2/5 ★ – ysobh's review of Gotham Knights.

The thing is Gotham Knights’ issues were deal-breakers from the start. “No one asked for this” was the predominant thought in my head as I played through the sorry excuse of poorly strung together copy-pasted missions that Gotham Knights calls a campaign. No one asked for the follow-up to the seminal Arkham series to be this mess. No one asked for WB Montreal to abandon their good ideas in Arkham Origins to make the division but with a Batman reskin. You see, even if you fixed Gotham Knights’ glaring issues, it would still be bad because the initial idea was bad. It may be unfair to compare Gotham Knights to the Arkham game, and admittedly the Arkham games are in a whole other dimension when it comes to quality. It is obvious that Gotham Knights was gearing towards a live service looter crowd but backed out when it saw what happened to Marvel’s Avengers, hell you can see the stitch marks in the game where the “Go Grind and come back later” parts were meant to be. Yet all this doesn’t explain the game’s issues. Like okay, the combat is repetitive, and the gear system is shit and all the missions are a variation of on go-to icon on map and kick some cunts around until we tell you to stop but that is all par for the course in these sorts of games. Why the hell does the game look like utter shit? Why is the open world barren and empty? The game that kept popping into my head the more I played Gotham Knights was not any of the Arkham Games or any other superhero game, not even Marvel’s Avengers, it was weirdly enough the original division. Most of the issues I have with Gotham Knights are the same things that made me loathe the original division, hell they are even more compounded here as the division was a boring piece of shit but it didn’t drag with it one of my favourite IPs in the process. The division though put some effort into the grind wheel at least looking nice while Gotham Knight just feels hollow and cynical, it feels like the cheap Chinese plastic toy version of not only the Arkham games but of the shitty live service looter shooter genre it was trying to piggyback off its success. You can criticize pretty much every single aspect of Gotham Knight, I don’t think there is a single facet of design this game passes at, from the combat being weightless to the contextual as-hell stealth and how bad the traversal mechanics are but I think the most damning critique you can give to Gotham Knights is that it left behind one of the most influential combat models of all time in the Arkham-free flow combat in order to have a combat system that is as homogenized as everything else in the game. It cut off everything that could have made it unique to be exactly like everything else and I don’t think there is a worse fate than that in the AAA market. In order to balance the previous peddling session, some things I like about Gotham Knights: The patrol mechanics are really cool and should be expanded upon in future games, I enjoyed the group dynamic of the Knights are roleplaying them as an actual team with everyone going on specific sorts of missions based on their age, experience and skill set and I did really enjoy Nightwing and especially Red hood, I found them fleshed out with back stories that are shown via implication rather than random documents and audio logs. Other than that yeah, I had a lot of fun picking apart the game more than I actually had playing it so that probably tells you everything