Stop me if you've heard this one before, Batman is dead. Its been done better before, twice in recent memory: Batman RIP/reborn and Batman: Endgame/Superheavy. Both of these featured major character shake ups which explored the different aspects of Batman's archetypical character. In Gotham Knights Batman's death causes the "batfam" to look vaguely indifferent sometimes, while mostly being inoffensive quipsters. Being a modern Batman property Gotham Knights forsakes any interest in the world of Gotham: its strange architecture, its mysterious villains, and its storied history- a glaring omission considering that the Court is the secret Gotham historical society. Instead you just get a nice filed down version of the four main characters who speak in robotic platitudes while fighting interchangeable brutes.
This sort of laziness permeates the whole game, if there is one silver lining here is that its made me appricate Batman Arkham Knight even more. Its easy to assume that kind of power fantasy game is easy to make since the focus is primarily on "batman factor" rather then any difficulty itself, but Gotham Knights manages to take all of Arkham Knight's mechanics and make them worse.
The RPG systems make your character feel pointlessly weak- "Sorry Batgirl this random freak thug is x levels higher then you so you do chip damage to it compared to the one you fought 5 minutes ago", the focus on contextual animations makes everything feel slow and unresponsive, the stealth arenas have been greatly simplified, you have no gadgets for puzzle solving or combat, the driving is anemic, and roof top traversal is dull without the Arkham games signature glide. Even things as incidental as the idle grunt dialog are worse having been turned from a fun way to add not only jokes, but references, lore, and plot depth in the city traversal downtime. Have now just been turned into a very unfunny joke dispenser in the small amount of time spent canvassing combat arenas. There is a near infinite number of tiny flaws which build up to make a game that is just slow and tiring, while Arkham Knight was fast and snappy.
By the time you get out of the tutorial the game basically reveals its hand, to unlock the actual linear in-door plot levels you will have grind through a bunch of cut-n-paste filler (save the hostages, save the armored car, protect the cops ect) until the game lets you progress, and this is on top of all the randomly generated crimes you can fight in order to grind and stay leveled up for story missions. At this point I have no interest in playing an endlessly generated skinner box of bare minimum functional gameplay. Off to the recycle bin you go.
This sort of laziness permeates the whole game, if there is one silver lining here is that its made me appricate Batman Arkham Knight even more. Its easy to assume that kind of power fantasy game is easy to make since the focus is primarily on "batman factor" rather then any difficulty itself, but Gotham Knights manages to take all of Arkham Knight's mechanics and make them worse.
The RPG systems make your character feel pointlessly weak- "Sorry Batgirl this random freak thug is x levels higher then you so you do chip damage to it compared to the one you fought 5 minutes ago", the focus on contextual animations makes everything feel slow and unresponsive, the stealth arenas have been greatly simplified, you have no gadgets for puzzle solving or combat, the driving is anemic, and roof top traversal is dull without the Arkham games signature glide. Even things as incidental as the idle grunt dialog are worse having been turned from a fun way to add not only jokes, but references, lore, and plot depth in the city traversal downtime. Have now just been turned into a very unfunny joke dispenser in the small amount of time spent canvassing combat arenas. There is a near infinite number of tiny flaws which build up to make a game that is just slow and tiring, while Arkham Knight was fast and snappy.
By the time you get out of the tutorial the game basically reveals its hand, to unlock the actual linear in-door plot levels you will have grind through a bunch of cut-n-paste filler (save the hostages, save the armored car, protect the cops ect) until the game lets you progress, and this is on top of all the randomly generated crimes you can fight in order to grind and stay leveled up for story missions. At this point I have no interest in playing an endlessly generated skinner box of bare minimum functional gameplay. Off to the recycle bin you go.