Use bit.ly/ThatBoyAqua_HF or go to hellofresh.com and use code HELLOBOYAQUA for up to 20 FREE MEALS! You do not have to return to the Belfry to equip new gear. After the heroic assault update you can now enter heroic assault and craft/equip gear there, and head back out without finishing the night. Also jokes aside, I’m grateful to WhiteLight for being the only other person with this game lol. Without him I’d be extra miserable in heroic assault, and would likely have just ignored the co-op. Comments about his in game performance are, as he would call it, “just a bit uh bantah”.
Also Tim Drake doesn’t have a crime fighting sister or brother because Barbara is a lone child of Jim and Tim wasn’t adopted because he was already an adult when Batman found him
@@futurerebel62 Origins Blackgate Asylum Origins Gotham Knights City Knight This is super off the top of my head so it’s not concrete and I will not elaborate any further than I think City, Origins, and GK are all very close together imo. It’s also hard to compare them because GK is fundamentally different from Arkham
When I played the arkham games, my favourite thing to do was to put on the harder difficulty so the goons would have no interface indicator for their attacks, just the animation of a swing. It made me feel like a real batman who was observing my surroundings and winning. Looking at this in comparison makes my eyes hurt, just a cacophony of the damage values, health, criticals, elemental damage - it looks so gamy and cluttered
And it can mostly be turned off in the settings… as the video brings up…now I did personally also have a problem with the weird circles indicating a counter rather than the lightning bolts above the head from Arkham or the spidey sense above spidey from Spider-Man ps4. Personally I would’ve loved this game more if it’s combat wasn’t so slowed down, however the slower combat is more realistic compared to the pinball machine that is Arkham Batman, when his combo hits 100 you can go across a building in one punch, super unrealistic that a human at their physical peak can do that at that speed. Give that system to a flash video game however, and you’ve kinda solved the issue of how to incorporate super speed into a game without being too broken. Setting up a combo and ability system for a flash video game would make sense, and for traversal you could do somthing similar to what marvels Spider-Man does and build up speed as your moving, eventually moving along the side of buildings. Idk how you’d do a Superman video game, other than an on and off switch for his flight, and maybe a moral system…where the player is rewarded for pulling their punches throughout the game, giving two endings where if you murdered (did high damage really fast) your villains really quick you get an injustice Superman ending but at the same time your punishing the player for being good at the game…which isn’t fun, the other option is to hand kryptonite out like candy on Halloween night and watch the player try to work around it. You could also have a space setting for a Superman video game, where we have an escalating invasion from brainiac as the main plot, culminating in the player as superman destroying several ships and getting to the brainiac boss room. A Wonder Woman game could be taken in several ways, but I think an origin story leading into the justice society could be kinda cool, where we have a medieval combat system of block with shield, attack with sword or lasso, and a grapple mechanic as well as a timed counter to ranged and close range attacks utilizing her bracers. Story could start off as her entering WW1 and encountering the Justice Society members like Dr.Fate or Jay Garrick, and them assigning missions or being there to assist. Final boss could be Ares for example. In terms of combat systems flash and Wonder Woman would be simpler than Superman with a Superman game likely being the most boring thing ever simply because of how OP kryptonians are. And this comment has gone on a tangent….what was I originally commenting on?
The biggest barrier to entry for me for this game is that it feels so obviously designed with egregious microtransactions and lootboxes in mind. So many bizarre and baffling decisions are so obviously explained by the fact that it was designed with these elements in mind, but ripped out at the last minute after Avengers got absolutely raked over the coals.
I really appreciate you trying to be both honest and appreciative in your reviews. I feel like it reflects the experience of the normal consumer, where we *want* to like most games we buy, and being so specific but also so generous with your analysis helps make that decision easier
Yup. I love how he points out the little things that annoy the hell out of you that’s just bad game design. A lot of this stuff could have been avoided but the decisions behind it were just terrible. It’s one thing to have bugs, but you can’t blame bad design on bugs.
I love that they continued the grand tradition which is Nightwing's Glorious Glutes. They caked him up perfectly in the game. Especially when considering that his thicc cheeks are an ongoing joke in the comics.
Yeah but the joke has overstayed its welcome it's no longer funny considering the new season of Harley Quinn beat it to the ground and decided to get 1 million horses to slam it down further.
I actually thought Tim’s arc was great. The title of Robin is like a pawn in chess. It’s a stepping stone to be greater, to form your own identity. Dick didn’t stay Robin, he eventually moved on and became Nightwing. Jason didn’t stay Robin. He moved to being Red Hood I think it’s a conscious decision that he’s Robin in this game, instead of his role as Red Robin. He still needs to form his own superhero identity. Instead of getting one handed to him. That’s why I see Robin’s ending as the true one. He has his talk with Alfred, realizes he has his own destiny. And the final cutscene ends with his taking charge. And speaking to Gotham as a new hero.
And only people like you care about that, just how they look..... I chose nightwing not cuz im gay, but cuz he fits the way i play the most..... I didnt look at his ass like you do and go ah thats the one right there for me...... Besides no one who plays this game knows what fuckin stealth is, oh? Wanna try and handle the bomb threat silently as to NOT set off the bombs the vics have on them? Cool some batgirl or red hood assclown joins and just charges in guns blazing......
For me, the thing about damage numbers is that it takes me out of the immersion. In a video game landscape where everything’s trying to be an RPG, the last place I wanna see them is in my Batman fantasy.
bruh your trauma speech about Jason had me tearing up a bit. I feel very seen. Media always seems to imply that trauma can be overcome and thrown off completely. And for years I felt guilty that it never worked for me and I never seemed to *stay* better permanently.
Praying for you. The pain never goes away but that doesn’t mean you can’t move forward day by day. It’s not easy but when striving for something even when you get knocked down makes that victory so much more important and rewarding. God bless you.
Trauma isn't something that can be 'overcome' similar, the only way to deal with it would either be talking to someone or focusing your mind on something that doesn't take you to that place.
54:02 there's something hilarious to me about Nightwing absentmindedly twirling his baton while waiting for the guy to pass out, like "yeah, yeah just go to sleep"
While I know you don't think it is appropriate to compare Gotham Knights to the Arkham series, I do think that it allows us to very clearly see why Gotham Knights has struggled. The Arkham series is so well loved (almost universally) because it really does live up to the now cliche phrase "It makes you feel like the Batman". You can certainly see some of the larger gaming trends on display as you play them but how it all comes together really works and really does immerse you in the whole "I'm Batman doing Batman stuff" thing. It is as if Rocksteady very deliberately started with the Batman character as the jumping off point for all their design and narrative decisions. The franchise certainly had its more "gamey" moments but as a whole, it seldom deviated from telling a surprisingly cohesive, character focused story and that is really what the Batman fiction is all about. It is about characters and personalities. It is about characters dealing with inner struggles manifested outwards via villains and events. The Arkham series kept driving straight into that concept and that is the reason it will always be a textbook "You will feel like Batman" experience. With Gotham Knights, it is as if the developers took the exact opposite approach. Instead of starting with the characters and constructing everything around supporting their stories, it instead feels as though they just had a requirement to make a RPG-lite, loot based beat-em-up with crafting. It may not have been envisioned as a true "live service" game but it certainly was trying to adopt some of the general vibe of one on a structural level. There may not be loot boxes or anything but the way missions feel, the way the narrative is integrated, and the fact that it has a grind-based end game focused on refining specific high-level builds very much makes it feel like a "live service" style title more than it feels like a game focused around the "bat-family" dealing with the death of their mentor. There are other elements that kind doomed this game from the conceptual stage. The major one being the choice of using the Court of Owls. If one has read the comics that this game is drawing inspiration from, they would find that the real narrative value of the Court wasn't just that they are a aesthetically cool and capable threat. It is that they were very clearly created as a very direct foil to Batman/Bruce Wayne as an individual character. This is revealed right from the start of the comic run where the Batman character is talking about how well he knows the city. How much he understands it and its various comings and goings. The revelation that there was actually this shadowy but immensely powerful/influential group quite literally sitting under his nose the entire time is a major problem for him and it is one of the elements that actually makes the Court work. When you remove Batman from the Court of Owls equation (as Gotham Knights largely did), you don't get left with much. The Court really should have been a villain for a Batman only title while Gotham Knights should have simply went all in on the Talia storyline as the primary focus. It would have suited that group of characters better and would have made the game feel more cohesive overall. Another problem is the writing. It certainly isn't always as bad as it very much could have been but when you are coming from Arkham (and it is VERY safe to say that this game's target audience was Arkham fans considering the constant thematic connections it makes without wanting to take on the creative responsibility/accountability involved in doing so), it is hard not to notice just how distinctly "CW TV show" the dialogue feels in comparison to the more updated/comic connected 'Batman: The Animated Series' style that the Arkham games adopted. The dialogue is often entirely on the nose and with little art or nuance. It doesn't feel like it has a style and instead just feels very flat almost all the time. It is very much a "kinder, gentler" approach to writing that while more likely to attract certain demographics, is also less likely to challenge the player to pay attention to subtext or imagery. Gotham Knights feels like it was written by a marketing committee in order to be as safe and as specifically tailored towards the 12 to 20 demographic as possible. It isn't written for someone who wants a good Batman/Bat-family story, it is written for someone who just wants to watch more CW format superhero shows in general. The game has other problems but I want to focus on just one more. 'Gotham Knights' very immediately reminded me of the experience of going from Assassin's Creed: Unity to Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. In Unity, the developers took all the lessons they had learned from prior entries into the franchise and really focused on delivering a gameplay experience that felt loyal to the original concept and intent. On top of that. It had a strong, effectively linear story that still enabled you to explore and do your own thing at will but seldom ever felt generic. Missions never had a "procedurally generated open world content" feel. When you get to Syndicate, all that changes. The gameplay shifts to something more streamlined and "gamey". The narrative is drip fed between generic feeling missions and generic open world "random" content. It isn't so much about inhabiting the characters as it is just playing a open world game with an Assassin's Creed coat of paint applied thinly to the top. You could also make an argument that 'Gotham Knights' is not unlike going from the more focused, more narratively satisfying 'Assassin's Creed: Origins' to the more generically RPG-lite, more bloated 'Assassin's Creed: Odyssey'. The Arkham series had just the right mix of open world content and very obviously hand-crafted story rich missions. Everything felt very connected in a narrative sense and by the end of a given Arkham game, you feel like most of what you did fed into the story or even just the overall theme in a satisfying way. When you go from that to the much more generic, much more "open world procedurally generated content" style of 'Gotham Knights', it is hard to not make comparisons. As you said. It is hard not to compare when the Arkham series already provides such a clear, obvious starting point. When I compare Gotham Knights to the Arkham series, it isn't because I want it to be a carbon copy, it is because so much of Gotham Knights would be really, really good if it had not so obviously and aggressively strayed from a formula that would have worked perfectly for it. Gotham Knights could have been a true evolution of the Arkham format but instead it wants to hint and reference it while also pretending that any comparison is unfair and unjust. It wants to connect to the Arkham games and benefit from the existing Arkham audience but whenever any unfavorable comparison comes up, it is shot down as "unfair" and "entirely incorrect". The game can't have it both ways and neither can the developers or the game's bizarrely aggressive defenders.
