Gotham Knights: Deluxe Edition (PS5)

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Combat fatigue (see our What we didn’t like section below) can be mitigated by switching different characters, each with their own combat style. You can also encounter these missions differently, depending on the way you’ve upgraded your abilities. For example, you might want to switch over to Babs if you’re planning to do some light espionage and your current Batgirl can’t be seen by cameras. When your chosen character has enough experience to level up, happily, the other characters level too. Co-op play allows you to get a taste of different character interactions: Jeremy Powers, our co-op partner (playing Red Hood), joined us in our fight (playing Robin) against Clayface. He had completed the scene himself a few minutes before. When the scene ended, he pointed out that in his version, Red Hood punched a wall, while in our shared version, Robin inspected the residue on the grate Clayface escaped through. 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. 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. Oh look. We've stumbled into Aperture Science's Enrichment Center. Carol Pinchefsky/CNN Underscored

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.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. 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. After some further reflection, I think Gotham Knights' visuals - while largely unchanged in this version - do deserve considerable praise. Ultimately, Gotham Knights is best understood as a game of two halves, visually speaking. The first half is the game's mission environments. Basically any time you start a major mission, Gotham Knights loads into a space that features pretty solid visuals. Lighting is a particular standout in these environments. Each of the game's interior spaces features very attractive ambient lighting with excellent GI, and well-placed light sources. Technically speaking it's par for the course with big-budget Unreal Engine 4 titles, but it often looks excellent. There's plenty of fog, volumetrics, and smoke in these areas as well, which gives them a sort of lived-in quality. 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. According to Warner Bros. Montreal, you’re automatically placed at the same level as the instance owner. We couldn’t test this. Due to time constraints, we could only play together twice, and both times, we were coincidentally the same level.

Even enemies like Clayface, Harley Quinn and the Penguin are well characterized. And almost every character is voiced to perfection. (See The voice of Batgirl in our What we didn’t like section below.) Every 30 seconds in the Belfry, we overhear chats between the characters, and their dialogue ranges from the practical to the punny. We could listen to it for hours. 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 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. Better yet, it allowed us to get extra dialogue. On a mission with our co-op partner, Robin tumbled down a hole and said something like, “I’m glad no one was here to see that.” But because Red Hood was standing right there, he responded, “I didn’t see anything.”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. Our co-op player, ZensPath, proves that Nightwing's glider is overpowered, right before he flies away to Star City. Jeremy Powers/ZensPath Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Northern Ireland and the Scottish Highlands) may take longer to reach you. 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. 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.

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. 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. Assets also impress here. Again, this isn't generation-defining stuff but geometric density and texture resolution are both suitably high. The artwork here holds up well at close range and the game itself has a lot of asset variety, with key story areas showcasing very different interior stylings. If you just evaluated Gotham Knights on the interiors alone, it would seem like a very good-looking game. A lot of effort has clearly been expended to make these spaces look unique and attractive, with capable rendering technology combined with carefully-crafted artwork and visual design. 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. CPU-based problems in traversal plagued the console versions of Gotham Knights. As you can see here, it's vastly improved in the current game.Nightwing wonders whatever happened to the band's front member, John Constantine? Carol Pinchefsky/CNN Underscored 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.