Gotham Knights | Batman
Hell! If only Jason Todd, one of the four heroes of the game, hadn't been beaten to death by the Joker himself in "A Mourning in the Family" and resurrected some time later, which he keeps reminding us of throughout the game. Perhaps the heroes would then have an idea of what to do next, and could finally stop pretending that everything is not so black and white. But no: Batman is dead, and that's not the worst thing. The worst part is that the characters who are supposed to represent the succession of the world's greatest detective don't know how to add two and two, where a five year old would see the events of the script coming right from the credits. It's going to be a long night in Gotham.
It is Batman that is being murdered. Criticism is easy, art is difficult, of course. Gotham Knights should not be compared to Rocksteady's Arkham trilogy of games. The Warner Bros. Montreal team wanted to do something different, to transform a formula that had already been pushed to the limit. The idea is commendable. In many ways, the new game stands out from the cumbersome elder. Rarely for the better, unfortunately. Warner Bros. may have wanted to go its own way, claiming that it's not the same thing, but it's hard not to see in it, in a negative way, everything that made the Rocksteady recipe successful. Whatever it does, Gotham Knights remains a Batman game.[/FONT][/SIZE]
The fights are perhaps the most interesting part. Like in the Arkham games, it will still be about delivering big tattoos to dozens of punks infesting the streets of Gotham, but the parry system has been replaced by a dodge that is more reminiscent of Insomniac's work on the latest Spider-Man games. Enemies have levels that affect their strength and endurance. As for the four heroes, they can build equipment to hit harder or resist better. A light RPG aspect that doesn't always hit the mark and often results in the feeling of hitting on ever more full bags of health points, in clashes that are a bit messy and laborious.Quote:
The real problem, in the end, is that nothing is finished.
The treasure of Arkham the Red. From these RPG-style fights, a trend emerges: boss battles, which were used by Rocksteady to vary the gameplay, become just another brawl, with enemies that hit harder and longer. Gone are the Mister Freeze that you have to sneak up behind, the Bane that you have to throw against walls, the Man-Bat that you have to chase in the air. There is the Man-Bat you have to hit, the Harley Queen you have to hit, the Ergot you have to hit. This philosophy concentrated around a single gameplay is felt everywhere and gives the impression, after two hours, of doing the same thing over and over again.
Batman: Arkham was built around different phases that followed each other without any dead time. A puzzle was followed by an infiltration phase, which led to a confrontation with henchmen, then a narrative phase, before ending in a more or less Dantean fight. Here, there are only two phases: the fights and the cinematic scenes. Infiltration is always available, but it is designed, as in most open worlds, not to be separated from the fights. Each fight will therefore start with the elimination of a few enemies discreetly, before starting the serious stuff, in sequences that will all end up looking the same.
Not Gotham that lives. At the very least, let's move on. There are many ways to make a game, and Warner Bros. is right to want to change things a bit. The real problem, in the end, is that nothing is finished. The fights are messy, because of readability problems or poorly functioning abilities: they often only trigger after a small animation during which the hero, immobile, remains vulnerable. The city of Gotham, bigger than in Arkham Knight, is less artistically inspired than a game released seven years ago, without even taking into account the numerous bugs, slowdowns, desktop feedback and freezing screens. The weapon and armor crafting system is incomprehensible.
Most of the side content is procedurally generated. It's still basically the same side-quest: beat up a group of bandits, with some constraints. Here, you have to stop them from hacking a computer; there, you have to be careful with hostages. Sometimes, you have to get an object to be delivered in a limited time to another place on the map. The problem is that failure is less often due to a player error than to a random element that happens independently. It doesn't matter: you might as well give up, another random event will be proposed the next night.
A Batman against pacifism. Above all, the structure of the game does not benefit from its four heroes. Batgirl and the three Robins have, overall, almost the same abilities. There is nothing to stop you from choosing one hero at the beginning and going through the whole game without ever using one of the other three. At no point does the gameplay attempt to complement the narrative. Where the storyline vaguely tries to imply that the group is greater than the sum of the individuals in it, the game does exactly the opposite, never - absolutely never - featuring a moment where the heroes, together, would have to deal with a threat they cannot eliminate alone.
The rare moments when the heroes seem to have some interaction are those that take place in the belfry, the group's HQ, to which you have to return between each mission, which further contributes to breaking an already relatively absent rhythm, before starting a new night of patrol marked by other random events, events that often replace real progression and inflate the lifespan at little cost to, in the end, tell almost nothing: Batman is dead, the League of Assassins and the Court of Owls take advantage of the situation in order to get into a fight.
RIP Batman. They say that the silence that follows Mozart's performances is still Mozart. The awe that follows the end credits of Gotham Knights is also still Gotham Knights, with the impression of having played out a sequence of random events linked together by a story that seems to bore even the writers. It's a pity, because not everything is a failure: using the Court of Owls comic book, the game delivers a nice and somewhat inspired maze passage. The fights, even if they are not always successful, start from a good intention and make the license a bit fresh. There are some really scripted side quests that would have benefited from being removed and included in the main story. But, by not paying attention to the details, to the global coherence, Warner Bros. has completely missed what made the success of the Arkham trilogy: its sense of rhythm, the articulation between the different gameplays, stories that tell something. Maybe the characters in Gotham Knights weren't so stupid after all, and they had seen it all coming: this time, it's true, Batman is dead.
By trying to make something new at all costs out of a license that had already reached great heights with the Arkham trilogy, Gotham Knights didn't manage to find the coherence, the unity and the sense of detail of its elder. Despite a somewhat fresh, albeit messy, combat system, the game ultimately leaves a feeling of great emptiness once the credits are reached. For his funeral, the Dark Knight deserved better.
