 Hey everyone I tried to have this out like three weeks ago, but then my audio interface broke and then I went on a two-week cruise So we're gonna be two weeks behind in everything here, but in the meantime we had games like Evil West Callisto protocol Bayonetta 3 and God of War all release and I'm going to do a video about every single one of those in order So there'll be a backlog and by the time you get to those videos everyone else will have already talked about it Whatever you'll get my take on them due to the scheduling issue I'm gonna have to not do a video on plague tail requiem because at a plague tail requiem and this game here I had to choose one and man we got to talk about this one because holy cow It has so many bad design decisions all over the game Gotham Knights after the logo So I play most actually probably all like almost all triple-a games that release and while I don't love all of them I generally finish all of them In fact, there's only been three triple-a games in the last few years that I have not finished. Those were Far Cry 6 AC Valhalla and now Gotham Knights and each of these games share a bunch of the same problems Now you may be thinking oh those are all big open-world action games I guess plenty just hates those games But that's not true even though I thought Horizon Forbidden West wasn't nearly as good as the first game I still liked it more than enough to finish the game I finished cyberpunk when everyone hated it. I finished Elden Ring three times and Miles Morales and Spider-Man I don't automatically hate open-world games I don't like bad open-world games and Far Cry 6 Valhalla and now Gotham Knights are Bad open-world games. We'll try to keep this relatively short because unlike something like cyberpunk where a great game was buried Just beneath a few near misses Gotham Knights is flawed right down to its very core You would think when you take a bunch of average stuff and mix it with a few slightly below average stuff You'd get a game that's about average, but Gotham Knights is quite a bit less than the sum of its parts. Let's talk about why Nobody will ever convince me that Gotham Knights was not developed as a live service always online game I'm aware that the game is not a live service game and that the devs and publisher never said it would be But it's so clearly designed as a live service game that it's obvious I have a story in my head about how Gotham Knights was developed several years ago WB was looking around gaming and saw massive money cows in almost every major publisher Activision had world of Warcraft cod and destiny 2 2k had that basketball game and GT online EA had FIFA Madden Battlefront battlefield and apex legends and poor WB was sitting there with multiple Massively expensive intellectual properties and no live service Golden Goose Surely the publisher who has Batman and the Batch family and Lego and Lord of the Rings should have several popular live service titles But here we are now it seems like they probably didn't want to take rock steady off of whatever they're working on So they turns the next best thing an in-house developer Who's worked on the Batman property and was almost certainly itching to work on a game that was fully theirs WB Montreal made a Lego game. They worked as a support studio on Arkham City They made some other Arkham DLC and then they were allowed to make Arkham origins themselves You might remember origins as the perfectly serviceable, but not necessarily all that great Arkham game Handing them a live service Bat universe game was surely seen as a fairly low risk high reward move But somewhere along the line Anthem came out and then the Division 2 and then Avengers and that was probably a warning sign And then as development continued it became clear that Gotham Knights would be a terrible live service game So there was a mad dash to salvage a co-op slash single-player superhero game from the ashes The evidence within the game for this theory is overwhelming. It is beyond all doubt as far as I'm concerned There are four playable characters, which almost certainly was originally intended to be the core of a four-player online game There are multiple absurd currencies There's an in-depth cosmetic system including a ton of colors for your suit and your bat bike The main missions aren't just out in the open world But rather our instanced dungeons akin to something like a destiny strike or a Division 2 story mission And the open world is less a place to explore for secrets and missions and really more something like a destiny patrol zone Full of procedural repeating public events. This was a live service game and nobody will convince me otherwise Unfortunately unlike the Division 2, which is an excellent single-player game that also happens to be a pretty decent live service game Gotham Knight doesn't do either end of this equation well Hopefully Jason Schreier is calling people as we speak to figure out what the hell happened here So Gotham Knights is made up of a few components that we'll deal with here. There's combat and traversal There's the main story missions the progression the open world stuff and the story itself Let's start with the core of a game which in an action game will always be combat and traversal Gotham could have used the Arkham's last shadow of Mordor combat system But instead they decided to do something totally new and use a system much closer to the new Assassin's Creed games This is not a problem in and of itself as long as the combat is well-designed But sadly GK's combat is not well-designed things. Just feel off movement is sluggish and slow Game feel is bad as the player will often get stuck on geometry and just stop