I read your whole comment and you perfectly articulated what I've been saying since this game was revealed back in DC 2020 after the gameplay reveal. People dismiss any critique toward this game as people wanting another arkham game. I also agree on the court of owls storyline and how they were poorly Depicted compared to their comicbook counterparts and how it defeats the point when Bruce/batman is dead. Nightwing also has history with the court and even that wasn't touched on outside of some throw away dialogue. But like I said you've done a better job articulating all the issues I have with this game. Unfortunately Rocksteady has also fallen into the same trappings with suicide squad.
Exactly! If they had changed things but they were just as good or better people wouldn't have a problem. But they did things worse which is inexcusable when you already have the blueprints to make a great Batman game.
The biggest problem most people have with this game is the brute enemies having too much health (some having regeneration too) and the fact that this game was going to be live service causing a lot of tedious grinding for 'currency'
The drone enemies for me, not only are they annoying, but they call in new drones every time one is defeated… that and they can dodge almost every basic attack flawlessly.
That part about Jason and his trauma hit me surprisingly hard. Nowadays I find it hard to even remember what really happened, but even so it the feelings that came with those experiences never really goes away. It's certainly done a number on my mental development, and living and finding a reason to keep living isn't always easy. While my memories start to crumble, I'll never forget the years of torment I went through, it'll be etched into me as a person for as long as I live
That said, it's part of the journey in life to be able to push and move forward even with that with which is etched into you. It's all easier said than done but it's to make the best of things as you can each day. The second Zombieland movie put it well (originating from Dr. Seuss), "When something bad happens, you have three choices - let it define you, destroy you, or strengthen you." My prayers out to you, I hope things get better for you.
For me, I don't like damage numbers not because of damage sponges, but because of the number focused ideology of modern gaming. Games are becoming more and more about who has the bigger number more than who has the most skill, and it makes it easier for developers to sell microtransactions with bigger numbers for you.
I've played division and my biggest problem isn't damage numbers but enemies are damage sponges. Division had the worst damage output in the game you had to use only one build to get through the game, it was updated later to fix the issue but rpg game that had guns shouldn't have enemies that take 5 mags from a lmg because he has armor. A game that is mainly about steath takedowns and martial arts its understandable to have enemies that challenge you.
I just wanted a Red Hood game and this had me hyped from announcement to launch and it didn't completely disappoint, but it didn't live up to the hype either. A perfectly average game all around. I ended up platinuming it and I did enjoy myself but it wasn't much more than that
@@Lauren007EHe definitely feels like the worst at stealthing out of them all. Most fun you’ll have with him is just building up his gun combos and going ham on every crowd you see
So for the Talons, the heavy ranged attack ALWAYS stuns them when they are not attacking but as soon as you see that red around their hand it means they have entered the super armor of red attacks and can now only be stunned by momentum abilities for the duration of their attack
A nice detail about the credits that i noticed is that the game remembers which character and suit you used for each main mission and alters the credits accordingly.
I always felt Gotham Knights's perception issues were caused by an oversaturation of looter mechanics and what that can imply in a lot of other games that have these systems and are designed to be a live service, rather than assuming its instead "oh god, another Bullet spongey grindathon, ugh". They assumed it would be like that cause of other games using it alongside other terrible systems and monetisation schemes, and I feel that perception damaged Gotham Knights more than being viewed as a "lesser Arkham." by the customers. Hell im starting to see this happen again with the recent suicide squad game leak. other than that, this was a pretty great review.
Agreed. For those who gave it a chance, it's a good game. But they really should've finished it rather than releasing a buggy and unoptimized version. Relaunching the game every couple of hours isn't a deal breaker, but was frustrating
tbf to the masses, they have been burned out by bad uses of said mechanics in said games and the monetisation problems that come with em, to a customer in the know theyre just getting sick of it cause of the many bad examples associated with those mechanics despite there being a potentially great game buried beneath all that.@@user-wg2sb1dw7c
Agreed, the fuck we need resources for when NOT ONLY do we have lucious fox on our side but graysons access to batmans wealth??? That would be like fuckin batman saying "i cant make this yet, i dont have the matierials" like ok cool just buy them and make them lmfao they even have a 3d printer in the belfry for gods sake and not once do the characters we dont play as need any of that, ive caught red hood making dozens of pieces of armor for his suits but im the one who needs materials unlike them
Wow! That bit on trauma was amazing… it was really eloquently put and really spoke to me! Even got me out of a slump I've been in these last few days due - thank you! 😊
This game trying to be "not like other Arkham games" is a stupid attempt to deflect criticism for a poorly designed game. Why it itn't as good? "Because it's not an Arkham game". It's re-inventing the wheel for the wrong reason. People were thirsting for a new Arkham experience, be it in the same timeline or not. Spider-man PS4 may have it's flaws and I maintain my stance that it's not as good as the Arkham series, but it still took what worked and added it's own stuff. Spider-man wasn't bothered by the Arkham comparison, because it was well executed and if any hero game had a right to invoke the "it's not Arkham" excuse it's that game. Yes, Gotham Knights is not Arkham, but that is no excuse for the disaster it is. Oh and another issue I have with the game is the visual design of characters, which is utterly amateurish in the best of cases and an eyesore in the worst cases. And idiotic "video game-y" BS, such as motorcycles materializing out of nowhere "bEcAuSe TeChNoLoGy".
I found it almost laughable the bat family doesn’t know who Dr. Langstrum is. After everything Batman went through all the adventures with the robins and Batgirl they never once went up against Man-Bat? Really hard to believe
I really hated the "stop and go" grapple in Gotham Nights, when the grappling hook from the entire Arkham series felt so smooth and seamless between grapples.
I hated the RANDOM AS FUCK directions it would pick for me, no joke the time i remember i was looking right at a billboard, tried to grapple to it and fucked off to some other building instead..... It seems like the grapple target system is completely random and selects whatever the fuck ledge is nearest to you even if off screen.....
The best thing to have come out of Gotham Knights is the fact that Arkham Knight has received some much-deserved recognition for just how good of a game it was in spite of its flaws.
The real thing that turned me off from gotham knights aside from the bugs was red hood's character, i've always loved him for being so different from the rest of the bat family, he's a tortured soul who became a vigilante that kills unlike the others who don't, i think taking away his ability to kill just spoils his character. he also has some of the goofiest abilities i've ever seen in my life, like since when did lazarus give you a magical double jump?
Jason stopping killing is probably my favorite part about him. He's a member of the Batfamily, not the dangerous vigilante who'd murder you for doing a hit and run.
I think a great villain in this game would have been Azrael as a kinda rival to the bat family and have him and his order to be the big bad after Bruce's death
It’s shame Gotham knights was so disappointing because this game had so much Potential to be amazing but it ended up to be a disappointment but that’s just my opinion.
The way the court of owls was handled in the game as the worst kept secret in Gotham, reminded me of Assassin's Creed Syndicate were you fought Templars that wore uniforms with the Templar Order symbol on the front and shoulders of them. Like this is an ancient secret society, emphasis on "Secret", instead Syndicate had them strolling the streets of London wearing these uniforms, like Templars are a military or police organization with a recognizable logo that everyone knows so dumb.
"Why Gotham Knights failed?" Perhaps making a game full of bugs and low frame rate while turning the Bat-family into a bunch of spoiled "modern" kids and Harley Quinn into a TikToker wasn't the best idea... Just saying.
I had the batcycle un summon at least 1-3 times a hour while playing. I bought the game in the first month of release and played on PS5. There were no colors just grey everywhere and this video was the first time I saw the sky be different and actually have some variety in the color. I saw all of the beginning bugs and beat the game over the course of a week since I had Covid. It was the single worse game I ever played recently and ever said to my dad that saw me play it that I don’t recommend he play it cause he wanted to play it. Even the story was horrible and it seems the damage on the weapons was inconsistent with the what was actually dealt. If I ever play Gotham Knights again it’s because the bugs are fixed or a dlc came out and I got curious. This rant from me is only the beginning of my issues with the game too
@@darthmase. I don't know if you ever played it, but I heavily recommend the Arkham Franchise to you (Arkham Asylum, Akrham City, Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight). If you want to play GOOD Batman games, these are the ones.
14:36 this is exactly what happened to me, i played about 2 and a half hours and with the cringe dialogue, low frame rate, underwhelming game traversal, slow combat, and out of place rpg mechanics it all just felt so janky to me. i tried to go in with an open mind and not compare it to arkham but when youre playing as a character gliding through gotham city while doing silent takedowns and throwing batarangs its really hard not to. if this game came out back in like 2011 and the arkham games never existed id probably love it, but the arkham games reached such a high standard now that its impossible not to compare all superhero games towards them. and thats especially the case with a batman themed game like gotham knights where its basically following the footsteps layed before it in a very janky and low quality fashion, at least from what i played.
@@blizzyalmxghty9297 No, Red Hood can grapple big enemies. HOWEVER, for some reason Robin is the one that can do takedowns on them... but can't grab them... Really weird choice. It feels like they should both be Red Hood's abilities.
I don't think the lack of coop in AK should justify this game looking significantly worse. Gotham Knights is a current gen-only game that looks pitiful in comparison to a game from the previous generation
In all the 4 Arkham games I kept thinking that chests were the only thing missing, and I am so glad they fixed that in Gotham. Also adding levels and numbers, that's also pretty cool. I am sarcastic
I know you are being sarcastic but idk... I actually really enjoyed the HP/level idea. Chests were fine as just another way to get materials for your gear. I found the lack of any sort of HP to be my only issue with the Arkham series, the amount of time everyone takes to go down is always identical but it can be hard to track who should be focused next unless you use finishers and they often disrupt combat.😊
@@kitnal4143 go play ur mobile games, adults are talking here... ok, there are games where where levelling makes sense, some RPGs and he souls games, but in Gotham it feels unnecessary and it just feels like it's wasting my time
Even after the months it’s been since playing this game, I still stand by the fact that it’s good. Not every game needs to be the next Arkham, and people need to stop expecting perfection from every single game. People were very unfair towards Gotham Knights, just because Rocksteady happened to strike gold 3 times in a row, so seeing a review that actually cares is a breath of fresh air.
The health bar argument is a little weird. Every Arkham game had health bars they just where not visible. Now if there is no way to disable the health bars, that is a problem. I do not like the levels though especially if I play nightwing all game and then switch to robin for the final fight does that mean its going to take me hours because robin is level 1? Only the abilities should be making me "stronger" and that is only because it gives me more options.
