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Gotham Knights’ combat quickly feels like second nature, an easy development from the combo-led combat of Rocksteady’s Arkham Games. I met no frustrating moments of characters freezing or accidentally making the opposite move I intended; it feels incredibly smooth. A great example is an ability to cancel an attack to dodge another enemy’s advance, so you never feel stuck when fighting.
That smoothness also extends to your utility belt, with the grappling hook becoming this lazy crimefighter’s best friend. It’s child’s play to scale skyscrapers, simply looking at ledges or high platforms and tapping ‘F’ when the grapple icon appears. Such a simple tool, but it made me feel like Gotham is my stomping ground as I leap from rooftop to rooftop, chasing down criminals below.
The grappling hook is like a combination of the heroic-fantasy in Marvel’s Spider-Man, where you swing through your city as protector and defender constantly looking to snuff out crime, and the zombie survival game Dying Light which uses the grappling hook as an additional tool in your movement arsenal.
If you want a speedier way to get through the city, you can always call your bat-bike. At a press of a button, the Dark Knight-inspired mechanical motorcycle phases into existence, facing the direction you’re running, and even starts moving if you begin to sprint. Climbing onto a motorbike is cool, but leaping onto a motorbike in motion, like Zorro mounting a stampeding horse, is cooler and keeps up the pace of the crimefighting.
However, there is one place Gotham Knights is painfully awkward: clearing low obstacles. You can’t jump in Gotham Knights, you can dodge, climb, or perch, but jumping isn’t in your wheelhouse. A lack that can make itself known at the worst moments.
At one point, I was in Gotham’s police station; my ears are ringing with the sound of the alarms, there’s an incinerated body in front of me, and armed police are searching the building for me. I need to beat a hasty exit and not get seen by Gotham’s finest in the process.
It goes well at first, I lurk in the shadows dipping and diving to avoid the mechanical glare of the security cameras and searching police, and no one suspects a thing. That is until I encounter my greatest enemy: a short railing. Red Hood doesn’t know what to do, rather than simply jump over the low barrier, he combat rolls around on the floor, sprints into the obstacle, he does it all except leap over the railing. Meanwhile, I’m quietly screaming at my computer, begging him to calm down and just go over it.
Eventually, I get him perched on the railing, ready to jump over and escape the building. That is until I accidentally press the button for an aerial takedown and land right in the middle of a pack of guards.
Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of stealth after that.