dead in their tracks You never feel like you have total control of the character in Gotham Knights very much like an AC Valhalla The developers put more emphasis on having the animations look fluid than they did in the combat itself Feeling fluid because Gotham Knights combat is slower lacks the Arkham counter system and tries to keep its animations looking somewhat realistic W Montreal should have absolutely made certain that the enemy and encounter design matched the combat toolkit The game should have had low enemy accounts and a parry system a lock-on would have been very useful Instead it's stuck in a weird middle ground where many of the elements of combat feel like the Arkham games But the toolkit of the player and the enemy design feels like AC Valhalla Because there are tons of enemies you will often be attacked from behind But there's no visual cue for when an enemy is going to hit you from off-screen like there is an Arkham. Why? Gotham Knights isn't a difficult game I think I was killed once in my approximately 20 hours, but every time I was hit from off-screen it pissed me off Every time I attacked an enemy that I wasn't meaning to attack it annoyed me and that happens all the time I get mad every time I'm damaged in the game if it feels like it wasn't my fault It makes me angry and sours the game for me and that happens in every single fight in Gotham Knight The game relies heavily on a perfect dodge system, but it doesn't feel good There's a slight but consistent input delay in the dodge which leaves you taking damage that feels bad with very few gadgets or combos The combat boils down to exactly what it is in AC Valhalla You press the light attack over and over and dodge every so often before dumping your momentum resource into cool down abilities Now listen, lots of games have simple combat FromSoft games are basically two attacks in a dodge with no real combos at all and no cooldowns But the game feel is so impeccably perfect in FromSoft games that it works amazingly Enemies are generally perfectly designed for the abilities the player has and usually have the perfect amount of health for the pace of the game Gotham Knights enemies just have too much health for the kind of combat on offer If you had a huge variety of distant combos to pull, this would be exactly the right amount of health For instance, God of War Ragnarok, which has its own problems as a game But the enemies have a ton of health because Kratos has a ton of things he can do There's multiple combos, different weapons, different spells, and runic attacks So you want enemies with a lot of health so that you have something to beat on But there's just nothing that interesting in Gotham Knights to justify this Pressing XXXXX dodge XXXXXX dodge 10 times in a row for each enemy gets very boring very fast It's hard to explain why pressing XXXX dodge over and over feels so much different from pressing XXXY and Arkham But it simply does The pace of the fights, the responsiveness of the player, the enemy design Everything about the combat in Gotham Knights is simply sluggish And then the game starts bringing in enemies that are absolutely annoying as hell Drone enemies, enemies that teleport all over the place, enemies that dodge all your attacks unless you use a charged ranged attack Except they attack you faster than you can charge the attack It all just feels off like it wasn't properly put together. It was rushed out the door Now it's not terrible by any means It's very much like AC Valhalla. It's fine-ish Not good by any stretch of the imagination, but not awful It's a little below average If the rest of the game is excellent a game can overcome having slightly below average combat In an open world superhero game the world and traversal can definitely compensate for below average combat Feel like a superhero Okay So the combat isn't good enough to carry the game But if the open world is good and it's fun to move around that can go a long way to making a game enjoyable A great open world is important if you're going to be spending most of your time running around in it Arkham city and knight are not perfect games But they both absolutely nail not only the open world itself But also the open world activities and most important the traversal Now it's one thing to say it's unfair to compare the combat between gotham knights and arkham I disagree. I think it is fair to compare them But that's at least a reasonable argument as they are different combat systems But it's totally ridiculous to say we can't compare the open world and traversal between the two games This is a game set in the same city. It is from the same publisher. It is within the same universe It's from the same developers who made an open world arkham batman game with similar traversal to rock steady's games So it is totally fair to compare them and that comparison is dire Gotham knights has a horrendously terrible open world. It's empty. It's boring The open world events are repetitive and bland Even more importantly, the art design simply isn't very good. While we discuss this I'm going to have the open world gameplay from arkham knight up for a bit Arkham knight was released seven years ago and is a massively better world because you can't go 10 feet without something defined Or fight or do the world is so jam packed with shit that it's almost overwhelming As interesting is just how much better arkham knight looks Despite being seven years old and having much lower quality textures Art design is almost always more important than pixel count when it comes to building a world. Gotham knights is simply boring It doesn't feel like Gotham. It feels like a generic city When you're playing one