A tale of two cities.
At which point there is a rumbling, or perhaps just a dignified electrical hum.
Gotham Knights review
I love a concealed door.
I absolutely cannot get enough of them.
And testify: this is one of the ways thatGotham Knightshas made me pretty happy.
Nobody else can touch it.
What is all this sweet work worth?
Batman’s dead, baby!
He doesn’t make it through the opening cut-scene.
I love the Court of Owls.
It’s a secret society that controls everything but has tricked people into thinking that it doesn’t exist.
It’s a conspiracy theory, centuries old.
It’s a playground rhyme of questionable provenance.
How do you punch that?
But we’ll get to that.
We’ll take our time.
Because Gotham Knights takes its time to get to the Court too.
Firstly, you absolutely do not play as Batman.
Instead of Batman, you get aspects of him.
Robin is angled towards stealth, when he isn’t spinning his bo staff at enemies.
Red Hood is a heavy brawler who also shoots people with non-lethal guns.
Nightwing’s also completely brilliant to hang out with, but we’ll get to that.
Yes, I missed Batman.
Mainly I missed his cape, allowing for flying and swooping around the city.
I missed his stately menace when moving, too.
Batman, particularly in the first Arkham adventure, made for a more close-up superhero game.
Actually, let’s talk about combat here.
Arkham would stop everything for combat: the camera moved, and then the mob gathered around tight.
Batman sort of rolled between foes, whacking one, then another, then another.
It was oddly democratic brawling.
This doesn’t really work in Gotham Knights, and it took me a while to realise why.
For a large part of the game at least, brawls have moved from set-piece to filler.
This is because it’s almost always folded into action here.
Here, they’re just part of the flow of combat.
I’ll be stealthy until I get spotted.
In a way it reminds me of the classic Halo encounter: whack, whack, then anything goes.
Elemental attacks are something to think about.
The map itself is a bit of a downer - at least on the surface.
Landmark buildings stand out somewhat awkwardly as they’re lavished with care but mounted in neighborhoods of filler real-estate.
(Granted, it would hardly be the first time a superhero outing has made that calculation.)
Over time though I did start to see the beauty in it a bit.
A crime scene puzzle here, an armoured car encounter there.
Long after the campaign is done, I’m still playing this stuff.
But crucially, this is only half the city.
To return to a favourite quote, there is another world, but it is in this one.
Here come the owls again.
What a muddle this game is.
But also this: the truth is I often had fun with Gotham Knights.
And I always looked forward to coming back to it.
In retrospect it makes a little more sense.
But some of them are loot!
And you could also craft more loot.
It’s been fun to dabble in co-op too.
This online mode is absolutely packed with Batgirls currently.
All this is fun.
And we have to open his emails.
I will admit, I had never thought about Dick Grayson very much.
But it turns out he’s brilliant.
(That’s right!
Reading his emails has been one of my happiest memories in games for years.
It seems like such a small thing to remark on, and it is.
Fine, here he is talking to the Penguin about the current mission.
Here he is worrying about resources, or what the Court is up to and how deep it goes.
The underlining of themes.
Actually, Grayson isn’t alone in this.
Like the Court of Owls, this strange unlikely charm underpins everything.
Maybe they don’t get the budget they need for a truly vibrant open-world.
Maybe they don’t get the time to polish the combat and stop people slipping around on the floor.
Maybe they have to trade the Batmobile for a bike.
But they can add charm.
