Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights puts you in the boots of Batman's extended family - Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Robin - after Bruce Wayne dies in a prologue that sets up a conspiracy involving the Court of Owls. That setup is genuinely solid. The Court of Owls is one of the stronger modern Batman villains, and the game earns some real tension in its early chapters by leaning into the idea of Gotham without its apex protector. If you care about the DC universe and want to see these four characters carry a story, there is enough here to keep you engaged for a dozen hours before the cracks start to show. The core loop is open-world patrol: you pick a district, beat up criminals, gather clues, and chain those into larger case files that eventually unlock story missions. Each hero plays meaningfully differently. Nightwing is a crowd-control acrobat with momentum-based combos, Batgirl leans into gadget variety and has the most versatile toolkit, Red Hood uses Lazarus Pit mysticism for ranged and heavy melee, and Robin is the stealth and tactical pick with a teleport-heavy moveset. Build variety comes from gear drops and a skill tree per character, which holds up reasonably well in the early-to-mid game. Past hour 30, though, the gear treadmill starts to feel like a chore. Stat bumps replace genuine mechanical progression, and the open world starts repeating itself aggressively. Co-op is where the game is designed to shine, and it delivers more than the solo experience does. Playing two characters simultaneously opens up combo opportunities the game clearly was built around, and the tone gets looser and more fun when you are not grinding patrol routes alone. The problem is that the PC version launched with well-documented performance issues, and even post-patch the frame pacing on certain hardware configurations is inconsistent. Steam reviews reflect that frustration accurately - this is not a smooth port, and that matters in a brawler where timing is everything. The writing is the game's most uneven element. The main storyline has a payoff that fans of the source material will appreciate, but the side content is filler in the most literal sense. Procedurally generated crimes repeat with copy-pasted dialogue, and the character development that makes the four heroes interesting is almost entirely confined to the Belfry hub conversations - optional chats you can miss entirely if you do not know to trigger them. For an RPG fan who reads every item description and reloads saves to see alternate dialogue, this is maddening. The bones of a great character study about grief and legacy are present. They are just buried under padding that would embarrass a mid-tier mobile game. Gotham Knights is worth your time if you are a dedicated fan of Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, or Robin as characters, if you have a friend to co-op with, and if you go in expecting a serviceable action RPG rather than a narrative landmark. Lower your expectations from the setup the Court of Owls deserves, ignore the side crimes after hour ten, and focus on the story missions and hub conversations. That version of the game is honestly decent. The version that asks you to grind gear levels across a repetitive open world is not.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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