Gotham Knights FAQ – how to glide, use smoke bombs, change characters, unlock fast travel and more

Gotham Knights is not always the best at explaining some of its mechanics. While many are straightforward enough, a few just glide under the radar, especially if you’re expecting them to function like they did in the Arkham games.

We’ve rounded up all your random questions about Gotham Knights’ gameplay in this story, and we’re going to answer them all. These are typically too small to deserve their own guides, so we may update this FAQ in the future if other questions pop up.

How to glide in Gotham Knights

Gliding across the skyline of Gotham City is a possibility, but it’s not something you can do immediately upon starting the game. The only way to unlock the glider for your chosen hero is to finish their Knighthood quest.

When you’re done with all three steps, you will unlock a unique traversal ability for your character. For Batgirl, it’s a standard glide with her cape, but the others have wildly different methods of flight.

Unfortunately, the same quest has to be repeated for every hero individually, so it’s a bit of a grind if you want all four to freely move around the sky.

How to use smoke bombs and return to stealth in Gotham Knights

As we mentioned in our Gotham Knights tips, returning to stealth is quite easy in the game. Enemies are happy to lose interest a few seconds after you break line of sight.

But in order to do that after you’ve been spotted, you need to deploy a smoke bomb. All four characters come equipped with smoke bombs, which can only be triggered by holding the grapple button (rather than pressing it) to reach a vantage point. So hold LB or L1 and your character will deploy a smoke bomb just as they start to grapple towards a perch.

There’s even a training exercise for how to perfect the use of smoke bombs, so head over to the training dummy, select Basic Training and practice away.

You can use smoke bombs several times (there's a number of uses next to the icon), but you can’t reverse actions triggered by breaking stealth. For example, if enemies set off a bomb timer because you got spotted, it won’t matter whether or not you regain stealth.

How to switch characters in Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights sadly does not let you switch characters in the field. The only way to play as a different hero is to return to the Belfry, which means ending your current night.

To do so, simply walk to the suit display to the right of the Batcomputer, approach any of the other heroes and hold A/X to interact. This will immediately let you play as that character, and lets you access their inventories and interact with their story cutscenes around the Belfry and outside in Gotham proper.

There is no ticking clock here, so there’s nothing stopping you from taking 100 nights to finish the game because you keep returning to switch heroes. But, it’s something you need to be aware of, especially if you haven’t gathered enough clues about premeditated crimes taking place over the following night.

How to unlock fast travel in Gotham Knights

There are four ways to get around the city in Gotham Knights. Your standard grappling move, and summoning the Batcycle are the two all characters start with. But you can also unlock the ability to glide - and more importantly, fast travel.

Fast traveling in Gotham Knights is done by utilising drones all over the city’s different boroughs. But in order to do that, you need to first hack them. This quest will not start until you talk to Lucius Fox.

Fox appears as a character to interact with very early on in the game, so keep progressing the story quests and you’ll naturally get an alert that he needs to see you. Fox will show you a high-altitude glider he developed, which allows a single hero to fast travel at a time.

But in order to expand the range of that glider, you need to hack more and more drones covering different parts of Gotham. Hacking a drone is simple: enter AR mode and keep tracking the drone (looking it at) for a few seconds until Fox has hacked it.

Some drones are shielded, so you’ll have to wait for them to dock into a recharging station to hack them. The trick is to try and anticipate the drone's route to see which charging station it’ll be docking at, as there are more stations than drones.

You have to do all two/three covering a certain borough to unlock faste travel to it, but you can leave the other areas until you naturally find yourself there. In other words, the ability to fast travel can be available in certain boroughs and not others, depending on what you activated.

If you’re feeling lost, we’ve got plenty of Gotham Knights guides and tips to help you along, such as this for all Batarangs locations, how to crack the crime scene puzzles and much more under the Gotham Knights tag.