Gotham Knights was recently released by Warner Bro. Games on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Players are able to follow an original story with the Batman Family looking to protect Gotham after the death of Batman. Throughout the game, you are able to choose between Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin as you solve mysteries and fight crime solo or with a pal via online co-op. Warner Bro. Games was kind enough to provide me with a PC code of the game, but the thoughts below are my own. You can purchase your copy from your preferred retailers including Xbox (affiliate link) and GameStop (affiliate link).
I’m sure a lot of you have already read and/or watched quite a bit of news regarding Gotham Knights. The hard decisions for the game start even before you purchase the game. Do you want to play on console or do you want to possibly get 60+ frames per second (fps). This was tough for me when Warner Bro. Games reached out to me. I was planning on getting it on Xbox but then they announced that the game would be locked to 30fps on console and that was not going to fly with me. Luckily, my machine has a Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 2060, and 16GB of RAM which falls between the listed minimum and recommended specs on Steam for 1080p and getting 60fps. I have a lot of thoughts regarding Gotham Knights.
Let’s start with the things I think the team got right. I haven’t completed the story yet, but what I have done has been really nice. The writing is solid, the voice work is fantastic, etc. I wasn’t sure about the voice cast since I love the cast from the Arkham games, but I actually really dig the new cast and their performances. Another positive is that I like the fact you can choose which of the four characters you want to play as, and you’re not hard locked into that choice. There are some aspects to each character that is unique as well. For instance, Batgirl can do some hacking while Robin can make it easier to use stealth. There are also a lot of customization options for graphics and controls to really help it be more to your liking. You can also customize each character’s costumes to some degree which is fun. Finally, I do have fun playing this game. There are times when I really can’t wait to get home and play some more Gotham Knights.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad with Gotham Knights, and it started before launch. As I already mentioned, the console versions were announced to be locked to 30fps instead of having a Performance Mode that lowers visual quality to bump fps. This already disappointed a lot of fans including myself. Then, after launch, I saw several headlines and online posts talking about how even the latest GPU, an RTX 4090, couldn’t get the game to run at a stable 60fps. What the heck is going on? Well, I played around with some settings on my rig, and then I used the optimize feature in NVIDIA GeForce Experience. NVIDIA recommended that I run most settings on Highest and turn off raytracing and set DLSS to balanced. I tried lowering the settings to Medium, turning on raytracing and setting DLSS to performance, and it didn’t run as well. I do want to note as well that I run the game at 1440p. On the NVIDIA settings, I range from about 45-60fps with the average probably around the 50fps mark.
At first, this seems extremely reasonable given my specs and normally I wouldn’t complain. However, I am bothered by the fact that according to NVIDIA, Task Manager, and HWMonitor, I only utilize about 40-60% of my GPU and CPU (except in loading screens when those numbers jump way up) at any given point of the game. This would jump up if I had raytracing turned on to about 80%-ish. I feel like a game should either be giving me more FPS at that usage or it should be using more of my GPU and CPU. Am I crazy? Also, the game will lag and stutter in single player with no change to CPU or GPU usage. This makes me honestly believe that the game is poorly optimized and I’ll talk more about this towards the end.
While we’re talking about graphics, I think it’s worth it to see how Gotham Knights compares to the last big Batman game from 2015, Arkham Knight. I’ll be honest, when I loaded up Gotham Knights, I was stunned by the graphics for a couple minutes, and the more I saw of it, the more I was disappointed. It looks maybe a hair better than Arkham Knight in some circumstances, but for the most part it looks the same or sometimes even worse than a seven year old game using Unreal Engine 3 (Gotham Knights uses Unreal Engine 4). Here’s a video comparing the two games and you can make the call for yourself.
My hope is that the team is able to use patches in order to optimize the graphics, and if the recent presets are to go by, then there’s a decent chance! I also have a sneaking suspicion that the 30fps cap on console is related to the lack of optimization. This makes me hope that in the future consoles will get patched with the ability to have a performance mode or something.
That’s enough about graphics. Let’s talk gameplay. There are several aspects I want to touch on here. First, yes, you can choose from four different characters to play as and you can even change between them. To me, it felt more like there are two different characters. Batgirl, Nightwing, and Robin all feel very similar. Now, their ability trees do make them a little unique as I’ve already mentioned, but for the most part they feel extremely similar. This makes Red Hood the most unique, and honestly that has more to do with the fact that his melee weapon is just his fists and his ranged weapon is a pair of pistols. I was disappointed that the other characters didn’t really feel different and that extends beyond combat.
Controlling the characters feels identical to Arkham Knight. It’s not precise. All the characters feel big and clunky. I would expect that from Red Hood, but the other three should feel more nimble. It feels like character movement isn’t precise, but it requires you to be precise. In essence, the control and the feel make Gotham Knights feel like a 2015 game and I’m not sure if that’s more generous or accurate. In addition, when you drive the Batcycle, it feels slow! That’s a real shame.
As I previously mentioned you can change characters throughout the game. The trick is that the game really pushes you to main a single character. As you gain experience, all of your guys gain it and level up. However, any blueprints you find to craft better gear is on a per-character basis which is really annoying to me. I like to switch up characters every night and thought it might make the game feel a bit more immersive, but after getting back as Batgirl and crafting some awesome new gear, I switched to Red Hood and didn’t have any new blueprints for him. I was disappointed in this because the marketing really pushed the whole idea of being able to choose which one you wanted to play as and even swapping between them. It’s also a little annoying how you have to end your patrol in order to change characters. Sometimes I just feel like changing partway through or a crime would be easier to thwart with a different character. These are smaller things, but worth bringing up.
At the end of the day, I genuinely have fun playing Gotham Knights (the only reason why it barely gets as high of a score as it did). It has a lot of problems, and I’m sure there are glitches and bugs that I’ve missed somehow. I also want to note that I haven’t done the multiplayer at all, so it is not part of this review. However, just because I have fun with a game doesn’t mean it’s good or great. Those problems keep Gotham Knights from being an incredible game. As it stands, it feels like Arkham Knight with a different skin and story. The feel of the gameplay is very similar, the feel of the characters is extremely similar, and the graphics aren’t what you’d expect when comparing it to its predecessor. My theory is that the game was playable and so someone made the decision that it needed to be pushed out for the holiday season. We’ve seen holiday pushes result in absolutely awful launches before, sometimes even worse than Gotham Knights. I really wish companies would stop doing it. I just ask the team to please go in and patch in better optimization of GPU and CPU to provide smoother gameplay. I know it’s too late to fix the feel of the characters, but they can patch in optimization. Right?
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