The problem in Arkham Knight with the Batmobile wasn't that it existed. It's that it was so much of the gameplay. There were far too many missions that took place in the Batmobile. Races, stealth, timed survival, chases, etc. Here, it's just travel and races. Which is fine because it's not locking story progression behind those. It's a good game, but it didn't hold my attention well. I might have to get back into it. I think one of the problems is that it is very "close but not quite" to Arkham, so it always is going to have comparisons to those games, and always will fall short.
Imma have to push back a bit on your "misconceptions of bullet sponge enemies" talking point. Cause, idk don't mean to sound harsh, but it feels like you came off a bit too disingenuous in representing that criticism. Though it is important/justified for you to clear up the misconception that is working against GK and show how it actually plays out if you simply engage with the systems, your point still comes off more as a "band aid" solution that still doesn't address the actual problem some of us have with this game design approach the moment we were made aware of it. See, to me, gear/rpg oriented action games just feel like you're playing the game of "make number go big" above all else. And, at times, that sort of design approach tends to lead to a rather uninspired enemy design that doesn't challenge the players "raw skill" (for a lack of a better term) Even you showing how by engaging with the gear systems just slightly that lead you to steamrolling enemies lends even more credence to my not so favorable perception of GK's combat. Though, I get it's unfair to compare GK to the Arkham series, it's just hard to shake off the comparison when GK is still roughly gunning for a combat design that is somewhat similar to the Arkham games. It's just that with GK, it "seems" to create an external unnecessary/artificial layer of challenge/difficulty through its RPG/Gear mechanics. While with the Arkham games, you knew the difficulty/challenge came solely from the combat instance you were put in and it all depended on your own mastery of the games' combat mechanics to overcome said combat instance. Maybe this ultimately sounds nitpicky to you, but that sort of difference matters a LOT to me.
Despite what I heard and saw about this game I was still kind of wanting to just play it for myself. But once I saw there was going to be no 60fps option on console, that’s when I didn’t care if I played it or not. No reason why they have to force raytracing on you and make you play the way they want you to.
This seems like a game made by people who don't really understand Nightwing or Batgirl, and just sees them as Batman sidekicks. I get the same vibes from this as I did from Ratchet & Clank All For One - just a meh side game that probably should have been DLC.
This Gotham Knights game was NOT a failure to me! For one thing yes Batman did actually die this time but that was to finally show blind fans that he's not an invincible Batgod. Second it was also showing how he was before it happened, he was being a more likable and balanced person even when not wearing the mask (a little humorous too) and he was also being more open towards his underlings like a caring father towards them and that's how I like Batman.
Considering the Arkham games already had playable foundations for Nightwing, Robin, Redhood and Batgirl. It’s weird they didn’t build on what they already had and continued the Arkham story with the ending that Batman is dead. And simply replace Barbara with Cassandra Cain and keep Barbara in the Oracle role.
Loved this review and why you’re one of my favourite channels around! I think you perfectly depicted Red Hood, better perhaps than anyone else I’ve heard! Keep the work up!
After making it all the way to level 60 on GK, I can honestly say that it's a fun game, but it took too long for it to get there. You don't really get to experience the game until NG+, and from there, you get to actually experience the game in its full entirety.
@@enternamehere3759 I'm not even trying to be pessimistic but you lowkey can't. The new Gotham Knights CW show and the new Velma show? It's fucking hard to enjoy new shit dropping, because they're somehow preforming under our low enough expectations. How do you disappoint someone who's already disappointed? That being said, do you know any good games out right now? I just want something good to play.
I’ll never understand people’s gripe with the Batmobile in Arkham Knight, driving that shit around was fun as fuck and the tank combat wasn’t that bad. We had 3 Arkham games without the Batmobile, fuck everyone else gimme more Batmobile I want it.
I get some people can be a little harsh with stuff, but in some of ours's defense...we wanted the Batmobile, but not tank battles and the stupid Riddler racetracks. The tank battles while not that bad, also weren't necessary considering no one asked for or really expected it. While the Batmobile can be built "tank tough" no one thinks tank battle when they think of the Batmobile. They also don't feel as much like Batman as everything thing else in the series before that felt. Chasing criminals and using it's tools/gadgets, sure. If we wanted to play a tank battle game we'd go play a tank battle game. Just like with the racetracks. If we wanted to play a racing game we'd go play a racing game. It's too different from the previous three games and again, no on asked for that. Those Riddler tracks can be so annoying and I'd rather not have to mess with them. Give me riddles/puzzles. It was just too outside the formula for a lot of us. Tank battles aren't really Batman's style and the only reason it was able to play in this is because they were drones instead of manned vehicles. Again, I loved chasing down criminals and using the concussive missiles to take out their vehicles and then beating the snot out of them, if I feel like it. I liked when they had Riddler henchmen to interrogate at the end of the fight.
The hate for a mechanic they wanted since Asylum. Honestly I was excited for the batmobile and it didn't disappoint. The car just came at the expense of meaningful bossfights and that is my only gripe with it.
Nice video Aqua. I can feel the passion from the writing in the video. I haven’t played Gotham Knights since I beat it at launch & simply watching the gameplay in this video made me wanna return to the streets of Gotham 🎉
I played the high seas version, so I assume its the drm thats making performance bad because I got perfectly smooth performance with zero hitches at 4k. I do see visual bugs though and I do get occasional dropped inputs. I dont like the gameplay but the story is incredible and 100% DC animated movie vibes
Thats also untrue, for the longest time i had a level 76 dart for nightwing that i couldnt get rid of cuz its stats were too good, then i fould the exact same one at 80, so even then that is false lmfao
The upgrades in the Arkham games served a purpose.. Gotham knights is a game where you can just run through it chucking batarangs and a few punches. With ps3 character models.
@@zerobullets6935 I understand. I just wanted to have a little fun and an excuse to pay a little respect to PS3 tech (at least when it was used to its highest potential).
I bought Gotham knights on sale for 13 dollars a few days ago. The fact that I am still bored playing it given the amount of content I’m getting for 13 bucks is so disappointing
Might be a weird analogy but it reminds me of the movie Ocean Waves. It was made by younger staff at studio ghibli and while it did some things good, it definitely dropped the ball in some areas. However it was cited as an inspiration by Miyazaki to make other great Ghibli movies like Whisper of the Heart. This game definitely feels like the missed shot while the arkham games are like ghibli's greatest films (Spirited Away, Totoro, etc.) I wish that Rocksteady would've had some involvement in the production to help polish up what was wrong with the game
I liked the game. Played it 3 times as 3 different character. My biggest complaint is that it’s just not the team up game it advertises. These heroes works solo almost entirely. Cool concept but why divide the attention then? It diluted the strength of the narrative
I find it funny how with Knights coming out, we suddenly hold Arkham Knight in such high regard, when at the time, the major perception was that is just wasn’t that good.
Wrong or right I think a lot of fans when they found out the game didn’t play like an Arkham game (and that some thought it was to the game’s detriment) said the exact same thing to themselves which was “I’ll wait for a sale”.
Great video but I think I can provide an explanation on nightwing assuming leader ship. Usually he's chosen cause he's the most emotionally stable of the group with Tim being insecure as all Robins were when they were Robin, barbara just not having as much emotional intelligence as dick, and Jason beacause... Do I even need to explain? He also has camoncially the most experience out of everyone as has led multiple teams, with varying amounts of success. The problem is that outside of the side stories the main character don't connect in the main game so you can never see dick being the most stable. I found the best way to see their was the emails but again this is a very big issue cause who's gonna read the emails for character moments when you can just as easily animate scenes of nightwing encouraging Robin, superman coming in to check on the knight, etc. So thats an explanation for you as you don't seem to have red a lot of comics(be happy honestly, nothings destroys your soul more than reading comics).
Just some different interpretation points to flaws that you pointed out in the plot: 1 - Harley doesn't actually discover the Court, just the fact that the Penguin was the only elite criminal not to be released on technical matters or witness being killed / 2 - The Penguin knows about the court because he's a member of the Cobblepot family, one of the main families of the Court (and also he was a criminal, it isn't far fetched to know he poked around and managed to convince The Voice that it was benefitial to maintain him alive / 3 - At the end , the Court isn't without a Voice, the buff guy that speaks is a new Voice that replaced Jacob Kane. I finished the game recently and I liked it. It doesnt do anything revolutionary, and has its flaws, sure, but it was fun for me. And a great point in favor to it is that I personally don't like Batman very much, but the game actually made me be more sympathetic towards his character. So for me I would give it a 7.5 out 10.
So I'm a Nightwing fan boy so I want to defend my boy for absolutely no reason. The reason dick is the leader is because... He's usually the leader in the comics. I realize that's not a good reason but hear me out. Nightwing is the old brother for the rest of the team and he has the charisma to inspire others. Dick Grayson is also the leader of the teen Titans where he uses his said charisma and his intellect to lead the team. I realize that this is in the comics and in the game Dick Grayson is lacking most of these leadership skills. There's also the issue that it's hard to make the bat family stand out sometimes. Every member is a master in the arts if stealth, hand to hand combat, detective skills, and intellect. The only difference is dick is more acrobatic and charismatic, Tim is smart, Jason is angry and uses guns, Barbara is smart and a girl(that's a joke at writers not the character).
I hate the way gamers and gaming TH-camrs stake all their thoughts on just criticism. Any little thing they don’t like and suddenly the whole game is bad. It feels like gaming critics (your favorite TH-camrs included) just don’t wanna engage with any game deeper than just mashing the buttons. I’m glad there’s people like you that actually attempt to play the games you review
I could care less about it being an Arkham game or not. I just wanted a game that has a decent combat system that controls well and I don't think we got that. I could forgive every other shortcoming with this game if I didn't think the combat and controls were god awful. Easily the worst feeling melee combat system I played with in 2022. Issues I found that you didn't even talk about are as follows: 1: The game takes control away from the player arbitrary for doing seemingly innocuous actions like after doing a special move you briefly can't attack or dodge for a few seconds. 2: Simply turning your character in the direction you want to face comes with an egregiously noticeable animation delay that locks you out of some other actions. 3: Sometimes inputs just won't register at all until you press the button for a second or even third time, even though your character is CLEARLY back in a neutral (0) position. This is incredibly baffling considering this game has an input queue system, so the game is literally just dropping inputs out of nowhere sometimes. I often have this happen with batgirl's beat-down special where she'll just stop attacking even though I'm still mashing the X button. And just casting a momentum ability at all literally negates your next button press. I could cast out BG's ultimate drone, press the 'B' button on my controller and BG will just stand there, totally in neutral, no dodge action whatsoever. 4: You can't cancel into special moves. You have to do momentum abilities raw instead of having the option to cancel into them out of a combo, which would only help with the fluid-ness of the combat as whole and increase option variety. Would certainly help against enemies with armored moves, especially when they just randomly throw them out after stunning them during your combo, giving you another option to deal with them immediately instead of just 'Dodge THEN do special move'. 5: Your dodge has no I-frames at all, which means you're completely at the mercy of attacks with horrendously bad hit-boxes at times and melee attacks that come at you out of nowhere from off-screen because 1: The camera is pretty awful and you constantly have to keep fiddling with it during a fight because it doesn't always know what it's suppose to be tracking and sometimes won't even bother tracking anything at all. And 2: They put WAY too much tracking on some enemy attacks, which looks absolutely goofy. (Something you did mention briefly) A godmother's spinning attack literally teleports her half a mile to your position. 6: Enemies will often immediately cancel their hit-stun into an attack out of no where. This has to be some kind of programming goof. I can't imagine this being intended as it conveys to the player that hit advantage practically doesn't matter which should be one of the most consistent things in your brawler-style game. 7: indicators for enemies preparing to shoot you from off-screen often blend into the environment, making them hard to see and react to sometimes. 8: The auto-targeting sometimes has a mind of its own. You could be pressing the stick in one direction and your character will still choose to attack an enemy in the opposite direction. And you need to direct your character as much as possible unless you want to be attacking the air because an animation left your character standing with their BACK TOWARDS the enemy. Simply pressing an attack button won't turn them around. This game's controls just feel so sluggish and unresponsive and it kills the combat and movement to me. Everything feels stiff, disconnected and needlessly restrictive for what I can only guess was done for the sake of "realism" in a super hero game. I glad you had fun with it but when the most intense parts of the gameplay are this wonky-feeling to me, I struggle to get any sort of fun out of it even when I'm one-shotting everyone as Batgirl, or really any hero with a crit build, because crit builds are so monumentally broken in this game. If you got this far, YOU are the best thing since man created the toaster.
