Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights boasts a seriously stacked cast of supporting characters all brought to life by an impressive group of voice actors.

While Freeze sadly doesn’t make incredible puns like that one in Gotham Knights, he’s certainly one of the game’s most intimidating villains as well as one of the biggest threats to post-Batman Gotham. Keane has popped up in everything from House of Cards and Ray Donovan to The Gilded Age and Dopesick. You’d probably expect The Penguin to immediately step up and become the crime lord of Gotham now that Batman’s dead, but his role in the game is a bit more complicated than that. Brian Keane certainly assumes the role of Clayface quite nicely in Gotham Knights. Mylène Dinh-Robic’s voice will probably sound very familiar to gamers thanks to her recent appearance in 2021’s Guardians of the Galaxy game as Meredith Quill. In a game all about people stepping up to fill some big shoes, it’s fitting that Talia Al Ghul has a major role to play in Gotham Knights. While Gotham Knight‘s heroes worried that Alfred wouldn’t know what to do with himself without Bruce Wayne in his life, it turns out that he’s more than willing to assume a similar role for Gotham’s new heroes. Red Hood’s path to becoming one of Gotham Knight‘s playable protagonists has been interesting, to say the least. Nightwing has been honing his craft for quite some time, and his skills are certainly being put to the test now that Batman is going. Video game-wise, he most recently played Arokkeh in Horizon Forbidden West and has previously lent voicework to titles like Ghost of Tsushima. Of course, it’s the voices of those characters as much as their faces that really sell how much they belong to be the stars of an unlikely Gotham adventure. While some fans balked at those creative decisions, it’s certainly nice to see Batgirl patrolling the streets of Gotham again.

Gotham Knights is a co-op-centric caped adventure that made my interest Wayne thanks to poor combat, a transparently predictable mystery, and grueling ...

Unfortunately, combat in Gotham Knights is one of the worst parts about it – and that’s not a great thing to have to say about a game that’s virtually all about combat. Even if running around Gotham in two-player co-op can be decent fun and each of the four playable crime fighters are well executed in their dialogue and distinctive moves, too many of the fundamentals fall short for me to recommend it. Gotham Knights also suffers from performance issues that range from amusing bugs to annoying hindrances, the most grave of which is that the framerate. Gotham Knights does have a New Game+ option, so you could definitely take your hard-won loadout with you to a tougher version of the campaign… At its best, dishing out justice is merely boring as you repeat the same attacks and wait for your special ability meter to charge up and enemy health bars to whittle down (yes, they have health bars over their heads); at its worst, it’s actively frustrating as you’re hit by attacks that seem almost impossible to dodge and don’t feel like you have full control of your character. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played but if you were hoping for a return to the smooth, incredibly fine-tuned brawls of the Arkham series, you’re in for a rude awakening when you’re smacked in the face with the simple and underwhelming substitute that sits at the center of this disappointing adventure. As you gain XP and level up, you’ll acquire new weapons and armor, mod components, and crafting schematics to aid your power creep, but unless you’re extremely lucky or willing to grind a whole lot of repeatable crimes in Gotham’s open world, you’re unlikely to have much power over what you’re able to use or craft because drops aren’t frequent or targetable enough to organically build the character you want to play. Really, my only major complaint with swapping characters is that each character has to unlock their abilities and be geared up individually, so the longer I played as one the less feasible it was to actually switch to someone else – I’d have to stop making progress to catch up one character and unlock all their special abilities before proceeding. One key difference is that here you get to play as your choice of the four mostly lovable heroes (Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin) as you zip around an open-world Gotham, delivering justice to all manner of superstitious cowards and unraveling a troubling mystery in the iconic city’s murky streets. It doesn’t help that the oddly brief campaign is padded out with busywork, like repeated sections where you have to wander around Gotham interrogating a string of different criminal factions headed by everyone from Harley Quinn to Mr. But when you’re stealthily grappling from ledge to ledge, crawling through ventilation shafts, and beating up groups of criminals in a rhythmic combat system, it’s impossible not to compare it to the vastly superior Arkham games. Like Bruce Wayne it was born to a well-respected and rich family, in this case the four third-person action games in the Arkham series.

Travel around Gotham not riding a bike, but flying, teleporting, and gliding through the air.

The requirements are the same for all four, but you’ll have to repeat them for each hero. In order for those to show up, of course, you need to interrogate criminals to see what they’re planning in future nights. Remember, crimes you learn about through interrogation mostly take place during the next night, though they can sometimes lead to discovering active crimes during the current night. The bad news is that you’ll have to unlock it for each of them separately. Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin, and Red Hood each require the completion of their Knighthood quest in order to earn those upgrades. You can cue a jump to get a boost of speed and travel some distance once you reach your destination, but that’s about it.