experience with this game. Normally I like to start with the positives, but as I write this review, I can only think of the negatives. So I’m going to do the inverse. And be forewarned because I have significantly more negatives to say than positives.
My biggest gripe is that after the conclusion of the Arkham series, there is no reason this game couldn’t have been a sequel. At the end of Arkham Knight, Batman fakes his own death and retires. Nightwing, Jason Todd, Batgirl, and Red Robin are all established characters already. There is no need to set up this story as something completely separate. The setup to this game is that Batman dies (he is confirmed to be dead in the opening cutscene), and the Bat-Family have to figure out his death and close Batman’s last investigation (The Court of Owls). The Court wasn’t featured in the Arkham Series, so why not just make it a sequel or spinoff? Batman still leaves and retires, but he trusts his recruits to finish the last case he was working on. The only downside is that you would have to play by the rules of the existing universe and characters’ fates, but the only dead villains in the Arkham series are Black Mask, Joker, Poison Ivy, Ra’s Al Ghul, Talia Al Ghul, Solomon Grundy, Electrocutioner, Dr Hugo Strange, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang. The rest of Batman’s main foes are locked away in the GCPD, but people break out of there all the time! Not only that, but this is a perfect chance to highlight some other villains in the Batman story that aren’t as heavily featured, such as Hush (he did have a small side-story in Arkham City, but you could do the Riddler’s new form version), Calendar Man, Clock King, The Ventriloquist, The Phantasm, Prometheus, Joker’s Daughter, or even Damian Wayne. Heck, even throw in the Condiment King for kicks and giggles. Rather than highlight some of those characters, we just get another Talia Al Ghul fight, another Mr. Freeze fight, another Harley Quinn fight, and another Penguin story. I say that even as a Mr. Freeze stan. After beating the game, I see no reason this game couldn’t have been connected to the Arkham series, except for the lack of an actually dead Bruce Wayne, which I’ll get to later.
Gotham Knights’ next biggest detriment is combat. The Arkham series perfected combat, and many other games used a similar style (see: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War). While a similar style, the new combat takes away so many great elements that were incorporated into previous games. Rather than the flawless system we were left with, what we get is a butchered version where most of the time, all you’re doing is spamming the X button. What’s even worse is the complete eradication of stealth. Sure, you can still play stealthily, and I tried, but this game was not designed to be that way. I loved sneaking around as Batman and using silent takedowns, but this game has no interest in that. You can perform a silent takedown, but it requires way less planning than the previous games, and it isn’t as fun. For example, the only character you can do a stealth takedown from a gargoyle with is Red Robin, which is also only after you unlock it. Combat from past games turned from something perfect into something that without all the intelligence.
My biggest gripe with the game, on a similar note, is a pretty small detail that has some pretty big consequences. Gotham Knights introduces ranged attacks for each player. While it is a welcome addition, it is awfully executed. To perform a range attack, you press Y, the previous games’ Counter button. You no longer counter, but can only dodge with B. The problem with this control scheme is that the button for silent takedown is still the same, with Y. In the past games, the only two things Y did were silent takedowns and counters, which didn’t activate anything if there was no incoming attack. In no less than 20 times while playing Gotham Knights, I pushed Y for a silent takedown while it was prompted on the screen, and my character performed a ranged attack, which for all characters is a non-silent attack. So, while trying to remain stealthy, it wound up blowing my cover.
Moving on, the map in Gotham Knights is just kind of meh and uninspired. It has a lot of vague buildings with significantly less Easter eggs than the Gotham of Arkham Knight. It feels like an afterthought in the game’s development. There are also four main chunks of land, and they are all connected by a bridge. The only ways to travel to them are to fast travel (which you unlock maybe two hours into the game), or to use the bridges. You can drive around on the Batcycle, but the vehicle is remarkably slow and boring. You can pop a wheelie. Woohoo. There is literally a tutorial for popping a wheelie to get over obstacles, and I never once encountered an obstacle in the game. You can still use your grapple gun, but it is way less free than it was in the past games. There are fewer points, and the grapple system is way less polished. Plus, the only character that can do this is Batgirl. Nightwing gets a small jet glider, which is kind of cool, I guess, but the mid-grapple abilities for Red Hood and Red Robin are downright laughable. Traversing the city just isn’t fun like it was in the other games.
