The four Gotham Knights must save the crime-ridden city without its most famous hero – because Batman is dead. Read our review to find out whether up-and-coming heroes stand a chance against Gotham”s criminal world and how much fun it is.
Can Gotham even exist without Batman? If you”ve only dealt with this question theoretically so far, you”ll have to do so practically in Gotham Knights: The legendary hero is killed in an epic battle scene right at the beginning of the game and blows up the Batcave along with all his equipment. Left behind is the stunned offspring of the hero, who now has to come to terms with the fact that shortly after Batman”s disappearance, Gotham”s streets are alive again, because the city”s criminal world promptly turns up the heat.
A good eleven years after the brilliant Batman action game Arkham City and seven after its still outstanding sequel Arkham Knight, expectations are naturally high. Arkham City even bagged a well-deserved 91 points in our 2011 test and combined an extensive open world with a thrilling story and crisp combat action. How far Gotham Knights manages to live up to this great role model, we will clarify in this test – but a little warning beforehand: It”s complicated.
Table of Contents
The Little Hero Quadruple
After a short introductory mission that explains the controls, combat, how to use the investigation interface and how to ride your Batcycle, you”ll land right in the middle of the action and break into the police station. Your heroes inherit the historic clock tower in the centre of the city as headquarters from the different Batman, where Batgirl already ruled over Gotham”s information as Oracle.
There you can equip your heroes at the Bat-Computer, award skill points received when leveling up and supply the new generation of knights with equipment. Background information in the form of case files, emails and profiles on all the important people, opponents and factions is available on top of that – assuming you”re in the mood for so much reading material in the first place.
You start your hero”s life and thus the night patrol as soon as you have chosen one of the four characters, equipped him or her and distributed ability points. All heroes rely on three talent trees that are available from the beginning of the game. These contain abilities for more power, more life or other practical effects, such as Batgirl”s hacking skills or Nightwing”s acrobatics.
By the way, you unlock two more talent trees during the course of the game through activities: swing abilities allow you to use different types of attacks such as armour piercing or armour crushing, knight abilities provide your heroes with unique skills such as Red Hood”s mystical pistol bullets, which he uses to shoot down several enemies at once. Knight skills must be unlocked individually for all heroes, while a new level generally applies to all four characters.
Excuse me, where are the gangsters here?
No sooner have you arrived in Gotham, which at first glance looks grandiose, than you go looking for trouble in the air or on the ground, just like Batman. Instead of the Batcycle on the ground, we almost only used the grappling gun for the swing from house to house, because it was faster and easier – apart from that, it”s more fun! By the way, as later knights your heroes get an individual flying ability, Batgirl for example glides through the night with her cape, while Red Hood jumps through the air thanks to mystical Lazarus Pit power, but you are not as freely mobile as in Arkham City.
On location, you decide whether to jump right into the action, silently take out enemies or shoot them from a distance. Don”t worry, the world and mission design will give even the quietest of players a sufficient sense of achievement. There are enough crawl shafts and the comprehensible patrol corridors leave enough room to scurry by unseen. In addition to experience points, you also beat clues about planned crimes or craft materials out of gang members, corrupt cops and professional criminals. These clues end up on your map for the coming night when you return to the bell tower at the end of your hero patrol.
There you”ll see where the more dangerous action is taking place in Gotham”s neighbourhoods in the form of crime challenges. Sometimes you”ll foil a bank robbery, a hack or a prisoner escape, sometimes you”ll rescue hostages chained to bombs from certain death, or clear out a criminal hideout for a much bigger reward. What still seems exciting and varied on the first few nights, however, quickly leads to a certain fatigue due to the repetitive course of the challenges and only becomes crisper through a higher difficulty level or completed bonus tasks.