I liked Gotham Knights while I played it, but I can’t help but feel like it’s a massive step down in a lot of ways. The combat is going for a different style than Arkham, so I don’t think that comparing those is that productive. But other things like traversal and stealth just feel like stripped down versions of what we had in Arkham. I don’t hate the game, but I can’t see myself coming back to it anytime soon, unlike all the Arkham games.
The fact that Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Caine weren’t in this was already a big mark against this game for me when this was first announced. And before anybody says they aren’t as well known members of the Batfamily, lots of people didn’t know who Tim Drake was before playing it either. The whole “Batfamily” game just feels incomplete without the other two Batgirls fans love. Heck, Stephanie was a Robin and a Batgirl, you can’t make a game about all the Robins without her.
I’m not gonna lie I really like this game like I’m really happy. They finally made Jason Todd, a.k.a. my favorite DC character a time in the spotlight I mean we’ve had Batman games for so long Arkham series. I’m looking in your direction I mean we had a good amount of time with Knightwing and all the characters but yet nobody really knows about red hood, other than that one movie that came out so long ago And I feel like red hood finally getting that spotlight in the storyline as a playable character really just brought a tear to my eyes
Great review man. Been following all of your stuff lately. The Arkham and uncharted stuff is great. Are you excited at all for suicde squad releasing in about a month?
@@ThatBoyAqua same. Rock Steady doesn’t disappoint. Looks more borderlands than Arkham . But I’m hopeful and hope it’s better than Gotham Knights. It was bad just mid to me. If you end up liking it and want someone to squad up with. Drop that gamertag. Otherwise keep up the great work man. Absolutely love these gaming essays. That 4 hr Arkham video got me through a bad work week lol.
The game has bullet sponge enemies. The fact that you have to either turn down the difficulty or spend hours grinding gear to actually do a decent amount of damage on enemies is evidence of poor game design. This isn't how most RPGs operate you aren't normally punished for not grinding. Grinding is optional if you want to create an overpowered build. This isn't Destiny and it doesn't need to pretend that it is the gear grind doesn't justify the gameplay experience. If you see the complaints from other youtubers about the bullet sponges and disagree I think you are honestly missing the point. There's a lot of unjustified complaints for this game but that isn't one of them.
Because its a live service collectathon using the same mechanics as mobile games with a batman voat of paint. Please do not ever buy a live service collectathon game regardless of what characters are present. Its ruining the industry as a whole...
It's not a love service game though.. which is funnily one of its main issues. Because rhe way ita built is a way a love service game should be built. But it has none of the good parts of being a love service game
@@willbaker6532 good parts of a live service game? Sounds like you're part of the problem. We dont need mobile game practices on console. Live service games exist exclusively as cash grabs and are in no way art forms like the majority of the industry
@@aroccoification I never said they were an art form. But live service does have good aspects like constant support, constant new content post launch. Thr negatives are either that you have to pay extra for stuff (though non live service games do this anyway) and that you tend to have to grimd for currencies to be able to get anything they add (gotham knights has all the grinding but without any content to grind for)
@@willbaker6532 gross worst of both worlds... If you like grinding play an rpg dont give your money to live service people who are ruining the industry
Saying to get a PC if you care about frame rates is kind of a cop-out. Like the whole point of the current gen consoles is so console players don't have to make that decision. That's kinda what the $600 USD was for. Sony and Microsoft have both said that they made sure that devs had the option to make their games run in 4K and 60fps. It's become the standard. WB Montreal just chose not to do that, and instead prioritized on visual fidelity. Which is odd considering the game isn't really THAT impressive looking from a fidelity standpoint. I'd expect a hard 30fps cap on something like Horizon Forbidden West, but not this. I'd like to eventually try the game because of how big a fan I am of Batman and the Bat Family, but I'm not touching it until a performance mode comes. Or a sequel with a performance mode. I mean shit, I'd genuinely rather play at 480p if it meant 60fps. Whether it means disabling co-op and ray tracing AND using a dynamic resolution, I don't really care. Feels like it shouldn't be this difficult of a task for something that basically every other AAA game is doing nowadays. I know I sound super entitled rn but I just legit can't play games like this at 30fps. I get crazy motion sickness and really bad headaches from that shit unless it's particularly well handled like it is with Monster Hunter Rise on Switch.
On PC I couldn’t even play the fucking game, I got stuck on an infinite loop with a cutscene at the beginning of the game, I got a refund and decided I’d never get the game again, I refuse to give a company money when they dish out broken games
I love the idea of Gotham knights if they actually had the same feel/vibe of knight. But it shows how lazy and uninspired wb was while creating this. This game just comes off goofy and cartoony and cringy. I like the story tho. One of those things that say it looks good on paper but not in execution. It was a let down. I’d say I wanna try it but man the gameplay just looks awful
I feel bad for WB Montréal . . . When they made an Arkham game, people got upset and some wished they had focused on a different universe. When they made a game in a different universe a lot of people wished they just made an arkham game.
The "not as bad as the first 3 hours" compliment is a huge red flag. Like,why can't this gane be good from the start, like Batman Arkham? If your less than 20 hour game takes 3 hours to be good, then it's an automatic fail.
Use bit.ly/ThatBoyAqua_HF or go to hellofresh.com and use code HELLOBOYAQUA for up to 20 FREE MEALS!
You do not have to return to the Belfry to equip new gear. After the heroic assault update you can now enter heroic assault and craft/equip gear there, and head back out without finishing the night.
Also jokes aside, I’m grateful to WhiteLight for being the only other person with this game lol. Without him I’d be extra miserable in heroic assault, and would likely have just ignored the co-op. Comments about his in game performance are, as he would call it, “just a bit uh bantah”.
Perfect title! After the 4 Arkham games, all other Gotham City games are just going to be like Robin the sidekick. Cool but, he’s no Batman
Also Tim Drake doesn’t have a crime fighting sister or brother because Barbara is a lone child of Jim and Tim wasn’t adopted because he was already an adult when Batman found him
@@Dark_Saibot you probably just needed to engage with the gear more. On the hardest difficulty I was steamrolling enemies.
@@ThatBoyAqua can you rank all the arkham games including gotham knights under my comment?
@@futurerebel62
Origins Blackgate
Asylum
Origins
Gotham Knights
City
Knight
This is super off the top of my head so it’s not concrete and I will not elaborate any further than I think City, Origins, and GK are all very close together imo. It’s also hard to compare them because GK is fundamentally different from Arkham
When I played the arkham games, my favourite thing to do was to put on the harder difficulty so the goons would have no interface indicator for their attacks, just the animation of a swing. It made me feel like a real batman who was observing my surroundings and winning. Looking at this in comparison makes my eyes hurt, just a cacophony of the damage values, health, criticals, elemental damage - it looks so gamy and cluttered
You summed up exactly why this game turns me off.
And it can mostly be turned off in the settings… as the video brings up…now I did personally also have a problem with the weird circles indicating a counter rather than the lightning bolts above the head from Arkham or the spidey sense above spidey from Spider-Man ps4. Personally I would’ve loved this game more if it’s combat wasn’t so slowed down, however the slower combat is more realistic compared to the pinball machine that is Arkham Batman, when his combo hits 100 you can go across a building in one punch, super unrealistic that a human at their physical peak can do that at that speed. Give that system to a flash video game however, and you’ve kinda solved the issue of how to incorporate super speed into a game without being too broken. Setting up a combo and ability system for a flash video game would make sense, and for traversal you could do somthing similar to what marvels Spider-Man does and build up speed as your moving, eventually moving along the side of buildings. Idk how you’d do a Superman video game, other than an on and off switch for his flight, and maybe a moral system…where the player is rewarded for pulling their punches throughout the game, giving two endings where if you murdered (did high damage really fast) your villains really quick you get an injustice Superman ending but at the same time your punishing the player for being good at the game…which isn’t fun, the other option is to hand kryptonite out like candy on Halloween night and watch the player try to work around it. You could also have a space setting for a Superman video game, where we have an escalating invasion from brainiac as the main plot, culminating in the player as superman destroying several ships and getting to the brainiac boss room. A Wonder Woman game could be taken in several ways, but I think an origin story leading into the justice society could be kinda cool, where we have a medieval combat system of block with shield, attack with sword or lasso, and a grapple mechanic as well as a timed counter to ranged and close range attacks utilizing her bracers. Story could start off as her entering WW1 and encountering the Justice Society members like Dr.Fate or Jay Garrick, and them assigning missions or being there to assist. Final boss could be Ares for example. In terms of combat systems flash and Wonder Woman would be simpler than Superman with a Superman game likely being the most boring thing ever simply because of how OP kryptonians are. And this comment has gone on a tangent….what was I originally commenting on?
The biggest barrier to entry for me for this game is that it feels so obviously designed with egregious microtransactions and lootboxes in mind. So many bizarre and baffling decisions are so obviously explained by the fact that it was designed with these elements in mind, but ripped out at the last minute after Avengers got absolutely raked over the coals.
The game doesn’t have any loot boxes nor microtransactions, wtf are you even saying??
@@gabrielximenes911 Can you read? He said that it was built with loot boxes and they removed them which is why the loot mechanics are not great
@@gabrielximenes911 my brother you need to do some research on live service games before commenting lmaooooo
@DRealSlipstreamzgame sucks deal wit it lil bro
@Slipstreamz Oh, yeah, because that NEVER happens in comment sections.
