What The STRUCK is Gotham Knights?
(My BRUTALLY Honest Review/Impressions of the game after completing the full story)
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Gotham Knights launched on October 21st, 2022 for PC, XBOX Series & PS 5 (Epic [creator link], Humble [partner link], Steam, & XBOX, & PlayStation). After fully completing the game (without the new game+ mode) I’m ready to share my Impressions/Review and explain “What The STRUCK is Gotham Knights?“. This is both a review & a basic guide as 2-in-1 combo.
EDIT: I’ve fixed multiple typos + added info/rant about the Nth metal drop rates & legednary craft ‘prices’.
I’ll be brutally honest and some of the things I say may not be nice but my overall impression of the game is: that it’s a solid aRPG but it suffers from performance issues and it could also feel a bit overpriced for what it offers (at least in EU & NA regions). I’ve enjoyed playing the game at my own pace and progressing the cases/stories when I felt like it while taking my time to grind exp and loot from side events here and there. Why do I think so? Hopefully, it will get clear after reading this post (or watching my video version).
Gotham Knights is an open-world, action RPG set in the most dynamic and interactive Gotham City yet. In either solo-play or with one other hero, patrol Gotham’s five distinct boroughs and drop in on criminal activity wherever you find it.
Quoted from the game’s Official Website.
This post could end up getting expanded and updated eventually but, hopefully, for now it includes enough information to serve as a basic guide on top of a Review/Impressions article.
Video Version:
The Story:
This is how the game is described by the devs:
Batman is dead. A new expansive, criminal underworld has swept the streets of Gotham City. It is now up to the Batman Family; Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin; to protect Gotham, bring hope to its citizens, discipline to its cops, and fear to its criminals. From solving mysteries that connect the darkest chapters in the city’s history to defeating notorious villains in epic confrontations, you must evolve into the new Dark Knight and save the streets from descent into chaos.
Quoted from the Game’s Official Website
Batman is dead. It is up to the bat family (Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood & Robin (Tim Drake a.k.a. Red Robin) to step up and fill the void that Batman’s absence has left in regards to fighting crime in Gotham City. Harley Quinn, Mr. Freeze, Penguin, & Clayface are some of the villains involved in cases the Bat Family will investigate. On top of that the mysterious Court of Owls and Talia al Ghul are connected to something bigger that’s brewing in Gotham’s underworld. Without revealing & spoiling much I can say this: the Gotham Knights will have to investigate, interrogate, co-operate with and fight against all kinds of foes from various factions to uncover the truth behind what has been happening and who is pulling the strings. The ending did leave me feeling blue-balled as if pulling out right before a climax but never finishing. It felt like they cut off content to only sell it as DLC expansions later on. Some storylines and villains did not fully get ‘closed’, leaving the door open to be re-used for DLCs.
The Combat:
Is one of the good pulling points of the game. Smooth & fluid animations, diverse set of abilities (especially considering all 4 heroes) that can be comboed with regular attacks as well as an ultimate. Dodge mechanics, takedowns, melee, ranged, even silent takedowns & stealth options to those who don’t want to go in guns blazing. The momentum mechanic fits well as a resource generation & spending system for the momentum abilities and I love how it’s executed.
The Bat Family:
There are 4 playable characters that players can switch freely between in the Belfry (the Gotham Knights base of operations). Dick Grayson – Nightwing, Barbara Gordon – Batgirl, Jason Todd – Red Hood, Tim Drake – (Red) Robin are the 4 Bat Family members and each of them has 3+1 skill trees to invest into + several momentum abilities. Each of them will also bring in different ways to experience the story in the shape of slightly different dialogue during the major custscenes as well as character-specific cutscenes that are defining of the journey towards becoming the Knight that Gotham needs.
Abilities & Momentum:
Each character starts with 3 unlocked skill trees and later on unlocks a 4th after reaching a “Knighthood” status. Two of those 3 initial skill trees are dedicated to a certain playstyle (for example Red Hood has a Marksman & a Brawler trees for ranged or melee centric builds). The 3rd initial skill tree is connected to the character’s origins and serves as the extra spice that can be added to either of the other 2 “build-defining” trees. Now, that is not to say that players can’t make hybrid builds like a melee + ranged mix of Red Hood with less Vengeance points taken, for example, but it won’t be as viable or useful in most cases.