Swinging out
Depending on the neighbourhood, you will mainly meet members of the faction residing there, who, apart from their characteristic appearance, differ in the weapons they use, the types of damage they inflict and their vulnerabilities. The elemental damage types Fire, Ice, Poison, Electric and Concussion give you an advantage in battle with the right weapon, as long as the corresponding effect triggers: Ice damage, for example, freezes your opponents and lets you deal out significantly more damage against Frozen, Fire and Poison cause damage over time and so on.
In addition, the right equipment increases your heroes” resistance to these types of damage, which you can create using the crafting system and resources you find. During our playthrough, however, it was enough to always produce the strongest possible equipment and improve it further with mods that can also be found. We didn”t need highly specialised equipment for different enemy groups, as the elemental damage didn”t trigger often enough to make a noticeable difference and the swing abilities were much more crucial to success.
Each successful attack fills your Heroes” momentum bar. With enough momentum you can break through your opponents” defences, use particularly strong attacks or scare them so much that they spontaneously stop wanting to fight. This makes for strategic variety in most fights! But there is a catch: if you don”t succeed in hitting them, it can take a long time to build up enough momentum for a new powerful swing, which is particularly annoying in long boss fights.
Because then you are left with the standard tactic: hit with light or heavy blows and dodge until the momentum bar is sufficiently charged. Cool swing attacks such as armour piercing or area effects are therefore far too rare – at least when you”re alone.
Balling, bosses and balance
In co-op, the strengths of your heroes still seem rather unbalanced. Red Hood in particular clears up the entire mob of enemies in ranged combat, while Batgirl or Robin are still on their way to the fight – we tried it out. The only way to avoid frustration is to make arrangements with your team members.
The only bright spot is the grandiose technical implementation of the co-op function, we rarely had an easier time playing with friends! The all too uniform boss fights are annoying, especially in single-player mode. The mostly multiple enemies focus strongly on your hero and leave you little room for your own strong punch combinations due to interruptions and ground effects.
Even on the easiest difficulty level, the bosses hardly receive any of the boom you dish out, but on normal difficulty you eat up all the more damage. Too often you”ll find yourself in front of bullet sponges with a life bar a mile long, which also call out to waves of buddies.
This feels like the boss fight design is still geared towards co-op play, while the rest of the game world is built for single player – the development team should urgently revisit this. Especially in the final fight in the main story, but also in the final fights of the rogue stories, a lot of frustration could be avoided.
A city between the fronts
After the “how”, let”s get back to the “where” and “why”: Besides investigating Batman”s latest case, Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin and Red Hood are also struggling with plenty of problems of their own and have to follow in the outsized footsteps of their dead mentor. A new network of informants is needed, you can”t do it without better equipment and finally there are a lot of crimes to thwart, if you don”t stumble into a big conspiracy.
Thanks to old allies like butler Alfred, inventor genius Lucius Fox and the upright Detective Montoya, the four of them are not completely alone. You get to know other allies in the course of the game and support them in side missions, but these NPCs remain very interchangeable due to a lack of insight into their motivations and lives.
Besides the aforementioned crime gangs, several supervillains and a nasty secret organisation wrestle for power in the city, while the police are totally overworked. In general, most cops don”t want to have anything to do with our masked heroes since Commissioner Gordon”s death, the new police chief would like to get rid of vigilantes altogether and puts plenty of obstacles in their way.
More heroes, more problems
Not a good starting point for our group of four, all of them have their own baggage from the past to carry in addition to Bruce Wayne”s death – Batgirl, for example, is still very much in mourning for her late father, Red Hood is struggling with his resurrection. With well-known enemies like Ra”s al Ghul, his daughter Talia, their nasty Assassin League as well as Gotham”s very own parade of villains like the Penguin, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, the Council of Owls and Harley Quinn, the development team delivers a lot of familiarity and creates a proper Batman feeling.
Especially the many side conversations of our up-and-coming heroes in the bell tower as well as the mail traffic of our hero team show the love for detail. However, much more room for character development apart from the short background missions would have made it easier to really sympathise with the fate of the four. The main story also doesn”t really make it easy to love Gotham Knights: After a successful introduction to the scenario, an arc of tension builds up over several main missions until a brilliant climax.