I really appreciate you trying to be both honest and appreciative in your reviews. I feel like it reflects the experience of the normal consumer, where we *want* to like most games we buy, and being so specific but also so generous with your analysis helps make that decision easier
Yup. I love how he points out the little things that annoy the hell out of you that’s just bad game design. A lot of this stuff could have been avoided but the decisions behind it were just terrible. It’s one thing to have bugs, but you can’t blame bad design on bugs.
I love that they continued the grand tradition which is Nightwing's Glorious Glutes. They caked him up perfectly in the game. Especially when considering that his thicc cheeks are an ongoing joke in the comics.
Yea. his cheeks always nice and thick. Like a good pillow 😂🥴
Him and Batgirl. Oof. 🥴🔥
Yeah but the joke has overstayed its welcome it's no longer funny considering the new season of Harley Quinn beat it to the ground and decided to get 1 million horses to slam it down further.
@@ricniks4619I think it's only a cover so they can draw as much caked up man ass as they want.
@@ricniks4619na it is a good joke I still like it, taking away nightwings ass is like taking away batman's batatang
seeing you play with whitelight is the crossever i never knew i needed
Now all we need is Raycevick to join them
Power levels are off the charts. One must almost hide thine eyes lest ye be blinded!
Seriously though, couldn't agree more!
Add Joseph Anderson and we have a really powerful video essay group lol
@@ChocolateAsian9000 Joseph Anderson has became painful to watch to me
@@callmepsycho3132How come?
I actually thought Tim’s arc was great. The title of Robin is like a pawn in chess. It’s a stepping stone to be greater, to form your own identity. Dick didn’t stay Robin, he eventually moved on and became Nightwing. Jason didn’t stay Robin. He moved to being Red Hood
I think it’s a conscious decision that he’s Robin in this game, instead of his role as Red Robin. He still needs to form his own superhero identity. Instead of getting one handed to him.
That’s why I see Robin’s ending as the true one. He has his talk with Alfred, realizes he has his own destiny. And the final cutscene ends with his taking charge. And speaking to Gotham as a new hero.
I really like that interpretation and I don’t know how I totally missed the chess metaphor when playing the game. Good stuff!
@ThatBoyAqua but a pawn always stays a pawn...
@@ProjectRedfoot When a white or black pawn reaches its promotion square, players can exchange it for a queen
Batgirl’s ass is bigger than Nightwing’s, and no reviewer wants to bring it up because they scared lol
Right?! Like come on guys. Why they pretending. Batgirl ass makes nightwings look like a chin.
And only people like you care about that, just how they look..... I chose nightwing not cuz im gay, but cuz he fits the way i play the most..... I didnt look at his ass like you do and go ah thats the one right there for me...... Besides no one who plays this game knows what fuckin stealth is, oh? Wanna try and handle the bomb threat silently as to NOT set off the bombs the vics have on them? Cool some batgirl or red hood assclown joins and just charges in guns blazing......
.
For me, the thing about damage numbers is that it takes me out of the immersion. In a video game landscape where everything’s trying to be an RPG, the last place I wanna see them is in my Batman fantasy.
everything is trying to be a battle royal not an rpg lol
And u can turn the damage numbers off, which he mentions in the video.
Makes it really unrealistic that a bulmet makes 300 damage instead of blowing up a hand.
bruh your trauma speech about Jason had me tearing up a bit. I feel very seen. Media always seems to imply that trauma can be overcome and thrown off completely. And for years I felt guilty that it never worked for me and I never seemed to *stay* better permanently.
Praying for you. The pain never goes away but that doesn’t mean you can’t move forward day by day. It’s not easy but when striving for something even when you get knocked down makes that victory so much more important and rewarding. God bless you.
@@outcast935 word 😤
i feel ya.
I felt that. Actually makes me want to see Jason’s arc in this game.
Trauma isn't something that can be 'overcome' similar, the only way to deal with it would either be talking to someone or focusing your mind on something that doesn't take you to that place.
54:02 there's something hilarious to me about Nightwing absentmindedly twirling his baton while waiting for the guy to pass out, like "yeah, yeah just go to sleep"
While I know you don't think it is appropriate to compare Gotham Knights to the Arkham series, I do think that it allows us to very clearly see why Gotham Knights has struggled. The Arkham series is so well loved (almost universally) because it really does live up to the now cliche phrase "It makes you feel like the Batman". You can certainly see some of the larger gaming trends on display as you play them but how it all comes together really works and really does immerse you in the whole "I'm Batman doing Batman stuff" thing. It is as if Rocksteady very deliberately started with the Batman character as the jumping off point for all their design and narrative decisions. The franchise certainly had its more "gamey" moments but as a whole, it seldom deviated from telling a surprisingly cohesive, character focused story and that is really what the Batman fiction is all about. It is about characters and personalities. It is about characters dealing with inner struggles manifested outwards via villains and events. The Arkham series kept driving straight into that concept and that is the reason it will always be a textbook "You will feel like Batman" experience.
With Gotham Knights, it is as if the developers took the exact opposite approach. Instead of starting with the characters and constructing everything around supporting their stories, it instead feels as though they just had a requirement to make a RPG-lite, loot based beat-em-up with crafting. It may not have been envisioned as a true "live service" game but it certainly was trying to adopt some of the general vibe of one on a structural level. There may not be loot boxes or anything but the way missions feel, the way the narrative is integrated, and the fact that it has a grind-based end game focused on refining specific high-level builds very much makes it feel like a "live service" style title more than it feels like a game focused around the "bat-family" dealing with the death of their mentor.
There are other elements that kind doomed this game from the conceptual stage. The major one being the choice of using the Court of Owls. If one has read the comics that this game is drawing inspiration from, they would find that the real narrative value of the Court wasn't just that they are a aesthetically cool and capable threat. It is that they were very clearly created as a very direct foil to Batman/Bruce Wayne as an individual character. This is revealed right from the start of the comic run where the Batman character is talking about how well he knows the city. How much he understands it and its various comings and goings. The revelation that there was actually this shadowy but immensely powerful/influential group quite literally sitting under his nose the entire time is a major problem for him and it is one of the elements that actually makes the Court work. When you remove Batman from the Court of Owls equation (as Gotham Knights largely did), you don't get left with much. The Court really should have been a villain for a Batman only title while Gotham Knights should have simply went all in on the Talia storyline as the primary focus. It would have suited that group of characters better and would have made the game feel more cohesive overall.
Another problem is the writing. It certainly isn't always as bad as it very much could have been but when you are coming from Arkham (and it is VERY safe to say that this game's target audience was Arkham fans considering the constant thematic connections it makes without wanting to take on the creative responsibility/accountability involved in doing so), it is hard not to notice just how distinctly "CW TV show" the dialogue feels in comparison to the more updated/comic connected 'Batman: The Animated Series' style that the Arkham games adopted. The dialogue is often entirely on the nose and with little art or nuance. It doesn't feel like it has a style and instead just feels very flat almost all the time. It is very much a "kinder, gentler" approach to writing that while more likely to attract certain demographics, is also less likely to challenge the player to pay attention to subtext or imagery. Gotham Knights feels like it was written by a marketing committee in order to be as safe and as specifically tailored towards the 12 to 20 demographic as possible. It isn't written for someone who wants a good Batman/Bat-family story, it is written for someone who just wants to watch more CW format superhero shows in general.
The game has other problems but I want to focus on just one more. 'Gotham Knights' very immediately reminded me of the experience of going from Assassin's Creed: Unity to Assassin's Creed: Syndicate. In Unity, the developers took all the lessons they had learned from prior entries into the franchise and really focused on delivering a gameplay experience that felt loyal to the original concept and intent. On top of that. It had a strong, effectively linear story that still enabled you to explore and do your own thing at will but seldom ever felt generic. Missions never had a "procedurally generated open world content" feel. When you get to Syndicate, all that changes. The gameplay shifts to something more streamlined and "gamey". The narrative is drip fed between generic feeling missions and generic open world "random" content. It isn't so much about inhabiting the characters as it is just playing a open world game with an Assassin's Creed coat of paint applied thinly to the top.
You could also make an argument that 'Gotham Knights' is not unlike going from the more focused, more narratively satisfying 'Assassin's Creed: Origins' to the more generically RPG-lite, more bloated 'Assassin's Creed: Odyssey'. The Arkham series had just the right mix of open world content and very obviously hand-crafted story rich missions. Everything felt very connected in a narrative sense and by the end of a given Arkham game, you feel like most of what you did fed into the story or even just the overall theme in a satisfying way. When you go from that to the much more generic, much more "open world procedurally generated content" style of 'Gotham Knights', it is hard to not make comparisons. As you said. It is hard not to compare when the Arkham series already provides such a clear, obvious starting point.
When I compare Gotham Knights to the Arkham series, it isn't because I want it to be a carbon copy, it is because so much of Gotham Knights would be really, really good if it had not so obviously and aggressively strayed from a formula that would have worked perfectly for it. Gotham Knights could have been a true evolution of the Arkham format but instead it wants to hint and reference it while also pretending that any comparison is unfair and unjust. It wants to connect to the Arkham games and benefit from the existing Arkham audience but whenever any unfavorable comparison comes up, it is shot down as "unfair" and "entirely incorrect". The game can't have it both ways and neither can the developers or the game's bizarrely aggressive defenders.
I read your whole comment and you perfectly articulated what I've been saying since this game was revealed back in DC 2020 after the gameplay reveal.
People dismiss any critique toward this game as people wanting another arkham game.
I also agree on the court of owls storyline and how they were poorly Depicted compared to their comicbook counterparts and how it defeats the point when Bruce/batman is dead. Nightwing also has history with the court and even that wasn't touched on outside of some throw away dialogue.
But like I said you've done a better job articulating all the issues I have with this game. Unfortunately Rocksteady has also fallen into the same trappings with suicide squad.
Well stated!
Exactly! If they had changed things but they were just as good or better people wouldn't have a problem. But they did things worse which is inexcusable when you already have the blueprints to make a great Batman game.
The biggest problem most people have with this game is the brute enemies having too much health (some having regeneration too) and the fact that this game was going to be live service causing a lot of tedious grinding for 'currency'
thy need to release update to fixed everything wrong with this game. listen to gamer, not investor
The drone enemies for me, not only are they annoying, but they call in new drones every time one is defeated… that and they can dodge almost every basic attack flawlessly.
I never had any issues with them with Batgirl it's the drone masters I hate because they take me the longest to beat
@@jamariojackson4289 a heavy ranged attack will stun them, and shocking them with electric elemental weapons will destroy their drones instantly
@@haldir255 Yeah Ik I have an electric build on my Robin now. Thanks though man !
That part about Jason and his trauma hit me surprisingly hard. Nowadays I find it hard to even remember what really happened, but even so it the feelings that came with those experiences never really goes away. It's certainly done a number on my mental development, and living and finding a reason to keep living isn't always easy. While my memories start to crumble, I'll never forget the years of torment I went through, it'll be etched into me as a person for as long as I live
That said, it's part of the journey in life to be able to push and move forward even with that with which is etched into you. It's all easier said than done but it's to make the best of things as you can each day. The second Zombieland movie put it well (originating from Dr. Seuss), "When something bad happens, you have three choices - let it define you, destroy you, or strengthen you." My prayers out to you, I hope things get better for you.
