WB Games Montreal’s cityscapes certainly look the part – all neon and noir – but feel eerily soulless. Post-Batman’s demise, gangs of thugs have congregated on every corner, and duffing them up reveals a repetitive roster of bigger crimes to foil, resulting in resources, experience points, crafting blueprints, and, occasionally, new plot points to explore.
Active leads can be pursued in any order but key actions such as changing character, equipping crafted suits and weapons, and analysing plot-critical evidence, can only be carried out back at base, meaning you’ll be returning on a regular basis. It’s an interesting and largely successful attempt to add structure to open world exploration that confers a compulsive pick-up-and-play feel to proceedings.
By contrast, Gotham Knights’ open world activities are strictly by-the-book. Progressing further into the game largely means longer to-do lists of rote tasks to tick-off. And while it’s surprisingly easy to fall into the game’s grind-based rhythm, the ambient pleasure from doing so is undercut by the disappointment that this current gen-only game is still in thrall to the previous console era’s design doctrines.
Take the way traversing Gotham has been rendered a needlessly reductive chore. Each character starts with a grappling hook to fling themselves across the skyline and a summonable Batcycle for a more conventional approach.
With no supplementary, Arkham-style glide mechanic available out of the box, hook travel is fiddly, imprecise, and lacking the empowering style afforded by the open world Arkham titles, let alone the freewheeling fun of web-swinging in Marvel’s Spider-Man.
