Gotham Knights: Deluxe Edition (PS5)

Product Information

The very best aspect of Gotham Knights is the character development, particularly the cutscenes. We get to know the people behind the cowls, and they’re all fun to hang out with — even Red Hood, who is more self-aware than you would expect from a bruiser like him. Nightwing wonders whatever happened to the band's front member, John Constantine? Carol Pinchefsky/CNN Underscored Gotham Knights lets you play co-op with a buddy, if you have a compatible system. In our case, because we were using PS5 consoles, we both needed a PlayStation Plus account. It worked seamlessly. Explore and Fight Crime in an Open-World Gotham City – Patrol the dark streets of five distinct boroughs in a dynamic, interactive Gotham using a variety of traversal abilities and heroic combat moves, as well as the iconic Batcycle. From street-level crimefighting to face-offs with iconic DC Super-Villains, save the city from descent into chaos.

We particularly enjoyed the hat tips to the DC Universe sprinkled throughout the game, including John Constantine’s punk band, Mucous Membrane, and Zatanna’s father, Zatara. Then there’s Otisburg. Otisburg! And if the name “Dr. Kirk Langstrom” sounds familiar, it’s because in the comics, he’s the villain Man-Bat. DC Comics fans will be satisfied with the presentation of the characters and the storyline, even as Gotham Knights tells its own tale. Consider this a Just Imagine or Elseworlds story. 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. Play as a New Guard of DC Super Heroes – Step into the roles of Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin and shape Gotham’s newest protector to create your own version of the Dark Knight. To summarise the graphics of this release, we should take a look at the 2015 release Arkham Knight, a game that was developed for past-generation consoles. Ideally, Gotham Knights should look substantially better than a 7-year-old game, yet the art direction and graphical fidelity of the previous title are unmatched. The city of Gotham feels so empty, lifeless and dull in comparison with its sparse details, it's a tremendous disappointment. The game also does a poor job of guiding the player so they have a good first impression of the type of main and side content they will experience. Elden Ring, on the other hand, despite its difficulty, is exceptionally good at playing with player expectations.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. The real killer croc in the room is that Gotham Knights is not the beloved Batman: Arkham series (Asylum, City, Origins and Knight), which was famously developed with rhythm in mind and innovated some of the most fluid combat in the history of gaming. Compared to Arkham — and frankly, most video games — combat here is bland. 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. We first investigate the demise of Dr. Kirk Langstrom. Thanks to help from our augmented reality (AR) tech, we uncover clues that ultimately lead us to our shadowy nemeses, the Court of Owls. Insert warning music here.

I also couldn't find any downgrades to the game's ray tracing, which is present on PS5 and Series X. RT still makes significant use of screen-space information when available, and distant geometry is often absent from the BVH structure, but the resolution of the RT is relatively high. What seems to have happened with Gotham Knights then is genuine optimisation, particularly on the CPU side. Open-world traversal, where the launch release suffered most, is also very stable. Long stretches run at a perfect 30fps, even when speeding through Gotham City on the Batcycle. I can't say it's completely perfect - one-off dropped frames can pop up, though not more often than every few minutes or so. For all practical purposes, open world gameplay just hugs that 30fps update. The opening bike chase, which is possibly the most consistently demanding scene in the entire game, provides a helpful illustration. The updated PS5 code is almost a flat line here, with just a handful of dropped frames through the entire sequence, while the launch version goes on a bit of a frame-time rollercoaster ride. There are extended dips, sharp stutters, and plenty of 16 millisecond frames sprinkled in for good measure on that original code. The new version brings a night-and-day improvement, and is ultimately a much more enjoyable experience.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. Whilst we will do everything we can to meet the delivery times above, there may be factors outside of our control and we cannot guarantee delivery within this time frame.

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. If you think you have to be at the Belfry’s craft station to craft gear and items, you would be mistaken — as we were throughout most of the game. However, you do need to return home to equip them. 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. 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.

About This Game

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. Our caped crusading is made more difficult with the appearance of enemies like Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze and the Penguin. Since our ally Commissioner Jim Gordon (Barbara’s father) is also dead, the police are openly hostile to us. Still, if we’re tough and determined enough, we can foil the Court’s dastardly plans for Gotham. Insert strigiformophobia here. Gotham Knights also suffers from performance issues that range from amusing bugs to annoying hindrances, the most grave of which is that the framerate. On the Xbox Series X, a stable 30fps was a rarity, especially when out in Gotham’s open world or during cutscenes – and God forbid I ride on my motorcycle for any amount of time. I’m not one to turn up my nose at a 30fps game versus 60 (which isn’t available here) and generally don’t need a game to be God’s gift to Digital Foundry to enjoy it, but Gotham Knights is pretty rough in this regard. That’s another disappointment when so many other aspects, like graphics, animations, and more, look quite good.

The open world - and travelling through it - also caused big problems for Xbox consoles. Although not perfect, it's still a vast improvement. Gotham Knights is a good game, and we had a lot of fun playing it. It isn’t, however, a great game, and its shortcomings are disappointing. Its engaging story is marred by issues that other games have solved for years. But despite a myriad of problems, ultimately it did more right than wrong. So, buy it if you’re a fan of the Bat Family. Otherwise, wait for it on sale.Our co-op player, ZensPath, proves that Nightwing's glider is overpowered, right before he flies away to Star City. Jeremy Powers/ZensPath 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. Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) may take longer to reach you. Even though there are 12 types of premeditated crimes, the actual combat can be boiled down into one word: meh. There are only minor differences between the gangs and hoodlums that need taking down (and the dialogue from gangs and passersby can be repetitive or even ridiculous). Extra challenges, such as defeating two foes at once — a game mechanic swiped whole from Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man — make the game less repetitious but might not suit the play style of the character you’re currently with. 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