The original Batman Arkham trilogy is a masterpiece of open-world superhero gaming and under Rocksteady Studios‘ development, each of those three games has earned a spot among the greatest video games of all time. Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and Arkham Knight were and still are brilliant. But when WB Games Montréal stepped in to make Arkham Origins, many critics and fans alike felt like something was off… And WB Games Montréal’s next crack at the series, Gotham Knights, appears to fall significantly short of what fans expect out of the franchise…
Gotham Knights, the fifth open-world Batman (adjacent) title, maintains a lot of the same elements as the four Arkham titles but is a separate and original story all its own and does not take place in the same universe as the other four games. But while it tries to emulate a lot of what made the core trilogy, and to a lesser extent Origins (which was just okay), successful, it appears to be rather lackluster at its core, according to a bunch of early reviews.
MetaCritic: 69/100
OpenCritic: 69/100
Game Informer: 7.25/10
“Gotham Knights didn’t wow me with its overly familiar objectives”
VG247: 3/5
“Four isn’t always better than one”
IGN: 5/10
“This co-op-centric caped adventure made my interest Wayne.”
Polygon: Unscored
“Gotham Knights buries a great Bat-family under a combat slog”
PC Gamer: 49/100
“A misguided action game that can’t let go of the past.”
GameSpot: 4/10
“Gotham Knights takes the Arkham blueprint … but where it’s different, it’s worse.”
Hardcore Gamer: 3.5/5
“Gotham Knights … never manages to step out of Batman’s looming shadow.”
None of us here at Geek Outpost planned on picking up Gotham Knights, as we had felt the game didn’t have any heart at its core. And the more we learned about it, the less interested we were in playing it (plus, we are still too small of a fan blog to get the game for free, lol).
Adding the fact that the game only runs at 30 FPS on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, along with frustrating PC performance, we will likely skip this one and just wait for Rocksteady’s upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