For me, I don't like damage numbers not because of damage sponges, but because of the number focused ideology of modern gaming. Games are becoming more and more about who has the bigger number more than who has the most skill, and it makes it easier for developers to sell microtransactions with bigger numbers for you.
I've played division and my biggest problem isn't damage numbers but enemies are damage sponges. Division had the worst damage output in the game you had to use only one build to get through the game, it was updated later to fix the issue but rpg game that had guns shouldn't have enemies that take 5 mags from a lmg because he has armor. A game that is mainly about steath takedowns and martial arts its understandable to have enemies that challenge you.
Also kinda takes away agency when it comes to play style, too. Cause the "whats the most optimal build?" Will always come into play.
@@SLIKZRKKbut "what is the most optimal build" really doesn't come into play. Sure you *can* do that but it isn't that important.
Haven't watched the video yet, but I love that you and Whitelight played together
I just wanted a Red Hood game and this had me hyped from announcement to launch and it didn't completely disappoint, but it didn't live up to the hype either. A perfectly average game all around. I ended up platinuming it and I did enjoy myself but it wasn't much more than that
I assume Jason plays better than in Arkham or is it about the same? Stealth is a no no, fast loud and quick is key
@@Lauren007EHe definitely feels like the worst at stealthing out of them all. Most fun you’ll have with him is just building up his gun combos and going ham on every crowd you see
So for the Talons, the heavy ranged attack ALWAYS stuns them when they are not attacking but as soon as you see that red around their hand it means they have entered the super armor of red attacks and can now only be stunned by momentum abilities for the duration of their attack
Terrible combat design. Those talons literally made me uninstall the game.
@@SolidSnake240 😂😂😂
@@SolidSnake240get good
@@SolidSnake240 skill issue
Imagine canceling the last gen version only for it to be *locked at 30 fps* on the next gen hardware 💀
Lol and they are making a switch version
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A nice detail about the credits that i noticed is that the game remembers which character and suit you used for each main mission and alters the credits accordingly.
I like that it shows in the opening scene to where everybody's on the building in the outfits you put them in
I always felt Gotham Knights's perception issues were caused by an oversaturation of looter mechanics and what that can imply in a lot of other games that have these systems and are designed to be a live service, rather than assuming its instead "oh god, another Bullet spongey grindathon, ugh".
They assumed it would be like that cause of other games using it alongside other terrible systems and monetisation schemes, and I feel that perception damaged Gotham Knights more than being viewed as a "lesser Arkham." by the customers. Hell im starting to see this happen again with the recent suicide squad game leak.
other than that, this was a pretty great review.
Well said you hit the nail on the head.
Agreed. For those who gave it a chance, it's a good game. But they really should've finished it rather than releasing a buggy and unoptimized version. Relaunching the game every couple of hours isn't a deal breaker, but was frustrating
Man, you said it. The masses just seem to want to tear shit down instead of giving it a chance. I’m stoked for Suicide Squad.
tbf to the masses, they have been burned out by bad uses of said mechanics in said games and the monetisation problems that come with em, to a customer in the know theyre just getting sick of it cause of the many bad examples associated with those mechanics despite there being a potentially great game buried beneath all that.@@user-wg2sb1dw7c
Agreed, the fuck we need resources for when NOT ONLY do we have lucious fox on our side but graysons access to batmans wealth??? That would be like fuckin batman saying "i cant make this yet, i dont have the matierials" like ok cool just buy them and make them lmfao they even have a 3d printer in the belfry for gods sake and not once do the characters we dont play as need any of that, ive caught red hood making dozens of pieces of armor for his suits but im the one who needs materials unlike them
Wow! That bit on trauma was amazing… it was really eloquently put and really spoke to me! Even got me out of a slump I've been in these last few days due - thank you! 😊
This game trying to be "not like other Arkham games" is a stupid attempt to deflect criticism for a poorly designed game. Why it itn't as good? "Because it's not an Arkham game". It's re-inventing the wheel for the wrong reason. People were thirsting for a new Arkham experience, be it in the same timeline or not. Spider-man PS4 may have it's flaws and I maintain my stance that it's not as good as the Arkham series, but it still took what worked and added it's own stuff. Spider-man wasn't bothered by the Arkham comparison, because it was well executed and if any hero game had a right to invoke the "it's not Arkham" excuse it's that game. Yes, Gotham Knights is not Arkham, but that is no excuse for the disaster it is.
Oh and another issue I have with the game is the visual design of characters, which is utterly amateurish in the best of cases and an eyesore in the worst cases. And idiotic "video game-y" BS, such as motorcycles materializing out of nowhere "bEcAuSe TeChNoLoGy".
Every game doesn’t need to be an RPG
Then don't play RPGs, there are tons of games coming out that are not RPGs
I found it almost laughable the bat family doesn’t know who Dr. Langstrum is. After everything Batman went through all the adventures with the robins and Batgirl they never once went up against Man-Bat? Really hard to believe
I really hated the "stop and go" grapple in Gotham Nights, when the grappling hook from the entire Arkham series felt so smooth and seamless between grapples.
I hated the RANDOM AS FUCK directions it would pick for me, no joke the time i remember i was looking right at a billboard, tried to grapple to it and fucked off to some other building instead..... It seems like the grapple target system is completely random and selects whatever the fuck ledge is nearest to you even if off screen.....
@@themanwithnoname1839
LMAO that's rough. It's crazy how Arkham Knight from 9 years ago has better mechanics than this game
4:05
Oh god, I hope he didn’t play the Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League game
"arkham games should be contain, unless it gets ruined" oh boy if i got some news for you
The best thing to have come out of Gotham Knights is the fact that Arkham Knight has received some much-deserved recognition for just how good of a game it was in spite of its flaws.
The real thing that turned me off from gotham knights aside from the bugs was red hood's character, i've always loved him for being so different from the rest of the bat family, he's a tortured soul who became a vigilante that kills unlike the others who don't, i think taking away his ability to kill just spoils his character.
he also has some of the goofiest abilities i've ever seen in my life, like since when did lazarus give you a magical double jump?
Jason stopping killing is probably my favorite part about him. He's a member of the Batfamily, not the dangerous vigilante who'd murder you for doing a hit and run.
@@wiggard which goes against what made him unique, now hes just another nightwing.
@@Blanktester685 No. He's not. Red Hood, killer or not, is vastly different from any other member of the Batfamily. Can't believe I have to say that.
I think a great villain in this game would have been Azrael as a kinda rival to the bat family and have him and his order to be the big bad after Bruce's death
“Not as bad as the first three hours”
… Yeeeeeah that’s probably the problem my guy
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This is the one time in my life where I really wish I could get my money back. I couldn't even finish half of the story.
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It’s shame Gotham knights was so disappointing because this game had so much Potential to be amazing but it ended up to be a disappointment but that’s just my opinion.
Deleted the game when i found out i have to unlock the cape for Batgirl
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The way the court of owls was handled in the game as the worst kept secret in Gotham, reminded me of Assassin's Creed Syndicate were you fought Templars that wore uniforms with the Templar Order symbol on the front and shoulders of them. Like this is an ancient secret society, emphasis on "Secret", instead Syndicate had them strolling the streets of London wearing these uniforms, like Templars are a military or police organization with a recognizable logo that everyone knows so dumb.
"Why Gotham Knights failed?"
Perhaps making a game full of bugs and low frame rate while turning the Bat-family into a bunch of spoiled "modern" kids and Harley Quinn into a TikToker wasn't the best idea... Just saying.
I had the batcycle un summon at least 1-3 times a hour while playing. I bought the game in the first month of release and played on PS5. There were no colors just grey everywhere and this video was the first time I saw the sky be different and actually have some variety in the color. I saw all of the beginning bugs and beat the game over the course of a week since I had Covid. It was the single worse game I ever played recently and ever said to my dad that saw me play it that I don’t recommend he play it cause he wanted to play it. Even the story was horrible and it seems the damage on the weapons was inconsistent with the what was actually dealt. If I ever play Gotham Knights again it’s because the bugs are fixed or a dlc came out and I got curious. This rant from me is only the beginning of my issues with the game too
@@darthmase. I don't know if you ever played it, but I heavily recommend the Arkham Franchise to you (Arkham Asylum, Akrham City, Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight).
If you want to play GOOD Batman games, these are the ones.
@@grimreaper6060 I grew up on those games and plan on getting the Arkham trilogy on the switch when it comes out due to my 360 controller dying
@@darthmase. I feel ya. My PS4 had it's last days a while ago. I had awesome games on it, but now I can't play them anymore.
Tough times...
@@grimreaper6060 dang. Sorry for the loss man.
14:36 this is exactly what happened to me, i played about 2 and a half hours and with the cringe dialogue, low frame rate, underwhelming game traversal, slow combat, and out of place rpg mechanics it all just felt so janky to me. i tried to go in with an open mind and not compare it to arkham but when youre playing as a character gliding through gotham city while doing silent takedowns and throwing batarangs its really hard not to. if this game came out back in like 2011 and the arkham games never existed id probably love it, but the arkham games reached such a high standard now that its impossible not to compare all superhero games towards them. and thats especially the case with a batman themed game like gotham knights where its basically following the footsteps layed before it in a very janky and low quality fashion, at least from what i played.
Even without Arkhams shadow, its such a dull experience
The weird thing is that Red Hood can grab strike big enemies, so why couldn’t Red Hood take down the same enemies in stealth?
U mean robin
@@blizzyalmxghty9297 No, Red Hood can grapple big enemies. HOWEVER, for some reason Robin is the one that can do takedowns on them... but can't grab them...
Really weird choice. It feels like they should both be Red Hood's abilities.
@@scottmemelord6130 Probably it's just "Tim Drake sneaky, good sneaky takedowns, Jason Todd blunt, not much sneaky"
@@scottmemelord6130 Yes, you articulated the point well!
I don't think the lack of coop in AK should justify this game looking significantly worse. Gotham Knights is a current gen-only game that looks pitiful in comparison to a game from the previous generation
Yeah when one of the thugs said SMASHY SMASHY SMASH. SMASH like bruh why add that dialogue
In all the 4 Arkham games I kept thinking that chests were the only thing missing, and I am so glad they fixed that in Gotham. Also adding levels and numbers, that's also pretty cool.
I am sarcastic
Straight up though, what retarded logic process did the designers go through to conceptualize that bullshit.
I know you are being sarcastic but idk... I actually really enjoyed the HP/level idea. Chests were fine as just another way to get materials for your gear. I found the lack of any sort of HP to be my only issue with the Arkham series, the amount of time everyone takes to go down is always identical but it can be hard to track who should be focused next unless you use finishers and they often disrupt combat.😊
@@kitnal4143 go play ur mobile games, adults are talking here...
ok, there are games where where levelling makes sense, some RPGs and he souls games, but in Gotham it feels unnecessary and it just feels like it's wasting my time
@@SuperOvidiuMihai no need to be a twat. "Adult" my ass.
