Gotham Knights answers the question “Would Batman games be as good without Batman?” with: “No”

^Stay tuned after the ads for our big review chat, featuring loads of lovely footage from every version of the game.

Aside from its performance issues, which are annoying but potentially fixable and hardly a dealbreaker, Gotham Knights’ biggest sin is that it just doesn’t do anything particularly exciting. And for a game which boldly kills the Batman in the first two minutes, that’s pretty astonishing.

It’s not all bad: there are some nice ideas dotted around. Occupying The Belfry between missions gives the game a nice overall pace, allowing you to spend time with the characters in some touching, backstory filling cutscenes (though, note of caution, these bits are laser-targeted at Arrowverse fans, a group of people who would inject mediocrity like heroin were it possible). The investigation gameplay also has a few neat touches, like the micro-examination of people’s workspaces and personal tech.

It also tells a serviceable story set in a new take on the Batverse, which is separate to the Arkham universe, and piecing together the lay of the land via exposition drops (and your built-in familiarity with DC’s characters as someone who exists in the 21st century) is an enjoyable aspect.

But the things that an open-word superhero game should live and die on, traversal and combat, are just a bit bobbins. It’s canned videogame soup. Familiar, fine if there’s nothing else, but impossible to get excited about. Nobody’s going to spend a whole day of work looking forward to sinking some time into this, in the same way that nobody ever looks forward to cracking open a tin of Heinz minestrone. And, to repeat the point: that’s a shocking state of affairs for a game where the core theme is that Batman is dead and his children are grappling with his legacy.

It’s very possible, and I suspect likely, that a performance patch will materialise at some point, putting to bed this nonsense about it being so blisteringly next gen that it couldn’t possibly operate without a 30fps cap (it doesn’t remotely do anything that couldn’t have been achieved in the PS4 era). So, if that was the chief issue, I wouldn’t be too concerned about Gotham Knights: optimisation can always come in a post-release patch. But no amount of patching can fix the aggressive blandness at its core..

Gotham Knights is available from tomorrow on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.