3/5 ★ – Batman_Beware's review of Gotham Knights.

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. Anyone who’s been following me would know that. But at nearly every turn the game felt determined to make me not like it. First let’s talk about the combat. The combat is a pretty basic brawler with a dedicated dodge button. Think of the Assassin’s Creed RPG games or Insomniac’s Spider-Man. When you take on the basic level enemies like the freaks and the mob it’s actually kinda fun at first. But over time it gets incredibly repetitive. And then every faction has their own version of the brute type. They’re all basically the same with no alternative strategy involved. Land a heavy attack to break their guard, keep attacking and then dodge their chain of piercing attacks. When they start adding in the regulators with their drones and dropping explosives from them is when it starts getting really annoying. And then after that they introduce the Court of Owls’ Talons which are feral zombie assassins basically. With these enemies the only way you can attack them is by dealing elemental damage via range attacks or your momentum abilities. You have to be quick after you do this though because they only have a limited time before they recover and are no longer susceptible to your attacks. Later on they introduce the Hunter Talons which show up like one time in the main story and are basically a better version of the talons. They can hit you with darts that deal lasting elemental damage such as poison. And probably the most annoying enemies in the game are The League of Shadows Assassins and their brute type The Rocketeers. The Assassins after you deal damage to them via momentum abilities or heavy/normal attacks will vanish into smoke and teleport somewhere else. Sometimes they take a while to reappear so if that’s the last enemy you just have to wait for them to show themselves. Once you see them you can finish them off. The Rocketeers like the name suggests wield an ancient like rocket launcher. They shoot them in quick succession so if you get hit by the first one you’ll more than likely get hit by the 2nd one. Land heavy attacks and keep wailing on them to get them out of the fight early because you’ll regret it if you don’t. The last type of enemy is a mini boss like the brutes that are Mutated Man-Bats. This isn’t Kirk Langstrom unfortunately or any specific character. The Man-Bat will fly towards you in a spinning move to try and deal some significant damage. Once you can actually attack them do so and eventually he’ll fly around the battlefield and summon Assassins and Rocketeers. The Man-Bat’s also have an unblockable Sonic screech that no matter where you are will hit you. Moves like that in this game really frustrated me. Even if you do everything right there’s still attacks that will hurt you no matter what. I really found the combat to have a lot of style but not nearly any substance. It’s flashy and looks nice sure but when you’re actually playing you can’t help but realize how bare bones and bland the combat really is. Now onto the stealth. Unfortunately there’s not much to talk about when it comes to the stealth in this game because it’s not at all a priority in the game’s design. There’s only 1 mission in the entire game’s main story that requires you to use stealth and that really sucks. The game’s stealth mechanics boil down to 3 takedowns: Silent Takedowns, Ambush takedowns which initiate a combat encounter if there’s still enemies in the area and aerial attacks which are basically the glide kick or pounce attack from the Arkham games. And aside from Robin’s inverted takedown and a couple other skills you can unlock for him that’s about it when it comes to the stealth. They use security cameras as an obstacle way too often in this game and if I knew that beforehand I would’ve just gotten Batgirl’s hacking ability so I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Next the detective side of the game. Again, there’s not much to talk about when it comes to this. You use the AR to scan the crime scene and sometimes you’ll have to follow a blood trail or other times you just have to connect evidence. I found this to be really uninspired and much worse than previous Batman games. Telltale did a much better job at making you feel like you were actually solving it, all the clues weren’t right in front of you. If you fail to correctly connect the right evidence nothing happens by the way unlike what they said prior to release. If you get it wrong you just have to try again. If you fail it enough times the game will give you hint and then eventually you can skip to the solution. The open world is something I thought would be a real strong suit for this game, and boy was I wrong. The city has nothing in it that makes me want to explore, there’s barely any civilians in the city and the design of the city itself is not that great. Each district does not feel distinct and I found myself multiple times saying “wasn’t I here already?” How you unlock Fast Travel is one of the dumbest decisions this game made and is worse than even some Ubisoft games. You have to scan every drone