of the arkham games, the city is a character Every second you're in the city grounds you in the world Many people thought the bat tank was overused and that might be true But going back and playing it a couple weeks ago. I have to say it's actually pretty damn fun to use the batmobile most of the time It's used in puzzles. It's used in combat. It's used in exploration and traversal It isn't just a faster way to move around the map. It's a hugely important mechanic that the game fully explores When you're driving around it's fast and the world explodes when you drive into stuff Giving a feeling of power and speed. Then there's this The bat bike is garbage. There's nothing to do with it. It's not a mechanic It's simply a fast travel system Arkham knight doesn't have real fast travel And I didn't even once think about it because moving about the map is half the fun Gotham knight does have fast travel and it pissed me off that I didn't have it available until I scanned 20 drones Because moving around the map sucks and it's only a massive waste of time. The driving in arkham is excellent It is terrible in gotham knights. The world is below average. The driving is below average The things you do in the world is below average But in arkham knight you spend as much time gliding around the city as you do driving the batmobile But gotham knights for some reason Locks gliding behind grinding out 10 open world events for each and every character So to have the base world traversal mechanic of the arkham games You need to grind 10 open world events four times Who on earth thought that was a good idea? Imagine if in spider-man you had to stop 10 open world crimes before you can web sling It's just like objectively a terrible idea. It blows my mind sometimes what developers put in their games And then there's this if you're going to make me grind garbage open world events to glide with my cape The gliding better be good. You know like just take the exact same system you used in the last batman game that your studio developed But no the gliding is awful. It's slow and boring and clunky and finicky Again in the arkham games or spider-man those traversal mechanics aren't just a faster way to move around the map They're a gameplay system There's some skill involved not a ton but some in arkham the glide is used in combat It's used in challenges and it just feels amazing Grappling allows you to get to ludicrous speeds. You can stay aloft basically forever by using the dive and climb You can eject from the car and get to the top of a building almost instantly This footage shows how awesome it is The same is true for spider-man where web slinging across the city is literally half the fun of the game But in gotham knight is just awful. I mean look at this. It's slow. There's no dive There's no using it in combat There's no skill to it at all and the times the game wants you to use it in challenges are terrible Because it feels so bad traversal on its own terms in gotham knights is bad Far below average for a superhero game When you compare it to spider-man or arkham or even anthem, it's so bad. It's frustrating The entire time I was gliding in gotham knights. I kept thinking to myself Man, I could be replaying one of the open world arcing games right now Eventually, that's what I did and that's what everyone should actually do progression Then there's progression and here again It is totally fair to compare it to other superhero games and or loot games Gotham knight decided it was going to have both a skill tree progression system and a loot system An arkham and spider-man there is no loot, but there's a top-notch progression system Arkham and spider-man skill trees are excellent Arkham's combat eventually plums a ton of depth out of a combat system that starts out using two buttons Spider-man's progression gadgets and skill system is even better. It's one of the best ever in a video game That system is why insomniac spider-man games are almost perfect Gotham knight decided it was going to split its progression and both suffer as a result The skill trees are awful. They're small and most of the nodes are pointless Shit like this a 10% increased crit chance Okay, exciting I can't wait to grinds and unlock that extra 10% crit chance Who thought that was worth putting on there instead of having large and interesting skill and gadget trees The game has four different small and boring trees There's almost no gadgets, which is so dumb. It's a bad family game gadgets are kind of important, aren't they? There's not even too much to say about the skill trees. They're badly designed boring utterly pointless A good skill tree is one where you unlock something Learn how to use it and then unlock something else spider-man would be a worse game if you had all of the stuff Unlocked at the start You would be overwhelmed and wouldn't get a chance to learn and master each skill combo and gadget In Gotham knights if it had every skill node unlocked at the start The game would be better for it at the start of the game combat is boring and bland And unlocking all of the nodes finally gets you up to what a baseline combat should feel like Before progression and then there's nothing else the game feels like the kit was designed for back girl And then things were taken away and locked on the tree as opposed to arkham or spider-man Or it feels like the base combat was totally perfectly designed and then things were added on as the game was developed With each new thing put on the tree Carefully the other part of progression is the loot game fucking abysmal utterly pointless The game would be improved if it was ripped out entirely and did not exist None of the gear matters