Gotham Knights Trip Report (Patreon)

I’ve been playing Gotham Knights in short bursts on the PlayStation 5 for the past week or so. I haven’t finished the game, and I don’t think I’m going to, so here’s what I’ve seen so far as a sort of “Trip Report” from my first… I don’t know, 7-10 hours with the game? I kinda jammed this out on my phone this morning so I’m going to guess that auto-correct created a few typos along the way. I’ll stream some of the PS5 and PC versions when we reconvene on Friday morning.

Have you heard the news? Batman is dead! Yes, after a long, drawn-out introductory cutscene, Bruce Wayne bites it in an attempt to stop Ra’s al Ghul. The Batcave is destroyed in the process, leaving a team of remaining heroes to literally pick up the pieces. Gotham Knights deals with the aftermath of that battle as you attempt to piece together what Batman was looking for on his last case while also attempting to contain a Gotham City that’s on the verge of boiling over. The cops hate you, the criminals ain’t scared of you, and  hey, who the hell are you, anyway?

You get four character choices: Red Hood, Robin, Nightwing, and Batgirl. You can switch between them more or less whenever you like with little penalty, as characters will all level up in unison. Also, the differences between the characters feel minor and mostly stat-based from my time with it so far. The combat system is largely identical between characters so everyone has light-and-heavy ranged and melee attacks. Everyone can dodge, everyone can “aim down sights” for precision ranged attacks, and so on.

The game tries to differentiate the four characters with language like “sharpshooter” for Red Hood and implies that Batgirl is good against single targets… which doesn’t actually sound great considering most of the time you’re brawling with like seven dudes at once. In practice, there are things on the skill tree that do differentiate players, and this seems like something that might matter more in co-op games, which, pre-release, I wasn’t really able to see. While reading up on it just now I discovered that it’s two-player co-op and not four-player co-op, which just made me shake my head and say “whaaaaat?” I figured the way the game’s spaces felt big, open, and empty was because all four of the characters would be in action simultaneously. Apparently not!

Playing alone, Robin seems like the right choice, as he has stuff on the skill tree that makes stealth easier. Like “enemies take 20% longer to notice you” easier. Since some parts of the game require stealth, this is where I settled after initially spending time with Red Hood, who is very gruff and has guns.  The differences between characters feel very minimal to me, but perhaps they’ve got endgame traits that matter more or something.

By day you’re in the Belfry, a home base where you can talk to the other characters about how much you miss Batman or feel lost without him or whatever. There’s one scene with Alfred trying to finish his last game of chess with Batman by guessing what Bruce would do that comes off as especially corny. The Belfry also houses a Spy Hunter arcade cabinet, allowing you to play a weirdly janky port of the arcade game whenever you like. At any point you can leave to start patrol duty for the night.

Once on the streets you’ll see map icons for random crimes, premeditated crimes, story missions, and so on. The world feels weirdly empty and extremely large. You’ll primarily get from place to place by either riding the batcycle or using your grappling line, which lets you connect and zip to a point ahead of you. While reeling in you can hit the jump button to leap forward and, hopefully, find something else to grapple on. Sometimes there just… isn’t. I ran into plenty situations where I zipped ahead and, with nothing ahead of me to zip to next, the game just automatically attached me to a tall building off to the side, stopping all my momentum and wasting a ton of time. It just doesn’t feel like a great traversal system. The bike is more straightforward but, on PS5 at least, has zero sense of speed and is an absolute bore to drive. I’m curious to see the game running at higher frame rates on PC to see if that changes anything. Over time you will gain the ability to unlock fast travel points but this requires you to go there first and scan drones, a task best done while on the way to go do something else, ideally while muttering “well at least I’ll never have to drive all the way out here ever again” to yourself.

The combat feels like a simplified take on the Arkham style. It’s easy to bop around between a group of targets, occasionally tapping the dodge button when one of them finally winds up an attack. You’ll find a lot of shooters and Molotov throwers in big groups, giving you another reason to dodge. Enemies with shields require you to open them up with a hard melee attack, done by holding down the melee button. But this rhythm of attack, dodge, attack some more should feel pretty familiar to you by now. As you take damage you can push right on the D pad to use a medkit for instant recovery, but you have a limited number of kits before you’ll have to return to the Belfry to restock and move the story forward.

You can end your night by returning to the Belfry at any point. If you’ve already completed the main missions, this is what allows the story to progress, opening up new main missions on the map the next time you patrol and replacing all the random crimes with more of the exact same random crimes but in new locations.

Killing enemies gets you XP as well as crafting materials, which come in like ten or so different types and lead to situations where, upon completing a wave of enemies, you just see that you received 1,700 or whatever random icon that just was. Dying causes you to lose a percentage of your crafting materials. Each character has three slots to equip—suit, melee weapon, and ranged weapon. You’ll collect or craft these items and they’ll have different elemental affinities in some cases, as well as basic stats and bonuses like crit chance. Some pieces have slots on them, allowing you to install modchips that confer further numbers upon your already existing numbers. You’ll get different colors for some of your costumes and some suits will also have different hood or arm choices, if you want to do some light visual configuration. You can also just swap to a default look, if that’s more your speed. Gotham Knights only barely feels like a loot game at the onset. All the pieces are there, but none of the items I’ve acquired feel like they actually make a difference beyond making sure that a basic “power” number keeps going up.

Visually, I think there are some good skyline shots and seeing Gotham City from a distance, from above can look pretty cool, at times. Closer to the ground it loses that and just feels like generic wet roads with generic crimes happening on top of them. The frame rate on PS5 mostly sticks around 30, though it has its occasional dips. The game seems to use the PS5 “resume activity” function, but it doesn’t appear to get you in-game much faster as you still have to sit through all the same copyright notices and logo builds regardless of how you start the game. As of this writing I also have to sit through a timed message about flashing lights each time the game starts up, which seems like someone forgot to only force on first boot or something.

I like the idea of trying to retrace Bruce Wayne’s final investigation and figuring out who lies at the heart of a deep conspiracy. And the way a lot of the classic Batman characters react when, say, Robin shows up to a meeting instead of Batman, allows for some interesting moments and confrontations. If anything about Gotham Knights was going to keep me playing Gotham Knights, it’d be this. But these fleeting moments are wrapped around a loot game with boring loot, a Batman game with a weak take on Batman combat, and a Gotham City with nothing going on.

Also, if you saw it back when some previews ran, there’s a scene where, inexplicably, a really shitty cover of Livin’ La Vida Loca plays as you fight your way out of a prison? While it’s probably there in an attempt to add a little more Harley Quinn-like RaNdOmNess to the proceedings, it just feels out of place, given the rest of the game’s general tone. Also also! The way people keep talking about Batman being dead and how heavily they lay that on makes me suspect that they’ll find a way to resurrect him by the end of the game. I don’t know if  I have the will or true desire to see this one all the way through, so that’s just a guess.

I’m left a little torn on this one, as I do want to see how it runs on PC, but I’m not enjoying it enough to actually start over and play through all the early game stuff again just to see it through. But also the sluggish movement and frame rate stuff of the PS5 version makes playing it there feel like a real drag. Either way I don’t think what I’ve seen of this one so far adds up to a recommendation beyond “I don’t think this is something you’d want to spend $70 on.”