in the area and some drones have shields so you have to wait for them to land on the charging pad and then you can scan them and you have to do that for like 8 different fast travel points in the city. The crimes in the game that appear randomly are so generic and boring and when you stop the same illegal hack crime for the 10th time you’re going to get really tired of the game’s terrible open world design. The open world also has some challenges like caches that give you XP, trials for the different traversal and the Batcycle and a few others. The ones I mentioned are fine but they really just pad the open world and aren’t that fun. Instead of having more villain side missions they opted for these instead which is incredibly disappointing. The villain arcs were also disappointing. Harley’s is ok but some of the missions don’t even involve her and are just doing crimes and challenges against The Freaks. Mr. Freeze’s was fine but not a real stand out and Clayface didn’t do anything for me either. The story is where this game really disappointed me. The Court of Owls were hyped up for years as the main villains of their next game and it was a huge letdown. They do have a couple missions that were genuinely good even if I had to push through several combat encounters that dragged it down for me, but when the Court of Owls are the focus this game has a lot of potential. But even with that they squandered it. A few story choices that I really didn’t like was not even acknowledging the fact that Dick Grayson was supposed to be a member of the Court of Owls. On top of that, his Grandfather William Cobb was nowhere to be found in this game and that was the boss fight I personally was anticipating the most. Even Lincoln March isn’t in the game and is instead replaced by Jacob Kane, Bruce’s uncle, as the voice of the Court of Owls. There is no boss fight with him either you just go to Kane Industries, Storm his building and hand him over to the police. Which brings me to my next point: Talia Al Ghul and The League of Shadows. That’s right The League of Shadows not the League of Assassins. Talia is basically the main antagonist of the game. With her father Ra’s al Ghul dead and burned to ashes, she became the new Head of the Demon and was in charge of them the entire time. It’s a twist that’s supposed to surprise you but I saw it coming from the beginning. Damian Wayne is also not present in this game which was another disappointment. Bruce Wayne at the end comes back resurrected by The League to command the army with Talia and so you have to fight him. The boss fight is ok but in comparison to the final boss you’ll wish it was the end of the game. Talia Al Ghul is the final boss of Gotham Knights and it’s one of the worst final bosses I’ve played in a game. The first stage of her fight is a series of unblockable attacks that you can’t do anything about but dodge and get a few hits in before she starts her moves again. It’s a painful boss fight that I wish wasn’t in the game and that’s just the first stage. The 2nd and final stage is just as bad but she wields a mystical sword that covers a lot of ground with her swipes. She can also teleport right in front of you, giving you no time to react. I also found that the Lazarus pools around the fight actually hurt you and there’s so many around you. So when Talia is in the pool herself all you can do is fire ranged attacks or momentum abilities. And how the game ends is worse than any Arkham game or Telltale Batman game. Bruce after being resurrected goes into the Batwing and kills himself AGAIN to destroy the kazurus pit instead of getting out of the Batwing before it blows up. He very easily could’ve remote controlled it or self destructed it, there’s no way Bruce wouldn’t have that contingency planned. And then whoever you play as at the end becomes the new Dark Knight and addresses the city. They tease a sequel with The Court of Owls still being at the center of everything but honestly I hope it doesn’t happen. This game was such a huge disappointment and while there are bright spots, they’re so few and far between for me to even consider it an ok game. One more thing I need to talk about is how the story itself is such a complete disconnect from the gameplay itself. The story is all about family but you can play this entire game by yourself. I played most of it by myself so I got barely any character to character moments between the Knights. Aside from the Belfry, the Knights only interact with each other after Bruce’s funeral and that’s it. What they should’ve done is had 3 AI partners with you like Guardians of the Galaxy and let you switch between them whenever you feel like it. That way it would truly feel like the theme that they were going for would really reflect in the gameplay. So in conclusion, I really didn’t like Gotham Knights and I’m really disappointed in almost every facet of the game. I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to anyone, even if you’re a huge Batman fan like myself. I really expected better from WB Games Montreal after Arkham Origins and I worry for their next game, if it even happens after this.