Aside from its performance issues, which are annoying but potentially fixable and hardly a dealbreaker, Gotham Knights’ biggest sin is that it just doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. And for a game which boldly kills the Batman in the first two minutes, that’s pretty astonishing. It’s not all bad: there are some nice ideas dotted around. Occupying The Belfry between missions gives the game a nice overall pace, allowing you to spend time with the characters in some touching, backstory filling cutscenes (though, note of caution, these bits are laser-targeted at Arrowverse fans, a group of people who would inject mediocrity like heroin were it possible). The investigation gameplay also has a few neat touches, like the micro-examination of people’s workspaces and personal tech. It also tells a serviceable story set in a new take on the Batverse, which is separate to the Arkham universe, and piecing together the lay of the land via exposition drops (and your built-in familiarity with DC’s characters as someone who exists in the 21st century) is an enjoyable aspect. But the things that an open-word superhero game should live and die on, traversal and combat, are just a bit bobbins. It’s canned videogame soup. Familiar, fine if there’s nothing else, but impossible to get excited about. Nobody’s going to spend a whole day of work looking forward to sinking some time into this, in the same way that nobody ever looks forward to cracking open a tin of Heinz minestrone. And, to repeat the point: that’s a shocking state of affairs for a game where the core theme is that Batman is dead and his children are grappling with his legacy. It’s very possible, and I suspect likely, that a performance patch will materialise at some point, putting to bed this nonsense about it being so blisteringly next gen that it couldn’t possibly operate without a 30fps cap (it doesn’t remotely do anything that couldn’t have been achieved in the PS4 era). So, if that was the chief issue, I wouldn’t be too concerned about Gotham Knights: optimisation can always come in a post-release patch. But no amount of patching can fix the aggressive blandness at its core.. Gotham Knights is available from tomorrow on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
