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. 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. 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. The open world - and travelling through it - also caused big problems for Xbox consoles. Although not perfect, it's still a vast improvement. Travel around the city is primarily by Bat-grapnel. Unfortunately, it’s extremely twitchy, and the grapnel gun that allows us to latch onto buildings and catapult us across Gotham doesn’t always go where you aim the camera. Instead, it seems to grab onto the nearest anchor point — even if it’s off-screen, sometimes behind or below you. Our ability to crimefight using stealth was thwarted more than once when, rather than propel ourselves away from criminal activity, we sailed straight into it. Multiple times. 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. 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’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.

Play as a New Guard of DC Super Heroes – Step into the roles of Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin and shape Gotham’s newest protector to create your own version of the Dark Knight. 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.) 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. Our co-op player, ZensPath, proves that Nightwing's glider is overpowered, right before he flies away to Star City. Jeremy Powers/ZensPath 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.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. 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.