The Knighthood:
Eventually, players reach a character defining moment of realization called “Knighthood” by completing a small list of crime-fighting related tasks. This unlocks a new traversal method unique to each character that makes your lives much easier as you move from one crime scene to another. Knighthood also unlocks the 4th skill tree where players can get additional mechanic-altering or ability-boosting bonuses to further compliment their builds.
Gotham City:
Gotham City is seeing a spike in all sorts of crime, which seems to be tied to the void Batman’s absence has left. All 5 regions of the city are freely explorable and players can access the city’s map to view various points of interest and ongoing events. There will be markers for various types of crimes each night you go to patrol the city and it’s up to payers to decide which crime they want to solve during their night patrol session. Some of the points of interest will be linked to one of our villain cases (kind of like sub-main quests) or to the main case (the main quest), while other crimes will be events that pop-up every night randomly. Each of those (both case-related & rng events) will have a difficulty indicator and show you what rewards to expect from completing them.
There are also various collectibles such as collecting batarangs spread around Gotham, checking out Street Art murals, reading the plaques of various “Landmark” buildings & more that will keep even the most devoted completionist busy & also leave them frustrated. Speaking of frustration, enter time trials: ones related to the heroes’ Knighthood traversal as well as Bat-cycle racing ones. Those have extremely low timers that don’t scale based on the selected difficulty and there’s also no way to auto-complete them so if you want to get them out of the way you will have to suffer from the bad game design.
Later in the game players unlock fast travel points for each of the 5 regions that further helps to save time when moving from point A to point B. This is for me one of the best QoL features of the open world portion of the game and makes it much more enjoyable. I only wish the missions that unlock those fast travel points made it easier to spot all drones (like showing them on my radar or something).
NOTE: Anything that involves a “timer” is plagued by an awful and non-scalable design where regardless of the difficulty you play on the timer will be the same and it will be at times severely unreasonable.
Gameplay Loop:
The loop is simple: go out every night to patrol Gotham city, solve crimes, find clues that help progress your cases, get rewards such as crafting materials, mods, gear, exp and so on as you do so. When finished with everything you wanted to do for that night, go back to the Bell tower and partake in other activities such as training sessions (optional), crafting gear, talking to Alfred and the other Bat Family Members to discuss the case files (shown to us via cutscenes) as well as modify your bat cycle visuals. In the bell tower players can also change the character they play before going out to patrol again. Any random crime events that have not been done during one night’s patrol will disappear as soon as you go back to the base. Events related to the case files will remain and can be addressed when you’re back to patrolling.
It’s worth noting that, while the open world events have their own “difficulty” attached, the game itself has 4 difficulties that can be changed at any time from the options: very easy, easy, medium, and hard. Medium seems like the best difficulty to get a reasonable challenge and I wanna stress out on the REASONABLE part. Hard seems to be more of a try-hard mode for the masochists who want to fight bullet sponges and waste their time. We don’t get any more or better rewards by playing on Hard and I like that I don’t feel the need to waste my time doing that as it would have left a bad taste if Hard gave more exp and better drops than Medium. It’s totally fine to have one such unreasonable overkill difficulty for people who want it and I think they’ve implemented it in the best way possible but they did not make it clear what changes with each difficulty. How much more HP and DMG do enemies on Hard have vs Medium? How much HP & DMG less do they have on Easy & Very Easy vs Medium? Wish we could see that.
Gear, Mods, & Crafting:
Each character will have 3 equippable pieces of equipment: 1 suit and 2 weapons (for Red Hood it Was Pistols used for melee & rounds/bullets used for ranged attacks). Each of those will come in various rarities: common, uncommon, rare, epic, heroic, legendary. Each of those can also come with mod slots between 0 and 3. Mods have 3 categories and each category seems to have 3 types. Each category of mods refers to the type of gear the mod goes to as for the types, two of the 3 types will boost a certain stat while the other one boosts two stats at once but for a smaller amount. So far I’ve seen only epic mods that boost more than 1 stat and only in the low levels. The higher the rarity of the regular single stat-boosting mods decides how much of that stat you get BUT the level also does that. So there might be cases where a green or blue higher level mod will give you more stats that a lower level epic or legendary mod of the same type. And here’s where mod fusion comes in.