Each character feels pretty well-written for their personality, but it seems like the writers only know one thing about each character, and they annoy you with that one thing. I love the character of Red Hood, so I played most of the game with him, and every five minutes I got hit with a joke that Jason Todd was previously dead. You can switch characters, but only between night patrols. I did not realize until about halfway through the game, but I just wanted to stick with one character mostly. Experience points and level progress transfer to all characters, so you don’t have to level up each character, but you do have to earn new gear for each of them.
Speaking of level and gear progression, it is mind-numbingly simple. The game developers probably put as much time into crafting it as I did this sentence.
And speaking of mind-numbing, I found myself bored with this game frequently. It took a long time for me to get into the new game, but then I got very into it. And about two-thirds through, I found myself bored again. After you beat the game, you can continue to explore and patrol the city, but I don’t really want to. In previous games, it was fun to go back and find all the Easter eggs, but I don’t think any of the grinding will pay off in any sort of satisfying way. I don’t plan on selling my copy of the game, but I also am not sure the next time I will pick it back up.
Given there are four main characters, you can be any one of them at any given time. While I like that, some of the cutscenes really show that. There is an impersonal interaction, because every NPC performance has to make sense for each of the heroes. When everything has to conform to that, it loses all sense of individuality. On top of that, all the voice actors are fine, but there is no standout, either good or bad. That’s really a shame, because the Arkham series had some of the best voice casting in gaming history.
My final two gripes are story-related. The Court of Owls is completely wasted here. The game was always advertised around them being the antagonists, but really this is a League of Shadows game. The Court is only a disappointing backdrop. There is no depth or mystery to that storyline at all, so it really just feels like a wet fart. The game should have played out like a mystery and feel very reminiscent of Tom Cruise’s character in Eyes Wide Shut, but instead, it feels entirely surface-level. A great example of this is that the game opens with investigating the death of Dr. Kirk Langstrom. In this universe, he hasn’t become Man-Bat, but any Batman fan can link the two. And guess what. Man-Bat creatures are literally some of the final bosses! The ending has a lot more issues than just that, and it had me fuming for the last hour. I just wanted the game to end before it ruined itself any more. I’m not going to spoil any more of the ending, but DM me and we’ll talk more about it after you beat it.
This game just feels so out of place. There’s an excellent game in here somewhere, but this isn’t it. I would start by scrapping the open world element entirely. Make it a linear story, even if it is a sequel or spinoff to the Arkham games. At some points, I thought it would make a great Mortal Kombat-style game, like the two Injustice games, so I would have kind of liked that. At many points, I thought that maybe the Telltale route would have worked great. Or maybe a game that has a little more exploration than a standard Telltale Game, such as 2K’s The Quarry. Ultimately, I think the direction this game should have taken was to still use the Belfry as a hub, but from there you can upgrade characters and gear, interact with things and people for some backstory and character development, and use it as a mission launch center. You could follow the main story or side quests one mission at a time. I also wish the game recommended a hero to fight as during the missions. Red Hood is a brute, Batgirl is tech-savvy, Nightwing is acrobatic, and Red Robin is stealthy. Give us the opportunity to play as any of them, but recommend certain characters for certain missions types. Changing to this format would have helped the game dramatically for me.
I was prepared to talk about some positives when I started writing, but now I don’t really feel like it. My score is going to reflect a little higher than you might expect because there is still plenty to like. Two-thirds of the story is solid, the game is not very buggy at all (which is high praise in 2022), and it took me a little over 22 hours to beat (which, with my play style, is moderately completionist). All that has to count for something. I’ll play a sequel to this game if it comes out, but next time I’ll wait for a pretty deep discount (at least 50% off), or until it hits Game Pass. If you want to play this game, I still think it is worth spending some time, but certainly not at a $70 price point. If you happen to find it for $20, or if it’s on GamePass, you could certainly do worse with your time.
Grade 4/10
Gotham Knights is available on Xbox Series X, Playstation 5, and PC
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