Gotham Knights Deluxe Edition [Xbox]
Developed by WB Games Montréal, Gotham Knights follows four of Batman’s closest allies as they try to restore justice to Gotham City after tragedy strikes. Beginning with a brilliant introductory cutscene wherein Batman and Ra’s al Ghul face off in their toughest battle yet, culminating in the demise of Batman and his foe. We then go on to meet the new guards of Gotham, the Gotham Knights. You can play as Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin, each equipped with their own unique skills and abilities, as well as costumes and equipment.
The story follows the Knights as they investigate the chain of events that led up to Batman’s death - and dealing with the growing number of criminals overtaking Gotham in his absence. You’ve got a list of tasks that can be brought up at any time, with storyline based objectives, villain specific questlines, side activities as well as tasks for dealing with different enemy factions. The Story missions remain the same across all characters, with only slight adjustments with the cutscenes, and some interactions between the characters themselves. Various crimes will appear across the map, from a selection such as Witnesses under Attack and Armed Robberies, with a set number available to be completed before refreshing the next night (aka, when you return to the Belfry), where you’ll receive a rundown of the prior night’s stats.
An interesting gameplay element that could have been better utilised is the ability to investigate crime scenes in the world to uncover evidence and search for clues. Using AR Targeting, a visual-highlight ability that will make evidence more visible, you can find out more about just what has occurred at a crime scene. Sadly, these tasks feel very shallow, requiring you to only glance over a few items before the crime is essentially solved - leading you to a further location to defeat the enemies. Making these require a bit more effort and problem solving - maybe along the lines of the Riddler Trophies in the Arkham series - would have made them feel more enjoyable and worthwhile.
Getting around the map feels quite stunted, with transportation limited to the Batcycle - which can be summoned when near roads - or grappling hook, until you unlock character specific options a little later into the game. Sadly these all feel quite unnatural, with the Batcycle being quite rigid, and coming to a complete stop when you bump into other vehicles. Great safety feature for heroes, but not at all realistic - and makes driving around the city feel really bland as a result. The grappling hook is awkward too, with no glide option upon release. Instead you’ll just grapple to a specific point, and then grapple again when you get near - which wouldn’t feel as bad if you could glide between, or if it was as smooth as Spider-Man’s web-slinging, but it’s just not.
Visually, Gotham Knights is beautiful with a sprawling city highlighted with neon hues and some absolutely stunning lighting. The heroes have great designs, with a variety of costumes available to you - and these can be further customised with different colour schemes; however enemies are a little disappointing, with a fairly standard rogues gallery available: Harley Quinn, Penguin, Dr. Freeze to name a few, but aside from the Court of Owls, these are all extremely familiar faces, and normal thug enemies are a bit boring after a while too - so it would have been nice to see more of the less common foes of the DC Universe (even if it was in addition to the usual big bads). The soundtrack is decent, but one specific moment truly shone - with Livin’ La Vida Loca being used to absolute perfection.
To get upgrades for your costumes and weapons, you use what’s called Salvage: materials you’ll pick up in random drops upon defeating enemies., as well as from caches and more This seems to be wildly convoluted, and looking at the wall of numbers within the crafting screen can feel a tad overwhelming due to the sheer volume of (slightly) different options available to you. This could have been implemented in a far simpler way, even making Costumes a collectible of sorts to find around the map. The in-game collectibles feel quite lacking, with things to find like Batarangs located on buildings, or a bunch of Secret Caches to find. The caches at least require a little bit of effort to open up, but once you’ve done one, they’re pretty much all the same and quickly become repetitive - even though you’ll find them all super fast since there’s only a handful of them.
Naturally it’s going to be different from the Arkham games, as those were primarily done by a different studio - but it is hard to not draw comparisons. It’s a game we both really wanted to love - especially being big fans of DC - but it just doesn’t quite feel like it measures up to our expectations. Don’t get me wrong, you can still have fun with it - but it feels extremely grindy after a while, and even with the addition of Heroic Assault mode, a 4-player co-op arena, there’s not a lot that’s calling for us to get back into it long-term. If you want to check out Gotham Knights, you can pick it up for £64.99 for the base game, and an extra £15 for a total of £79.99 for the Deluxe Edition, which nets you the Visionary Pack (some extra salvage, skin variants, etc) alongside the main game. They are however on sale for the next 13 days (at time of posting) for 50% off the base game, and the Visionary Pack is available for a tenner too, so you can pick up the pair for £42.48: a much more palatable price.
In the end, we decided to give Gotham Knights the Collecting Asylum rating of 7/10.
Are you interested in Gotham Knights? What do you think of it?
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- V x
Thank you to Warner Bros. Games for the Gotham Knights Deluxe Edition Xbox review code!