at all They're just numbers and the numbers don't even make sense man I had a level 11 heroic item that was a lower power level than a level 11 rare item by like 20 percent I couldn't figure it out every single number was the same defense the same health the same mod slots the same The only difference was that the rare one had a 7 percent increased resistance to poison Okay, who gives a shit man You get a weapon that has fire damage or ice damage But in reality all this terribly designed system does is make you go into your menu every so often To put on the thing with the highest number so that you can play the next mission. It's so bad. It's shocking Nothing not one thing changes how you play not one thing feels different than what you had before So what's the point? Why spend thousands of hours designing it if nobody is going to give a shit about it Developers really need to be able to ask themselves that question It doesn't even have cosmetic value because you just unlock total skins anyway. What a mess missions and story Let's finish this up with a brief chat about what the mission structure is here Basically, it's awful. There are like 10 total actual story missions and the rest of the game Literally everything else in the game is grinding out awful open world events to get to the level requirement for the next mission You'll do one of these actually well designed missions And they are well designed by far the best part of the game and you'll be excited to see what happens next You meet Harley Quinn in prison or mr. Freeze in a science lab And right as you're ready to keep advancing that story the game will stop and say nope You need more information go kill 53 mooks and then you can play the next mission Unless you're under leveled which you will be so actually go kill 116 mooks Ironically Arkham knight has a very similar setup You play a few of the story beats and then the game makes you wait so you can keep going But there's like eight other missions to deal with in fact in knight There's almost too many missions. So you feel kind of pressured But in Gotham knights, there's like three hours of a great superhero game locked behind 17 hours of open world trash Pure trash Finally the story I read a bunch of reviews once I finished about how the story and the relationship between the bad family is so well done Did I play a different game? The story is bad below average. There's no stakes. Nothing feels dangerous or important Nobody has any real issues to work through Batman being dead is supposed to be a big freaking deal But everyone's making jokes and seems to be dealing with it pretty okay And even worse WB Montreal has done the thing where the character is constantly talking to themselves Seriously Batgirl never stops talking for even one second in almost every mission She'll say something like every three seconds. Why? Why is this even a thing? Why do developers think I need to hear batgirl say meaningless shit out loud every three seconds? It's dumb. It's distracting Every game has this to some degree, but this might be the worst I've ever seen it Again, it's totally fair to compare this to other triple a superhero games The story in spider-man is excellent. The story in miles moralis is fantastic The story in arkham city and arkham knight is great all of those games feel menacing They all have serious personal stakes. There's real and powerful storytelling about loss or fear or madness Miles moralis tells a top-notch story about self-belief and the danger of vengeance Arkham knights batman and joker interactions are some of the best shit You will ever get in an action video game gk's story is average at best really probably below average The voice acting is fine as opposed to miles moralis or arkham city where it's amazing The writing is fine. The plot is fine. I'll be generous and say it's perfectly average triple a story It's never like stupid like far cry six, but it's never good either I didn't care and if the game doesn't make you care, it's hard to say it has a good story, isn't it? wrapping up Critical consensus seemed to be pretty poor for gotham knight, although there's a bunch of hedging as well Stuff like well, it's not great, but if you like the bat family, there's definitely something here for you No false There was nothing here for you The game is so much less than some of its parts and we didn't even talk about how abysmal the performance was The game ran like dog shit But no there is not something here for you Yeah, the game's made up of a bunch of average or slightly below components But when you combine it all together what you're left with is something that really shouldn't even exist It's a total waste of time I would say it might be worth 25 bucks, but it will never be worth your time There will never be a moment in history where this game will be better than anything else you can play You will always be better off Just replaying one of the insomniac spider-man games or one of the rock city batman games I didn't get this video up right after the game because I actually ended up just replaying arkham knight Don't play this game replay arkham city or arkham knight instead Gotham knights is a four out of 10 a muddled confused mess that was clearly a failed life service game That was quickly reconstituted as a bland co-op game and shoved out the door It's got four or five hours of good stuff buried under 20 hours of dreck one of the worst games I've played in a while. All right, we'll see what's up next It'll probably call us to a protocol, but it might be bayonetta But I got to do call us a protocol bayonetta evil west and god of war ragnarack. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye