Developed by WB Montréal, Gotham Knights is a game that has been on my radar since its announcement, and with its release on October 21st, 2022, I finally got to get my hands on it. Despite the infuriation around the internet, I still managed to find some love in this game, so with that being said, let’s get into the Gotham Knights review.

The fundamental gameplay and combat mechanics on display in Gotham Knights is surprisingly perfect. When in battle there’s little to nothing that can stop the immersion of feeling like a true Knight of Gotham. The search for the Court of Owls keeps you entangled in the game at all times, having you face off against numerous types of enemies and memorable villains. One thing this game does perfectly is upgrades, in the form of modchips. I’ll be the first to admit,  when first seeing videos of this surface online, it looked like a confusing disaster. It wasn’t until I really used it myself that I realize how simple it was. While you may have a cluster of mods at a given time making it look like a mess, a core part of the gameplay is fusing these mods to craft better ones, with the minimum being four to fuse. That being said you could probably picture how fast that long list of disgruntled numbers would turn into your perfect crime-fighting loadout. 

Gotham Knights – Protection in the Gotham Darkness

One thing that I’ve seen quite a lot of people complaining about is the voice acting, and let me assure you, it’s not a problem. The only real complaint I can bring to the table is that Red Hood’s dialogue feels extremely forced at times, almost as if his lines were recorded last minute with no context of how the dialogue is going to be used. Other than that the relationship between the bat family, including Alfred, is a part of this game truly shines. You can almost feel all of their pain and guilt after the loss of Bruce Wayne, with all of them taking the loss differently.

Unfortunately where this game truly begins to lack is the performance. I’m sure you can find numerous with the same issue in seconds, but for context, I am running the game with an RTX 3070, an 8-core i7, and 16 GB of RAM. While I wouldn’t call my pc high-end by any means, I’ve never had an issue running a single-player open-world game at over 60 FPS (Frames-Per-Second). Gotham Knights, on the other hand, was struggling to break past 45 FPS. This wouldn’t be all that odd if I was using the maximum setting available, but the game includes a graphical auto-detect to find what works best on your personal device. After countless attempts of changing various settings and even changing them all to low (still couldn’t pass 50 FPS), I realized the issue wasn’t with my hardware, but the game itself. Twitter user @AlexBrangwin shared this photo of the game’s performance while running with an RTX 4090 and 64 GB of RAM.

Following the success of the Arkham series, Gotham Knights had fans on their side from the very beginning. Unfortunately, they were unable to capitalize on the recent success of Batman media and ultimately gave us a project that just doesn’t feel right to have the issues it does in this generation of gaming.

6/10

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