Play Your Heart Out: “Gotham Knights”

“Gotham Knights” is an action role-playing game featuring the DC comic characters Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, and Red Hood. In the story, Batman is now dead, which is shown in the opening cutscene. Therefore, the four protagonists are left with the mess Batman couldn’t clean up: facing the crime and crime lords of Gotham in this DC storyline. Though this is not a sequel to any previous games, it is the spiritual successor to the Batman Arkham trilogy that was released on previous generation consoles. The previous three Batman games were made by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. However, this game was developed by WB games Montreal and is published by Warner Bros.

“Gotham Knights” is playable only on the Playstation 5, Xbox Series S/X, and Microsoft Windows platforms. It is one of the few current generation games that is available only on current platforms.

It is vastly different from the Batman Arkham games, as well. There is an online co-op mode, an element the Batman games didn’t have. The combat is similar to Arkham though there are no stringing of attacks – you either tap the attack button for a quick attack or hold it in for a strong attack. You can miss an attack. Meanwhile,  in the Batman games, attacks flowed sequentially as well as counters that didn’t miss.  So, this is more of a brawling combat system than a flowing dance.

The four protagonists can only be used one at a time, which is somewhat obvious for this gaming style. Each character earns experience for beating opponents and finishing objectives. Once you are about 2 to 3 hours into the game, at home base,  you can freely switch characters among the four. You don’t have to level up each character individually, they all accrue experience at the same time equally ( including the characters you don’t use.)

The graphics are very good. The frame rate on my console did not dip. Also, there is a lot of detail in the environments. In addition, the map of Gotham is a rather large one, bigger than the Batman Arkham games.

I had a lot of fun playing this game for a few hours. I was not able to finish the game completely and review it, but I did play it enough to realize that it is a high quality game, with good gameplay, voice-acting, story, and character mechanics. The actual full game is rumored to be at least 30 hours. It is very likely that I will finish this game because it is so much fun.

I give this game a 9/10 rating.