@@SuperOvidiuMihai Talk about hostility in that first sentence
Even after the months it’s been since playing this game, I still stand by the fact that it’s good. Not every game needs to be the next Arkham, and people need to stop expecting perfection from every single game. People were very unfair towards Gotham Knights, just because Rocksteady happened to strike gold 3 times in a row, so seeing a review that actually cares is a breath of fresh air.
At this point the DC games community will take anything that isn't like suicide squad kill the justice league.
The health bar argument is a little weird. Every Arkham game had health bars they just where not visible. Now if there is no way to disable the health bars, that is a problem. I do not like the levels though especially if I play nightwing all game and then switch to robin for the final fight does that mean its going to take me hours because robin is level 1? Only the abilities should be making me "stronger" and that is only because it gives me more options.
Last i checked all the characters lvl up together unless they changed that
The problem in Arkham Knight with the Batmobile wasn't that it existed. It's that it was so much of the gameplay. There were far too many missions that took place in the Batmobile. Races, stealth, timed survival, chases, etc. Here, it's just travel and races. Which is fine because it's not locking story progression behind those.
It's a good game, but it didn't hold my attention well. I might have to get back into it. I think one of the problems is that it is very "close but not quite" to Arkham, so it always is going to have comparisons to those games, and always will fall short.
Imma have to push back a bit on your "misconceptions of bullet sponge enemies" talking point. Cause, idk don't mean to sound harsh, but it feels like you came off a bit too disingenuous in representing that criticism.
Though it is important/justified for you to clear up the misconception that is working against GK and show how it actually plays out if you simply engage with the systems, your point still comes off more as a "band aid" solution that still doesn't address the actual problem some of us have with this game design approach the moment we were made aware of it.
See, to me, gear/rpg oriented action games just feel like you're playing the game of "make number go big" above all else. And, at times, that sort of design approach tends to lead to a rather uninspired enemy design that doesn't challenge the players "raw skill" (for a lack of a better term) Even you showing how by engaging with the gear systems just slightly that lead you to steamrolling enemies lends even more credence to my not so favorable perception of GK's combat.
Though, I get it's unfair to compare GK to the Arkham series, it's just hard to shake off the comparison when GK is still roughly gunning for a combat design that is somewhat similar to the Arkham games. It's just that with GK, it "seems" to create an external unnecessary/artificial layer of challenge/difficulty through its RPG/Gear mechanics. While with the Arkham games, you knew the difficulty/challenge came solely from the combat instance you were put in and it all depended on your own mastery of the games' combat mechanics to overcome said combat instance.
Maybe this ultimately sounds nitpicky to you, but that sort of difference matters a LOT to me.
Despite what I heard and saw about this game I was still kind of wanting to just play it for myself. But once I saw there was going to be no 60fps option on console, that’s when I didn’t care if I played it or not. No reason why they have to force raytracing on you and make you play the way they want you to.
True I'd much rather have a smooth 1080p than a constant stuttering mess
This seems like a game made by people who don't really understand Nightwing or Batgirl, and just sees them as Batman sidekicks. I get the same vibes from this as I did from Ratchet & Clank All For One - just a meh side game that probably should have been DLC.
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This Gotham Knights game was NOT a failure to me!
For one thing yes Batman did actually die this time but that was to finally show blind fans that he's not an invincible Batgod. Second it was also showing how he was before it happened, he was being a more likable and balanced person even when not wearing the mask (a little humorous too) and he was also being more open towards his underlings like a caring father towards them and that's how I like Batman.
I haven't even bothered with the game. The Arkham series set a bar and standard for superhero games.
Considering the Arkham games already had playable foundations for Nightwing, Robin, Redhood and Batgirl. It’s weird they didn’t build on what they already had and continued the Arkham story with the ending that Batman is dead.
And simply replace Barbara with Cassandra Cain and keep Barbara in the Oracle role.
It's funny because Batgirl in here WAS Oracle. She wears a back brace now.
To be fair, they DON'T have it, at least to my knowledge. Rocksteady still holds those assets
My reason for disliking this game is the combat
Loved this review and why you’re one of my favourite channels around! I think you perfectly depicted Red Hood, better perhaps than anyone else I’ve heard! Keep the work up!
A major in my game collection. I got bored with this game so fast and quit tried to go back and quit again. Gotham Knights sucked.
After making it all the way to level 60 on GK, I can honestly say that it's a fun game, but it took too long for it to get there. You don't really get to experience the game until NG+, and from there, you get to actually experience the game in its full entirety.
''It's a fun game'' Please stop lying to yourself.
@@largebig79 It's as bad as Saints row 2022
@@GetOffMyDick00 Damn, can't even enjoy anything no more.
@@enternamehere3759 correct
@@enternamehere3759 I'm not even trying to be pessimistic but you lowkey can't. The new Gotham Knights CW show and the new Velma show? It's fucking hard to enjoy new shit dropping, because they're somehow preforming under our low enough expectations. How do you disappoint someone who's already disappointed?
That being said, do you know any good games out right now? I just want something good to play.
I’ll never understand people’s gripe with the Batmobile in Arkham Knight, driving that shit around was fun as fuck and the tank combat wasn’t that bad. We had 3 Arkham games without the Batmobile, fuck everyone else gimme more Batmobile I want it.
I get some people can be a little harsh with stuff, but in some of ours's defense...we wanted the Batmobile, but not tank battles and the stupid Riddler racetracks. The tank battles while not that bad, also weren't necessary considering no one asked for or really expected it. While the Batmobile can be built "tank tough" no one thinks tank battle when they think of the Batmobile. They also don't feel as much like Batman as everything thing else in the series before that felt. Chasing criminals and using it's tools/gadgets, sure. If we wanted to play a tank battle game we'd go play a tank battle game. Just like with the racetracks. If we wanted to play a racing game we'd go play a racing game. It's too different from the previous three games and again, no on asked for that. Those Riddler tracks can be so annoying and I'd rather not have to mess with them. Give me riddles/puzzles. It was just too outside the formula for a lot of us. Tank battles aren't really Batman's style and the only reason it was able to play in this is because they were drones instead of manned vehicles. Again, I loved chasing down criminals and using the concussive missiles to take out their vehicles and then beating the snot out of them, if I feel like it. I liked when they had Riddler henchmen to interrogate at the end of the fight.
i only minded batmobile stealth sections those were truly ass. rest was dope
The hate for a mechanic they wanted since Asylum.
Honestly I was excited for the batmobile and it didn't disappoint. The car just came at the expense of meaningful bossfights and that is my only gripe with it.
Nice video Aqua. I can feel the passion from the writing in the video. I haven’t played Gotham Knights since I beat it at launch & simply watching the gameplay in this video made me wanna return to the streets of Gotham 🎉
My takeaway from this is the game suffered a major identity crisis on multiple levels glad I didnt buy thanks for your in depth analysis
I played the high seas version, so I assume its the drm thats making performance bad because I got perfectly smooth performance with zero hitches at 4k. I do see visual bugs though and I do get occasional dropped inputs. I dont like the gameplay but the story is incredible and 100% DC animated movie vibes
"Gear system is good because you can ignore everything but the level"
Thats not what good means tho
Thats also untrue, for the longest time i had a level 76 dart for nightwing that i couldnt get rid of cuz its stats were too good, then i fould the exact same one at 80, so even then that is false lmfao
The upgrades in the Arkham games served a purpose..
Gotham knights is a game where you can just run through it chucking batarangs and a few punches.
With ps3 character models.
Hey, man. That's a disgrace to what ps3 can offer. Arkham Asylum and City on PS3 had far more impressive models than Gotham Knights.
@@zerobullets6935 I understand. I just wanted to have a little fun and an excuse to pay a little respect to PS3 tech (at least when it was used to its highest potential).
I bought Gotham knights on sale for 13 dollars a few days ago.
The fact that I am still bored playing it given the amount of content I’m getting for 13 bucks is so disappointing
That speech about Jasón literally made me cry and gave me chills.
Finally, a review of this game that's not just "Not Arkham, 0/10"
Might be a weird analogy but it reminds me of the movie Ocean Waves. It was made by younger staff at studio ghibli and while it did some things good, it definitely dropped the ball in some areas. However it was cited as an inspiration by Miyazaki to make other great Ghibli movies like Whisper of the Heart.
This game definitely feels like the missed shot while the arkham games are like ghibli's greatest films (Spirited Away, Totoro, etc.)
I wish that Rocksteady would've had some involvement in the production to help polish up what was wrong with the game
I liked the game. Played it 3 times as 3 different character. My biggest complaint is that it’s just not the team up game it advertises. These heroes works solo almost entirely. Cool concept but why divide the attention then? It diluted the strength of the narrative
7:40 🤔🤨😃😄😁🤣😂
Nice setup, and follow through! I Was not expecting that joke, but I'm better now for it.
Thanks for the time stamp fam
I find it funny how with Knights coming out, we suddenly hold Arkham Knight in such high regard, when at the time, the major perception was that is just wasn’t that good.
Well opinions change over time but it’s my personal fav of the series I played it the most I think the gameplay is the best
sort of. I think people learnt to like what the game does right, but all the criticism still holds up.
That Boy Aqua is never late nor is he early he Uploads PERCISLY when he means to!
My number one problem with this game is the encounters. The combat doesn’t match the level design at all
Really wish this game had custom classes considering what the game asks you to do with different weakness would have said so much time
to me batman vs ra al ghul was the best batman game opening to date
Wrong or right I think a lot of fans when they found out the game didn’t play like an Arkham game (and that some thought it was to the game’s detriment) said the exact same thing to themselves which was “I’ll wait for a sale”.
Why kill Batman when he is your biggest star and literally only character who has great games. Where are the Superman or Green Lantern games?
I really loved the game personally. It was a little rough at first, but after a few hours I really got into it
Great video but I think I can provide an explanation on nightwing assuming leader ship. Usually he's chosen cause he's the most emotionally stable of the group with Tim being insecure as all Robins were when they were Robin, barbara just not having as much emotional intelligence as dick, and Jason beacause... Do I even need to explain? He also has camoncially the most experience out of everyone as has led multiple teams, with varying amounts of success. The problem is that outside of the side stories the main character don't connect in the main game so you can never see dick being the most stable. I found the best way to see their was the emails but again this is a very big issue cause who's gonna read the emails for character moments when you can just as easily animate scenes of nightwing encouraging Robin, superman coming in to check on the knight, etc. So thats an explanation for you as you don't seem to have red a lot of comics(be happy honestly, nothings destroys your soul more than reading comics).
Now that SS:KTJL is out, I think we can all say we treated Gotham Knights too harshly :(
No, it very much deserved it criticism. Just because SSKTJL is a limping dumpster fire does not change a thing.
