Gotham Knights: Deluxe Edition (PS5)

Product Information

Assets also impress here. Again, this isn't generation-defining stuff but geometric density and texture resolution are both suitably high. The artwork here holds up well at close range and the game itself has a lot of asset variety, with key story areas showcasing very different interior stylings. If you just evaluated Gotham Knights on the interiors alone, it would seem like a very good-looking game. A lot of effort has clearly been expended to make these spaces look unique and attractive, with capable rendering technology combined with carefully-crafted artwork and visual design. We feel the same way about Gotham Knights as we do the city of Gotham: We wouldn’t want to live there, but we can absolutely visit. Oh look. We've stumbled into Aperture Science's Enrichment Center. Carol Pinchefsky/CNN Underscored

You and your buddy can choose to play different characters, or hey, even two Nightwings at the same time. Expect a four-player co-op mode called “Heroic Assault” on Nov. 29, 2022, available as a free update. But the story’s biggest issue is that it tries way too hard to squeeze an entire rogue’s gallery of potential suspects into its murder-mystery premise, and feels completely disorganized as a result. You spend most of the surprisingly short campaign’s eight story missions jumping from one villainous cabal to another, before arriving at a conclusion I was able to predict practically before the end of the opening credits. It’s devastating to see such an underwhelming plot unfold after the Arkham series included some of my favorite Batman stories of all time, which often left me speechless with their stirring twists and turns. Gotham Knights, by contrast, includes a masked character whose identity is immediately apparent upon first sight and whose inevitable unmasking is laughably anticlimactic. It’s followed up with an ending that’s foreshadowed so frequently and unsubtly that I involuntarily cringed when they actually went through with it. So, it’s disappointing, then, that you can’t swap characters while out on patrol — an omission that hinders the versatility of combat. We recommend spending as much time as you can spare on training. You will need it, particularly in the beginning. Travel around the city is primarily by Bat-grapnel. Unfortunately, it’s extremely twitchy, and the grapnel gun that allows us to latch onto buildings and catapult us across Gotham doesn’t always go where you aim the camera. Instead, it seems to grab onto the nearest anchor point — even if it’s off-screen, sometimes behind or below you. Our ability to crimefight using stealth was thwarted more than once when, rather than propel ourselves away from criminal activity, we sailed straight into it. Multiple times.

However, as Gotham Knights progresses and our protagonists level up and dry the wet behind their cowls, the game does come into its own. Gotham is also home to some of the more bland gameplay elements in Gotham Knights. A lot of the open-world gameplay consists of scanning for and defeating specific enemy types, which is a tedious sort of hide-and-seek exercise, given how sparse the criminal groups are. The batcycle also feels ponderously slow, taking too long to traverse the game's broad city streets. Secondly, Gotham Knights had issues with frame delivery. You'd see a mix of 16, 33, and 50 millisecond frames in general gameplay even when the overall frame-rate was pegged to 30fps. The game never really felt truly stable, with bizarre frame-time fluctuations that came as a byproduct of the studios' chosen frame-rate capping method. Finally, the game would occasionally chug with no clear driving factor, like in the train terminals where performance could inexplicably drop into the low 20s, frame-rate wise. Gotham Knights had some issues with bugs and general stability, and that extended to some baffling problems in select areas at times.

Most of the game involves doling out justice with our fists, and leveling our heroes isn’t just a way to become more powerful: It’s part of our emotional arc, to become a hero who can fill Batman’s bat-boots. Additionally, each character in Gotham Knights has an individual journey of self-discovery they take to learn about how they deal with death and life. These scenes bring out the best that the world of gaming and comic books has to offer. Nightwing wonders whatever happened to the band's front member, John Constantine? Carol Pinchefsky/CNN Underscored We’re looking forward to replaying Gotham Knights so we can note the differences in how our protagonists react to the same situations and marvel at the dialogue that we will eventually get to hear, given that every plot cutscene has four different scripts. CPU-based problems in traversal plagued the console versions of Gotham Knights. As you can see here, it's vastly improved in the current game. It really feels like the open world gameplay was designed around a different set of technical constraints, with a streaming system that would permit much faster traversal, a denser placement of in-game NPCs, and proper large-scale world events. You get the sense that there's some underlying hangup here - perhaps the game assets were designed with a lot of unique elements that made them difficult to stream, for instance, or possibly UE4 itself is throwing up some obstacles.

Gotham Knights: Deluxe

The world then shifts to daytime whenever we chillax in the Belfry. Finally, a Batman game that has daylight — even if we only see it through the Belfry’s windows. Each character comes with their own skill set and the signature combat of the Arkham games is also here, though the quality of combat animations has seen a noticeable drop in quality. It gets close to replicating the same smooth snappiness, yet something always feels wrong as if the combat moves are unfinished in design. Moreover, it gets repetitive to fight enemies, which is the game's biggest downfall. The Callisto Protocol, a horror-focused recent release, had similar issues regarding this. Another downside of the game is it feels like it was once a game-as-a-service title with a loot-focused design with mobile-like hideous UI. It just gets so exhausting to change equipment and it often breaks your immersion. Frame Rate Controversy Combat fatigue (see our What we didn’t like section below) can be mitigated by switching different characters, each with their own combat style. You can also encounter these missions differently, depending on the way you’ve upgraded your abilities. For example, you might want to switch over to Babs if you’re planning to do some light espionage and your current Batgirl can’t be seen by cameras. When your chosen character has enough experience to level up, happily, the other characters level too.