Gotham Knights Batkids Pretend But Never Make It

The trailer for Warner Bros. Games’ Gotham Knights presented a pretty simple concept: what would Gotham City look like without Batman? How would the Dark Knight’s various protégés function in this grim city? The answer is very, it turns out. Please Brucie, come back to me!

Let me start by saying I didn’t make it to the end of the Gotham Knights story so I assume this is an ongoing review. I won’t score it for that reason, but to be honest I don’t think I’m going to finish this game because I don’t really want to. I don’t want to keep playing Gotham Knights, even for the benefit of GamesBeat’s readers, because it’s one of the most desperately un-fun stuff I’ve played all year.

The story is simple: After Batman’s death, his four adopted children – Dick “Nightwing” Grayson, Jason “Red Hood” Todd, Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon and Tim “Robin” Drake – come together to take over his job. They face several of Batman’s classic villains, including Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, the Penguin and the mysterious new threat called Court of Owls.

The hero Gotham has…

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first, if only because this review will mostly be bad stuff. Gotham City looks cool, the layout is inspired by real life New York City. It is also, as always, hell. But it’s a much brighter, livelier hellhole than in previous games. It also has real civilians for the Gotham Knights to defend and protect – many of them in fact.

A funny feature of Gotham City being so densely populated is that ordinary people can and will walk within a few feet of criminals at work or one of the knights, without acknowledging it or reacting in any way. In any other game I would call this poorly implemented AI. In Gotham, however, I fully believe that every citizen lives by the mantra “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”.

While the gameplay between the four protagonists is largely the same – the same combos, the same ranged and melee options, etc. – their individual skills have a unique flavor. Nightwing will provide some sparks, or Red Hood can fire on one enemy with both guns. They also have slightly different abilities, such as Robin gaining the early ability to use stealth attacks against mini-bosses. I wish the protagonists felt more different. Maybe I like them better then.

… but not the one who deserves it

If I can attribute Gotham Knights’ troubles to one source, it’s the pace. Everything about it is much slower than it should be, from the action to the traversal to the story. Locking the game at 30 FPS is just one of the proofs of this problem, but it’s a huge problem. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by years of 60 FPS action games – including the Arkham games, which I can’t help but make comparisons with – but this framerate just doesn’t feel workable with a game like this.

The gameplay is almost unbearably slow. Each punch and kick lands with minimal impact, and the combos feel like the signals from my fingers travel to the characters at the speed of a maple syrup drop. Since almost everything in the game is a punch/kick-fest, this isn’t optimal. You can also only perform stealth takedowns at ground level, meaning you can’t get people into the rafters like Batman did in Arkham. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem, except that the removal animations are excruciatingly long and increase the chances of you significantly warning the other enemies.

Here’s an example: There are two ways to traverse Gotham. One is by using grab guns to basically zipline from point to point. The other is to jump on the Batcycle and go through the streets. Both methods lack any kind of fluidity or speed. The grappling hook is chaotic about where you grab – more times than I can count I would run in one direction and, when I pressed the grapple button, my character would zip to a point somewhere behind me. The Batcycle appears in the street in front of the character, forcing them to run up to it, climb on it, and then ride.

Again, I try to keep comparisons to the Arkham series to a reasonable minimum. But I never thought I’d miss the days of summoning the Batmobile and watching Batman dramatically dive into the cockpit without me asking. Because that was fast anyway. Riding the Batcycle is another boredom exercise. The game puts white smoke trails on all sides of the screen to give the illusion that the player is moving fast, but in practice it feels like I’m crawling through the streets of Gotham.

How many protégés does one bat need?

It’s not just in literal speed that the game picks up the pace. Gotham Knights has a crafting system that allows you to build and upgrade various parts of their kit. My first words when I saw it: “What the hell bullshit?” There is no location in the multiverse where I would need a Batman game to have a suit system. Having different suits to unlock and wear is one thing. But having the kids make incremental upgrades for their suits and weapons, and have to see if something is two points higher in armor points is beyond annoying.

As for the story, I’m not sure there’s much I can talk about. Just as the gameplay is slow and boring, all the characters are boring and flat. The four protagonists barely get a chance to show any character, and their dialogue is generic at best. Even the villains don’t seem particularly excited to be here. I don’t blame the actors – they couldn’t have done much with the wafer-thin lines they were given.

An odd addition is an email system that basically allows the knights to get flavor texts from other DC characters. These could be great heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman, other members of their superhero teams, their close friends, etc. It begs the question of why these people don’t actually visit Gotham City and help them – gameplay wise it would be impractical, but why bother? in that case bring up their existence?

This actually causes a number of problems. Why isn’t Dick Grayson back in Bludhaven? Where is Tim’s father? Why isn’t Batwoman there to help her cousin’s kids? I won’t spoil any of the game’s story beats, but I will say that another major figure in Batman’s lore is also revealed (almost casually) to be dead, and Gotham Knights hardly deigns to acknowledge this.

nocturnal it

In case I hadn’t made it clear already, I really didn’t like Gotham Knights. It lacks the speed, flow and character of previous Batman games, and the action-oriented gameplay is crippled by the 30 FPS lock. It became such an exercise in boredom that I couldn’t bring myself to continue playing – and as I wasn’t ready, I’m leaving a score at the end of this review.

Maybe there is a DC fan who really wants to see villains like Clayface and the Court of Owls in a game and who might get more of this experience than I do. But I think everyone can safely skip Gotham Knights.

Gotham Knights launches on October 21 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Warner Bros. Games has given GamesBeat a code for this review.