Batgirl and Nightwing has more cake that a double-wedding
Just some different interpretation points to flaws that you pointed out in the plot: 1 - Harley doesn't actually discover the Court, just the fact that the Penguin was the only elite criminal not to be released on technical matters or witness being killed / 2 - The Penguin knows about the court because he's a member of the Cobblepot family, one of the main families of the Court (and also he was a criminal, it isn't far fetched to know he poked around and managed to convince The Voice that it was benefitial to maintain him alive / 3 - At the end , the Court isn't without a Voice, the buff guy that speaks is a new Voice that replaced Jacob Kane.
I finished the game recently and I liked it. It doesnt do anything revolutionary, and has its flaws, sure, but it was fun for me. And a great point in favor to it is that I personally don't like Batman very much, but the game actually made me be more sympathetic towards his character. So for me I would give it a 7.5 out 10.
When you do the first puzzle you can see a dotted line go across the gears to let you know your doing it right
This kind of feels like a "I need people to play this game with me" video, lol.
So I'm a Nightwing fan boy so I want to defend my boy for absolutely no reason. The reason dick is the leader is because... He's usually the leader in the comics. I realize that's not a good reason but hear me out. Nightwing is the old brother for the rest of the team and he has the charisma to inspire others. Dick Grayson is also the leader of the teen Titans where he uses his said charisma and his intellect to lead the team. I realize that this is in the comics and in the game Dick Grayson is lacking most of these leadership skills. There's also the issue that it's hard to make the bat family stand out sometimes. Every member is a master in the arts if stealth, hand to hand combat, detective skills, and intellect. The only difference is dick is more acrobatic and charismatic, Tim is smart, Jason is angry and uses guns, Barbara is smart and a girl(that's a joke at writers not the character).
I hate the way gamers and gaming TH-camrs stake all their thoughts on just criticism. Any little thing they don’t like and suddenly the whole game is bad. It feels like gaming critics (your favorite TH-camrs included) just don’t wanna engage with any game deeper than just mashing the buttons. I’m glad there’s people like you that actually attempt to play the games you review
I could care less about it being an Arkham game or not. I just wanted a game that has a decent combat system that controls well and I don't think we got that. I could forgive every other shortcoming with this game if I didn't think the combat and controls were god awful. Easily the worst feeling melee combat system I played with in 2022. Issues I found that you didn't even talk about are as follows:
1: The game takes control away from the player arbitrary for doing seemingly innocuous actions like after doing a special move you briefly can't attack or dodge for a few seconds.
2: Simply turning your character in the direction you want to face comes with an egregiously noticeable animation delay that locks you out of some other actions.
3: Sometimes inputs just won't register at all until you press the button for a second or even third time, even though your character is CLEARLY back in a neutral (0) position. This is incredibly baffling considering this game has an input queue system, so the game is literally just dropping inputs out of nowhere sometimes. I often have this happen with batgirl's beat-down special where she'll just stop attacking even though I'm still mashing the X button. And just casting a momentum ability at all literally negates your next button press. I could cast out BG's ultimate drone, press the 'B' button on my controller and BG will just stand there, totally in neutral, no dodge action whatsoever.
4: You can't cancel into special moves. You have to do momentum abilities raw instead of having the option to cancel into them out of a combo, which would only help with the fluid-ness of the combat as whole and increase option variety. Would certainly help against enemies with armored moves, especially when they just randomly throw them out after stunning them during your combo, giving you another option to deal with them immediately instead of just 'Dodge THEN do special move'.
5: Your dodge has no I-frames at all, which means you're completely at the mercy of attacks with horrendously bad hit-boxes at times and melee attacks that come at you out of nowhere from off-screen because 1: The camera is pretty awful and you constantly have to keep fiddling with it during a fight because it doesn't always know what it's suppose to be tracking and sometimes won't even bother tracking anything at all. And 2: They put WAY too much tracking on some enemy attacks, which looks absolutely goofy. (Something you did mention briefly) A godmother's spinning attack literally teleports her half a mile to your position.
6: Enemies will often immediately cancel their hit-stun into an attack out of no where. This has to be some kind of programming goof. I can't imagine this being intended as it conveys to the player that hit advantage practically doesn't matter which should be one of the most consistent things in your brawler-style game.
7: indicators for enemies preparing to shoot you from off-screen often blend into the environment, making them hard to see and react to sometimes.
8: The auto-targeting sometimes has a mind of its own. You could be pressing the stick in one direction and your character will still choose to attack an enemy in the opposite direction. And you need to direct your character as much as possible unless you want to be attacking the air because an animation left your character standing with their BACK TOWARDS the enemy. Simply pressing an attack button won't turn them around.
This game's controls just feel so sluggish and unresponsive and it kills the combat and movement to me. Everything feels stiff, disconnected and needlessly restrictive for what I can only guess was done for the sake of "realism" in a super hero game. I glad you had fun with it but when the most intense parts of the gameplay are this wonky-feeling to me, I struggle to get any sort of fun out of it even when I'm one-shotting everyone as Batgirl, or really any hero with a crit build, because crit builds are so monumentally broken in this game.
If you got this far, YOU are the best thing since man created the toaster.
I liked Gotham Knights while I played it, but I can’t help but feel like it’s a massive step down in a lot of ways. The combat is going for a different style than Arkham, so I don’t think that comparing those is that productive. But other things like traversal and stealth just feel like stripped down versions of what we had in Arkham. I don’t hate the game, but I can’t see myself coming back to it anytime soon, unlike all the Arkham games.
The combat sucks [compared] to arhkam knight
I know it’s not an Arkham game but it continues the story and feels like a worse Arkham from my understanding and I don’t know if I want to buy it yet
The fact that Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Caine weren’t in this was already a big mark against this game for me when this was first announced. And before anybody says they aren’t as well known members of the Batfamily, lots of people didn’t know who Tim Drake was before playing it either. The whole “Batfamily” game just feels incomplete without the other two Batgirls fans love. Heck, Stephanie was a Robin and a Batgirl, you can’t make a game about all the Robins without her.
47:42 this moved me to tears. Beautifully said.
Lmfao
@@4everhumbl36 ?
I’m not gonna lie I really like this game like I’m really happy. They finally made Jason Todd, a.k.a. my favorite DC character a time in the spotlight I mean we’ve had Batman games for so long Arkham series. I’m looking in your direction I mean we had a good amount of time with Knightwing and all the characters but yet nobody really knows about red hood, other than that one movie that came out so long ago And I feel like red hood finally getting that spotlight in the storyline as a playable character really just brought a tear to my eyes
16:56 non-lethal? Isn't the lethality the whole reason red hood is who he is
Great review man. Been following all of your stuff lately. The Arkham and uncharted stuff is great. Are you excited at all for suicde squad releasing in about a month?
Much appreciated! I’m not super hyped on it but I’m ready to go in with an open mind
@@ThatBoyAqua same. Rock Steady doesn’t disappoint. Looks more borderlands than Arkham . But I’m hopeful and hope it’s better than Gotham Knights. It was bad just mid to me. If you end up liking it and want someone to squad up with. Drop that gamertag. Otherwise keep up the great work man. Absolutely love these gaming essays. That 4 hr Arkham video got me through a bad work week lol.
The game has bullet sponge enemies. The fact that you have to either turn down the difficulty or spend hours grinding gear to actually do a decent amount of damage on enemies is evidence of poor game design. This isn't how most RPGs operate you aren't normally punished for not grinding. Grinding is optional if you want to create an overpowered build. This isn't Destiny and it doesn't need to pretend that it is the gear grind doesn't justify the gameplay experience. If you see the complaints from other youtubers about the bullet sponges and disagree I think you are honestly missing the point. There's a lot of unjustified complaints for this game but that isn't one of them.
Because its a live service collectathon using the same mechanics as mobile games with a batman voat of paint. Please do not ever buy a live service collectathon game regardless of what characters are present. Its ruining the industry as a whole...
It's not a love service game though.. which is funnily one of its main issues. Because rhe way ita built is a way a love service game should be built. But it has none of the good parts of being a love service game
@@willbaker6532 good parts of a live service game? Sounds like you're part of the problem. We dont need mobile game practices on console. Live service games exist exclusively as cash grabs and are in no way art forms like the majority of the industry
@@aroccoification I never said they were an art form. But live service does have good aspects like constant support, constant new content post launch. Thr negatives are either that you have to pay extra for stuff (though non live service games do this anyway) and that you tend to have to grimd for currencies to be able to get anything they add (gotham knights has all the grinding but without any content to grind for)
@@willbaker6532 gross worst of both worlds... If you like grinding play an rpg dont give your money to live service people who are ruining the industry
Saying to get a PC if you care about frame rates is kind of a cop-out. Like the whole point of the current gen consoles is so console players don't have to make that decision. That's kinda what the $600 USD was for. Sony and Microsoft have both said that they made sure that devs had the option to make their games run in 4K and 60fps. It's become the standard. WB Montreal just chose not to do that, and instead prioritized on visual fidelity. Which is odd considering the game isn't really THAT impressive looking from a fidelity standpoint. I'd expect a hard 30fps cap on something like Horizon Forbidden West, but not this. I'd like to eventually try the game because of how big a fan I am of Batman and the Bat Family, but I'm not touching it until a performance mode comes. Or a sequel with a performance mode.
I mean shit, I'd genuinely rather play at 480p if it meant 60fps. Whether it means disabling co-op and ray tracing AND using a dynamic resolution, I don't really care. Feels like it shouldn't be this difficult of a task for something that basically every other AAA game is doing nowadays. I know I sound super entitled rn but I just legit can't play games like this at 30fps. I get crazy motion sickness and really bad headaches from that shit unless it's particularly well handled like it is with Monster Hunter Rise on Switch.
lost me when they announced it was locked at 30 on console. No excuse for that nonsense
On PC I couldn’t even play the fucking game, I got stuck on an infinite loop with a cutscene at the beginning of the game, I got a refund and decided I’d never get the game again, I refuse to give a company money when they dish out broken games
I love the idea of Gotham knights if they actually had the same feel/vibe of knight. But it shows how lazy and uninspired wb was while creating this. This game just comes off goofy and cartoony and cringy. I like the story tho. One of those things that say it looks good on paper but not in execution. It was a let down. I’d say I wanna try it but man the gameplay just looks awful
I feel bad for WB Montréal . . . When they made an Arkham game, people got upset and some wished they had focused on a different universe. When they made a game in a different universe a lot of people wished they just made an arkham game.
Cuz bats wasn't it in.. just build up Terry.. i said what I said.
Terry wasn't even born yet
They really should've made a Batman beyond game instead. It would be so sick flying around in a cyberpunk Gotham city
@@Andruthless Fr fr. That would have been so AWESOME.
The "not as bad as the first 3 hours" compliment is a huge red flag.
Like,why can't this gane be good from the start, like Batman Arkham?
If your less than 20 hour game takes 3 hours to be good, then it's an automatic fail.