Gotham Knights answers the question “Would Batman games be as good without Batman?” with: “No”
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^ Stay tuned after the announcements for our great review chat, featuring loads of lovely images from each version of the game.
Aside from its performance issues, which are annoying but potentially solvable and hardly a deal breaker, gotham knightsThe biggest sin is that it just doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. And for a game that boldly kills Batman in the first two minutes, that’s pretty amazing.
It’s not all bad: there are some good ideas scattered around. Occupying The Belfry between missions gives the game a nice overall pace, allowing you to spend time with the characters in some heartwarming scenes that fill in the backstory (although, note of caution, these bits are laser-aimed at fans of Arrowverse, a group of people who would inject mediocrity as the heroine if possible). The investigation game mode also has some nifty touches, like micro-examining people’s workspaces and personal technology.
It also tells a useful story set in a new version of the Batverse, which is separate from the Arkham universe, and ties the pieces of the terrain together through expositions (and its built-in familiarity with DC characters as someone existing in the 21st century). it’s a nice look.
But the things an open-word superhero game should live and die, traverse and combat, are just a bit of a snare. It’s canned video game soup. Familiar, fine if there is nothing else, but impossible to get excited about. No one is going to spend an entire day at work wanting to spend some time on this, any more than anyone wants to open a can of Heinz minestrone soup. And, to repeat the point: that’s a shocking state of affairs for a game where the central theme is that Batman is dead and his children are dealing with his legacy.
It’s very possible, and I suspect likely, that a performance patch will materialize at some point, putting an end to this nonsense that it’s so brilliantly next-gen that it couldn’t run without a 30fps cap (it doesn’t do anything remotely that could not have been achieved in the PS4 era). So if that was the main issue, I wouldn’t be too worried about Gotham Knights – optimization can always come in a post-launch patch. But no amount of patching can fix the aggressive blandness in its core.
gotham knights is available starting tomorrow on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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