Mods can be fused in batches of 4. The 4 mods used are lost to get the new end result mod. 4 of the same type (for example 4 suit mods) will guarantee that type as an end result. 4 of the same rarity will guarantee a mod of the next rarity (for example 4 common = guaranteed uncommon mod). Each mod has 25% “weight” so you can add 2 suit 1 ranged 1 melee and have 50% chance of a suit + 25% chance melee + 25% chance ranged mod will come out. To further go into detail you can also guarantee the end result will boost a certain stat if all 4 “ingredients” give that specific stat (for example 4 crit dmg mods give a crit dmg mod). The level of the end result mod is decided by the highest level “ingredient” mod. So players can sacrifice a bunch of low level mods and then add one lvl 30 mod to make sure they get a lvl 30 mod.
NOTE: Mods above Epic rarity can not be crafted & even using 4 Epic mods will result in another Epic mod as a result.
Crafting gear is simple and you only need to have the blueprint & various materials (materials have rarities and are awarded from case missions as well as side activities). New blueprints can be awarded from missions such as case files ones, ones from contacts, and not sure but I think they maybe also randomly drop from enemies in other all kinds of events. Once you have all the materials you can craft the gear from the crafting station in your base or craft it remotely. While in Gotham city or in missions. You can only collect crafted items when in your base even if you crafted them remotely!
EDIT: I’ve spent considerable time playing New Game+ and my fears have been confirmed. The Nth Metal (legendary crafting material) drop rates and the cost of crafting Legendary gear are AWFULLY BAD! There’s barely any cases where Nth Metal drops and the little craps penguin gives us for doing his “contact” missions (20 per mission stage) are not going to cut if when an item costs 800 nth metal to craft at lvl 40. Even the “cheapest” lvl 40 legendary item is at a whopping 400 Nth metal. The Nth metal crafting cost should be at least 50% of the current one (ideally 40% of it maybe). On top of that there should be MUICH more ways to obtain it other than Penguin’s missions and praying to RNGzus & LOOTcifer to get it as a drop from enemies in High & Very High rated premeditated crimes.
New Game+ Mode:
Optimization & Performance:
The game very demanding and far from well optimized. The minimum GPU requirement for 1080p 60FPS is Nvidia GTX 1660 or equivalent just to give you an idea. But even people with good cards have been reporting FPS drops when there’s more movement and more things happening on screen. One fine example is how while using the Batcycle the FPS drops by 10-20 and even 20+ FPS. Even people with 3080ti cards have reported that running 1440p without ray tracing requires them to put some settings to medium or even low to get stable fps. If you are bothered by bad performance then hopefully patches will come to resolve those issues.
PROS & CONS:
PROS
- Beautifully Crafted Gotham City & Top Tier Character design
- A solid story that draws from various DC source material
- Fast-paced & smooth aRPG combat
- Beautiful OST, SFX & VFX
- Decent Itemization & Crafting systems
- 4 heroes with some build diversity
- A good chunk of transmog/style options
- Open-world exploration & freedom (still not enough freedom tho)
- Top Tier voice acting (the English one at least)
- Semi-linear progression or the cases
- Unlimited Side Missions
- Free-roam experience post-story
- 2 person online co-op
- Progression shared among heroes & option to swap between them
- Upcoming standalone 4-man co-op mini-endgame (Nov 16th)
CONS
- The ending leaves you blue-balled as if they cut off major plot lines for DLCs
- AWFULLY DISGUSTING design of anything that involves “timers”: trials, bomb event, organ trafficking events, etc.
- NO ABILITY RESPEC…WHY?
- NO JUMPING 🙁
- people in co-op can “hijack” your cutscenes
- various bugs & glitches (not too many afaik)
- 1 main/case mission forces a batcycle escape/race against a looming threat on the player. it’s terrible & super frustrating (the racing/batcycle element should be optional/skippable or at at leas made to scale with the chosen difficulty)
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This concludes my 2-in-1 Review + Basic Guide for Gotham Knights. If you’re interested in the game below are links to the various platforms where one can buy it (you can just click the links to open a new tab):
Platforms
Epic Games Store (also creator link = I earn profit when used to buy)
Humble Store (also creator link = I earn profit when used to buy)
