Review: Gotham Knights explained to parents

What parents need to know

Gotham Knights is an action, 3D adventure game featuring the following 4 characters: Batgirl, Robin, Nightwing, Red Hood from the Batman universes of DC Comics. The game is playable with a single player, and we alternate between the protagonists as the adventure progresses.

You play as one of the 4 heroes mentioned above and you go to various places in the open world to defeat many enemies.

You can move around the huge city with a grappling hook to hang on to the different buildings or by motorcycle (batcycle) on the road.

To change characters, you have to go to the Belfry (pronounced Belfree) which is the headquarters of the 4 Gotham Knights and Alfred, Batman’s butler.

The game is composed of 4 phases:

Investigation, combat, infiltration, exploration

Details

Release date: October 21, 2022

Developed by: WB Games Montreal
Published by: Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment
Available on: PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), Xbox Series, and Playstation 5 (tested version)

Game Type: 3D Action/Adventure
Themes: Combat, DC comics movie
Average duration of a game: 30 minutes
Total game lifespan: Unknown at the moment? 10-20 hours probably

Business model: Need to buy the game once.
Then it is possible to buy the characters, costumes, and other bonuses separately.

Languages available: French and English in particular
Number of players:
1-2 players online

Available in physical (disc) or digital format (download to console or computer)

Game provided by the publisher for review. It does not influence our opinion.

Violence, fear, nudity?

The game includes many scenes of violence with fighting, pistol fire, machine guns, rocket launchers. Blood, violence.

Minimum reading level required

Lots of reading for documenting attacks in particular.

Language level used

Presence of insults, provocations, threats. Coarse language

Positive message

Superheroes who save the city, but all problems are solved by fighting.

Difficulty

Several levels of difficulty are present to adapt to different players

Minimum level of execution on the controller required

Requires a lot of execution to defeat some fights. A little difficult to handle for those who have never played. A good margin of progress to improve. Many advanced techniques will satisfy veterans. Requires moving in a 3D environment by moving the camera simultaneously. Many combinations of buttons for combat.

Additional costs ?

It is possible to buy characters, costumes, and other bonuses separately.

Our opinion

Version 2.0

Since version 2.0 of the game released on December 13, 2022, the game is MUCH more enjoyable to play. Bugs are much rarer, the grappling hook clings to the right place, the fights are decent, the icons on the map remain displayed. Now, we can recommend the game to DC Comics and Batman fans, but at a low price… There are still many flaws listed below. It is mostly an action game, exploring the city with lots and lots of fights. It’s very repetitive, but it can be entertaining.

Version 1.0

The acting is beautiful, very well animated, the voice actors or acting performance are very good. There are constantly plenty of light effects, rain, all at the same time. The work on this side is impressive.

On the other hand, necessarily with all its effects, it has an impact on the performance of the game. It runs at 30 frames per second instead of 60 frames per second, as is the standard for action games.

Moreover, the game even drops below 30 frames per second during certain motorcycle phases.

Here’s a list of things that don’t work because there are far too many:

The fight

When you press a button, each character takes 1.2 whole seconds to complete his attack. It should be much less to have a better feeling of blow.

The impacts of the blows are very badly rendered. It doesn’t feel like you’re hitting anything. Only Robin has pretty decent stick shots, but still too long.

The shots are too repetitive and not interesting.

When you hit your opponent, your character will suddenly jump on another opponent for no reason.

The camera rotates randomly for no reason. And as soon as it turns, an enemy comes to hit you. You have to constantly reframe it to see the action. The 4 heroes are not different enough, nor interesting.

The characters are soft, not pleasant at all to control. It doesn’t feel like they live in the world, they float, get stuck in the walls. We do not feel the race, the walking of the characters, they do not seem anchored in the ground.

You will start the first battles of the game by facing 4-5 enemies, and suddenly your next fight will be against 30 enemies at once?! Bosses have 100 times more life than normal enemies. It makes boss fights way too long and laborious for nothing.

Exploration

The city is huge, for nothing. It is empty. We move between cubes and straight cobblestones. We are asked to detect crimes with sonar. They appear and disappear after 3 seconds, there is no way to follow them again. If you’re lucky, you have to open the map and mark them on top to get there. The grappling hook is not pleasant, the animations are good but not fluid, neither fast, nor pleasant, nor well connected to each other.

The character takes THREE seconds to jump!! You have to hold the jump button to jump after a race. You remember the jumps in 1995 with Tomb Raider 1 on PC, Playstation 1. IT’S THE SAME.

When you aim with the grappling hook and you throw it, and well…. sometimes it doesn’t take you where you aimed !! It works 80% of the time, but to do the tests in limited time, you will rage on the precision.

You can get lost in town especially at the time of the tutorials and have NO indicator either on the radar or on the map, to know how to continue the game.

The tutorial is really badly fucked, the button icons are not clear, the instructions are not clear. Some buttons do not work to validate the different steps.

The buildings are empty inside, there is nothing to do except activate switches, open chests and defeat enemy generators. Their architectures are also based on cubes and straight pads.

…

Do I have to continue?

There is nothing that goes….

Looks like a demo of a future game. It’s nice to drive through the pretty city by motorbike, but it’s empty. It’s like exploring the free-to-play Matrix game that was demonstrating a game engine.

Investigations

Investigations are useless, incomprehensible and slow down action.

When you are spotted in an infiltration phase, there is no way to hide and drop the alert unless you move away for miles, which is impossible indoors. Enemies will continue to follow you everywhere, like robots.

Online adventure mode

The online mode offers in theory to do the adventure with another person. When you choose to play with strangers does not offer to choose your partner, it is just random. So we come across anyone, we don’t know if they want to play or not, how they want to play.

Note that it is possible to play with a friend.

You have to unlock the online mode after a few hours of play.

It is difficult to select your mission, or to understand how to launch it. The game requires you to do a lot of unnecessary fights in the city, in a repetitive way to build experience. The operation of modules that improve costumes.

“Crafting”

There’s too much stuff in this game! There’s even crafting! Crafting consists of collecting a lot of objects, in order to create another object. In this game, we create the costumes in this way. Why do we need crafting in a Batman game?

You lose various random crafting pieces when you die…

What a waste! Gotham Knights had EVERYTHING to succeed! Superb license, great artists, animators, comedians, programmers, game designers, audio designer…

All the ingredients! They are just put in any way, in any direction. The ambition and scope of this project should have been greatly reduced.

I don’t understand why WB Games Montreal, which had so much trouble making a Batman game with one character, thought: “we’re going to make a game with FOUR characters, in a huge city, with an online mode”