Review: I’m not mad at GOTHAM KNIGHTS, I’m just disappointed

Gotham Knights was recently released by Warner Bro. Play on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X | S. Players can follow an original story with the Batman family trying to protect Gotham after Batman’s death. During the game, you can choose between Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin as you solve mysteries and fight crime alone or with a friend via online co-op. Warner Bro. Games was kind enough to provide me with a PC code of the game, but the following thoughts are mine. You can purchase your copy from your favorite retailers, including Xbox (affiliate link) and GameStop (affiliate link).

I’m sure many of you have already read and / or watched quite a bit of news about it Gotham Knights. Difficult decisions for the game begin even before the purchase of the game. Do you want to play on console or do you want to possibly get 60+ frames per second (fps). It was hard for me when Warner Bro. The games contacted me. I was planning on getting it on Xbox, but then they announced that the game would be stuck at 30fps on consoles and wouldn’t fly with me. Fortunately, my machine has a Ryzen 5 3600, RTX 2060, and 16GB of RAM which falls within the minimum and recommended specs listed on Steam for 1080p and achieving 60fps. I have many thoughts on this Gotham Knights.

Let’s start with the things I think the team did well. I haven’t completed the story yet, but what I did was really cool. The writing is solid, the vocal work is great, etc. I wasn’t sure about the voice cast as I love the cast of Arkham games, but I actually really like the new cast and their performances. Another good thing is that I like the fact that you can choose which of the four characters you want to play as, and you’re not stuck in that choice. There are also some aspects of each character that are unique. For example, Batgirl can do some hacking while Robin can make it easier to use stealth. There are also plenty of customization options for graphics and controls to really help you be more to your liking. You can also customize each character’s costumes to a certain extent, which is fun. Finally, I enjoy playing this game. There are times when I can’t wait to go home and play some more Gotham Knights.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot wrong with it Gotham Knights, and it started before launch. As I mentioned, the console versions were announced to be locked at 30fps instead of having a Performance mode which reduces the visual quality to increase the fps. This has already disappointed many fans including myself. Then, after launch, I saw several titles and posts online that talked about how even the latest GPU, an RTX 4090, couldn’t run the game at a stable 60fps. What the hell is going on? Well, I played around with a few settings on my rig, so I used the optimization feature in NVIDIA GeForce Experience. NVIDIA advised me to make most of the settings to Highest and to disable raytracing and to set DLSS to Balance. I tried lowering the settings to Medium, turning on raytracing, and setting DLSS to performance, but it didn’t work as well. I also want to note that I run the game at 1440p. On NVIDIA settings, I go from around 45-60fps with an average probably around 50fps.

At first, this seems extremely reasonable given my specs and I wouldn’t normally complain. However, I’m annoyed that according to NVIDIA, Task Manager, and HWMonitor, I only use about 40-60% of my GPU and CPU (except on loading screens when those numbers go up) at any given point in the game. This would increase if I had raytracing turned on at around 80% -ish. I feel like a game should give me more FPS at that usage or it should use more GPU and CPU. I’m crazy? Additionally, the game will delay and stutter in single player mode with no changes to CPU or GPU usage. This makes me honestly believe the game is poorly optimized and I’ll talk more about it towards the end.

As we talk about graphics, I think it’s worth seeing how Gotham Knights is comparable to the last great Batman game of 2015, Arkham Knight. I’ll be honest when I have uploaded Gotham Knights, I was amazed by the graphics for a couple of minutes, and the more I saw it, the more disappointed I was. It looks perhaps a hair better than Arkham Knight in some circumstances, but for the most part it looks the same or sometimes even worse than a seven-year-old game using Unreal Engine 3 (Gotham Knights uses Unreal Engine 4). Here is a video comparing the two games and you can make the call yourself.

My hope is that the team will be able to use the patches to optimize the graphics, and if the recent presets have to go through, then there’s a good chance! I also have a vague suspicion that the 30fps limit on consoles is related to the lack of optimization. This gives me hope that consoles will be patched with the option of having a performance mode or something in the future.

This is enough for graphics. Let’s talk about the game. There are several aspects that I want to touch on here. First, yes, you can choose from four different characters to play with and you can even switch between them. To me, it felt more like there were two different characters. Batgirl, Nightwing and Robin all feel very similar. Now, their skill trees make them a little unique like I mentioned, but for the most part they feel extremely similar. This makes Red Hood the most unique and honestly has more to do with the fact that his melee weapon is just his fists and his ranged weapon is a pair of handguns. I was disappointed that the other characters didn’t really feel different and that extends beyond the fight.

Controlling the characters looks identical Arkham Knight. It is not accurate. All the characters feel big and clumsy. I’d expect that from Little Red Riding Hood, but the other three should feel more agile. It seems that the movement of the character is not precise, but it requires you to be precise. Basically, the control and the feel do Gotham Knights it looks like a 2015 game and I’m not sure if it’s more generous or accurate. Plus, when you ride the Batcycle, it feels slow! It is a pity.

As I said earlier, you can switch characters during the game. The trick is that the game really pushes you to handle a single character. As you gain experience, all of your teens gain it and level up. However, any blueprints I come up with to make better gear are character-based, which is really annoying to me. I like to change characters every night and thought it could make the game a little more engaging, but after returning as Batgirl and creating cool new gear, I switched to Little Red Riding Hood and had no new plans for him. I was disappointed with this because the marketing really pushed the whole idea of ​​being able to choose which one you wanted to play and even swap between them. It’s also a bit annoying how you have to finish your patrol to switch characters. Sometimes I just feel like I’m changing in half or a crime would be easier to counter with a different character. These are smaller things, but they are worth bringing out.

At the end of the day, I really enjoy playing Gotham Knights (the only reason it barely gets as high a score as it did). He has a lot of problems and I’m sure there are problems and bugs that I somehow missed. I also want to note that I haven’t done multiplayer at all, so it’s not part of this review. However, just because I enjoy a game doesn’t mean it’s good or great. Those problems continue Gotham Knights from being an amazing game. As it is, it seems Arkham Knight with a different skin and history. The feel of the gameplay is very similar, the feel of the characters is extremely similar and the graphics are not what you would expect when comparing it to its predecessor. My theory is that the game was playable and therefore someone decided it had to be eliminated for the holiday season. We’ve already seen holiday thrusts result in absolutely terrible tosses, sometimes even worse than Gotham Knights. I really wish companies would stop doing it. I just ask the team to go in and fix better GPU and CPU optimization to provide smoother gameplay. I know it’s too late to correct the mood of the characters, but they can correct the optimization. Right?