Then a crash follows and really drags the story down in terms of credibility and narrative tempo. Especially the abruptly brought about ending disappoints with an all too predictable twist that would have been more exciting even in any comic from the sixties. Compared to Arkham City, Gotham Knights feels like a mountain of loose ends despite palpable potential, with too much focus on action and not enough on story-heavy side missions that are sorely needed for immersion.
Life desperately wanted
All non-fans are left out in the cold with the sheer mass of names, background references and the rather meagre explanations. During the main story about Gotham”s fate, as well as in the villain side quests, you get a rough idea of what you”re up against – but nothing more.
The texts, audio recordings and other snippets of information that can be found in the instanced, often very winding mission areas don”t help either. On the one hand, the amount of information is manageable, and on the other hand, you can”t get to it after the mission if you miss it in the heat of the moment.
The same problem Gotham has as a backdrop for the entire adventure. From above and during the first few hours of play, the city looks fantastic: Steam billows up from the streets, neon lighting at night illuminates the chicly designed landmarks and the mix of styles of the buildings fits perfectly with the staging from movies, comics and TV series. The environmental design, however, only superficially scratches the dystopian character of Gotham.
Most of the time you are on the move on almost deserted streets and are also fooled by the sound of the city, for example when a deserted bar sounds as if it is filled to capacity or police sirens can be heard again and again without there being a car chase.
Hakelike and uniform
The open game world offers quite a bit of variety away from the crimes, as is typical for the genre, but doesn”t go beyond the standard that stretches the game time: several collecting tasks, in which you pick up lost baterangs, scan graffiti art or search for book pages, let you rummage through the map from top to bottom.
There are also some challenges for hero skills, flying skills and the Batcycle, you also break into guarded server rooms to plant false information about Batman”s identity or search for secret hiding places. The development team doesn”t give you anything creative to do like the Riddler puzzles from Arkham City.
Another shortcoming of the open game world we noticed during battles, when many enemy abilities and moving enemies have to be displayed at the same time as the entire Gotham. Although 60 FPS is possible on the PC, there are noticeable frame drops, especially when there are a lot of effects going on at the same time – stupid when you should better avoid attacks at that moment! Despite the generally well-implemented mouse and keyboard controls, the game reacts rather sluggishly to inputs at such moments, so that abilities that can be triggered by tapping briefly only work if repeated several times.
More for the side
Did we enjoy the game despite its rough edges? Yes, because swinging through the city as a masked avenger is fast-paced, the battles remain varied thanks to the different hero specialisations, and your opponents level up fairly. Those who venture into Gotham”s streets for an hour or two in the evening will notice the quickly repetitive mission types much less than frequent players. Without the sometimes tiring boss fights, the empty game world and the main story, which deteriorates considerably towards the end, Gotham Knights would certainly have been good for more than just entertaining side entertainment.
Editorial conclusion
The playthrough event had me really hyped, I also really enjoyed the first few hours in Gotham Knights as I explored Gotham and learned to deal with my favourites Batgirl and Red Hood – yes, Nightwing and Robin, I like you guys too, but the other two just more! After the first twenty-minute boss fight, however, I was a bit disillusioned and hoped that this was just a slip-up. It wasn”t, and at the latest after the fiftieth prevented challenge crime I had the dull feeling of somehow being stuck in a time warp.
Yet there are a lot of good approaches in Gotham Knights: I am thrilled by the smooth co-op system and the joint crime-busting, I also like the different handling of my hero squad. The quiet tones between the characters away from the fights are also well done for my taste.
If it weren”t for all the little problems that really make me wonder if the development team didn”t forget halfway through what”s really fun about a single-player experience! Especially in the boss fights, I unpacked swear words I didn”t even know I still knew – and should I dare a second playthrough, I won”t tackle those without the help of friends. It”s just better for my blood pressure.
