Gotham Knights Sucks – Here’s Why

Gotham Knights is one of those overrated games that gets hyped up to no point with the trailers and advertisements and then fails to deliver on it.

The game was released on October 21, 2022. The game focuses on the story of Gotham City after the passing away of Batman. Yes, Batman is dead, and now it’s up to the others in the Batman family to defend the city.

In Gotham Knights, you play as Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin, and Red Hood. In the absence of the Dark Knight, it falls onto the rest of the Gotham Knights to save the city, conquer the chaos, and rise as the new Dark Knight.

The catch is that none of these characters are half as strong as our beloved Batman. All of his abilities have been divided into four characters. And you have to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each character to excel at the game.

Also, you cannot change the character whenever you feel like it. So, you’ll have to think through which Gotham Knights character and their abilities suit your playstyle. You’ll have to visit your home in the game if you want to switch characters. This may sound fun on paper, but it can be pretty dreading when you have to run back home multiple times.

Despite the attractive setting, things get messy towards the end of the story and might not appear to make sense. Confusing story-telling and clunky gameplay are the two aspects that make Gotham Knights suck. The setting could’ve been much more engaging paired with the old Arkham-style gameplay.

When all was going well, Warner Bros. Games announced that the console port would be capped at 30 FPS before the release. The devs blamed the Xbox Series S port for the consoles’ performance issue. Not only that, but the game has exceptionally high system requirements.

It appears to be becoming a trend. The same happened with the release of “A Plague Tale: Requiem,” where the game was locked at 30 FPS despite not having a PlayStation 4 port.

Not having a PlayStation 4 port saves the dev from considering its low specs while developing the game. After PS4, the Xbox Series S is the next thing stopping consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X from achieving their maximum potential.

In contrast to the current-gen consoles, the system requirements for PC ports of these modern games have also jumped a few steps up the staircase. “Gotham Knights” also requires a powerful PC to run the game smoothly.

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But, the issue with Gotham Knights is that, even if you have an excellent PC with a powerhouse GPU, the game will still not reach 60 FPS.

And you can’t lower the graphics and resolution to increase the FPS, either. That’s just how poorly optimized this game is. It is true that the game just launched. And it is common to see optimization issues like this right after the release.

Hopefully, the devs will do something about it and release a bunch of patches to fix the game’s optimization.

It’s also worth noting that the PC port of the game costs about $60 and can reach up to 60 FPS. At the same time, the console port costs $70 despite being locked at 30 FPS.

Besides the optimization and FPS issues, the game does better in other aspects. The co-op gameplay works without any significant issues but is limited to only two-player gameplay. And that is something you’ll need in this game to keep things slightly interesting.

Gotham Knight’s combat system is definitely not the best. It is much different and worse than the older Arkham games.

Basically, they had to tweak the combat mechanics to accommodate the co-op gameplay and combat with multiple characters with different abilities. And that resulted in a combat system that is a bit clunky and slow for a superhero game.

What’s even worse is that you have to grind for each character separately. This grinding, paired with clunky combat and repetitive missions, will test every ounce of your patience.

The one thing that the game does good is that the other characters that you’re not currently playing receive a share of the experience. But, the skill trees and lack of mission reward make it nearly impossible to level all four characters consistently.

Metacritic rates all the ports of the Gotham Knights somewhere between 66 to 69. These are just launch-day ratings, which might get even worse after more players try out the game.

Speaking of players, Gotham Knights is currently sitting at approximately 24,000 active players on Steam. The game is still 1,000 players short of surpassing the peak-player count of Batman: Arkham Origins, which is 25,017, according to SteamDB.

We’ll likely see the number of active players wither down in a couple of weeks. That is because of how tedious grinding is in this game.

Everything points to the fact that Gotham Knights sucks. That appears to be feeding off the nostalgia birthed by the Arkham games but fails to live up to their level. 

It is nothing but disappointing to see that devs put years into this game trying to come up with something new when there was no need for it in the first place. The game literally makes you miss Batman, not because he’s dead, but because of how much the Gotham Knights suck without him.