Gotham Knights has more than a Batman problem

In Gotham Knights, Batman is dead. “Like, dead-dead,” as WB Montreal put it during our preview, and in his place comes four sub-heroes: Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and Red Hood. These are, barring any surprises, who you will play as in Gotham Knights. I played as three of them in the preview – Batgirl and Red Hood in early game scenarios, and Robin for a late-game mission and boss fight – and I can now say with confidence that they are… fine.

Gotham Knights preview

• Developer: WB Games Montréal
• Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive
• Platform: Played on PC (via Parsec)
• Availability: Out 21 October on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S

It’s faint praise, and I’m loath to be too harsh on Gotham Knights when we’re still a few weeks away from launch. But at the moment it’s underwhelming, and underwhelming in terms of real substance, rather than technical performance – it looks nice enough and ran without any hiccups while we played over streaming platform Parsec.

What’s missing is a sense of conviction. The setup sees you making a base of the Belfrey, a clock tower hideout that’ll be familiar to series fans, where you can mooch about and briefly chat with the other characters, swap between them, and launch missions or an exploration of the open world of Gotham City. Gotham looks quite good, but also a little muted next to the Gotham of Rocksteady’s Arkham games – especially Arkham Knight – where that glorious, gothic maximalism is replaced with more of a mediumalism. The city’s deep blacks seem more like faded browns, the rain doesn’t fall as hard, there’s no sense of sharpness, rankness, no distinctive air of criminal filth and grime, and with a kind of unnerving clarity to it all, like an old game that’s been visually “remastered” by an AI, its atmosphere lost without its textured fog.

The same goes for its combat. Gotham Knights leans more heavily into the RPG tendencies here, with the typical three skill trees (although I didn’t really get the distinctions between each) and points to distribute when levelling up. This may be one cause of the problems. In the later-game mission, combat had a bit of a punch, with some kind of sparkly purple elemental damage popping out on hit, but earlier on it felt weak, almost insipid. Where the Arkham Batman would land punches with the crunch of a sledgehammer, flowing from one bone-shattering thwack to the next, in Gotham Knights they’re delivered with a kind of unintentional delicacy, each roundhouse like a fly bumping into a window.