TLDR: The worst game I've ever enjoyed.
Gotham Knights is a bizarrely written game with (as of now) a wholly inconsistent presentation that left me confused, annoyed, and laughing outrageously with the friend I played it with.
As an aside, if you are playing this game solo you are playing the worst experience of this game and I do not envy you.
The looter-RPG portion of this game is overwhelmingly frustrating to deal with. The randomised loot doesn't really provide any big bonuses or value beyond being an easy way to generate "number go up". There's elemental damage types that affect the game in a massive way if you can use them right, but because they are randomly tied to gear blueprints you can often find yourself in situations where your only gear of that element is overwhelmingly underleveled and so it doesn't help you anyway.
My friend and I hit the level cap halfway through our gameplay, at which point we were seeing notifications for XP gain and getting nothing for it. We completed the third villain questline assuming we were about to unlock the next one only to find that there's only three villain questlines??? Having limited content is not a bad thing, but it somehow felt... empty in a way that I didn't enjoy.
I think the worst thing about this game is that it touted itself as a story about this young bat-family. These four characters. I went into it hoping that what that meant as a multiplayer game was a cool story where my buddy and I could play as two characters and see the story about our two characters play out in interesting ways, changed by the characters we were and then supported by the 2 characters left as NPCs.
But instead, for the most part you only see the host character in cutscenes and it's like you (as the second player) are never there. So because my friend has the better internet and was the host for 95% of the game, I never saw my character in cutscenes, EXCEPT when in its extremely inconsistent way, the game decided I reached the cutscene trigger first and so I got to have the cutscene. Red Hood entered the mission alone, and Batgirl exited the mission alone. What the fuck????
Mass Effect 1, released in 2007, has party-member specific dialog depending on who you took with you. 15 years ago! Why did WB Montreal go into this four-character, 2-player game and not think "ultimately the bar we need to hit is these characters in cutscenes together."
But despite all this I did enjoy it. Primarily because I got to hang out with my friend and talk shit about this extremely busted game we were playing. Every time one of us fast traveled some short distance away from the other and the framerate tanked to 10fps, every time the network lag decided that we couldn't target the enemy the other was fighting. The 2 times we ever used the "team up attack" function because it was so tedious to try to set up we never bothered.
The last thing we laughed about really cemented the whole experience for me. I had to pick my wife up and my friend and I were in the middle of the final boss. We were extremely overlevelled being at the cap and so we obliterated the boss and when the credits started we said our goodbyes, our thanks for playings, and I put my headphones down and shot off in the car to pick my wife up from work.
When we got home 10 mins later, I went inside and kept watching the credits (they were still going). Then I heard a noise come from my headphones. I put them back on and said "Nick are you still there?" and he responded, exasperated "have you seen your messages? I'm stuck, the game won't let me exit the credits because you're still watching them." We both started laughing immediately, because how ridiculous is that? I held down the fast-forward button to skip the credits, waiting a minute while the names of all of hard-working developers zoomed by. When it reached the end of the credits for me, we got the final trophy and my friend was released from credits jail.
That's Gotham Knights. Make sure you play with a friend.
Gotham Knights is a bizarrely written game with (as of now) a wholly inconsistent presentation that left me confused, annoyed, and laughing outrageously with the friend I played it with.
As an aside, if you are playing this game solo you are playing the worst experience of this game and I do not envy you.
The looter-RPG portion of this game is overwhelmingly frustrating to deal with. The randomised loot doesn't really provide any big bonuses or value beyond being an easy way to generate "number go up". There's elemental damage types that affect the game in a massive way if you can use them right, but because they are randomly tied to gear blueprints you can often find yourself in situations where your only gear of that element is overwhelmingly underleveled and so it doesn't help you anyway.
My friend and I hit the level cap halfway through our gameplay, at which point we were seeing notifications for XP gain and getting nothing for it. We completed the third villain questline assuming we were about to unlock the next one only to find that there's only three villain questlines??? Having limited content is not a bad thing, but it somehow felt... empty in a way that I didn't enjoy.
I think the worst thing about this game is that it touted itself as a story about this young bat-family. These four characters. I went into it hoping that what that meant as a multiplayer game was a cool story where my buddy and I could play as two characters and see the story about our two characters play out in interesting ways, changed by the characters we were and then supported by the 2 characters left as NPCs.
But instead, for the most part you only see the host character in cutscenes and it's like you (as the second player) are never there. So because my friend has the better internet and was the host for 95% of the game, I never saw my character in cutscenes, EXCEPT when in its extremely inconsistent way, the game decided I reached the cutscene trigger first and so I got to have the cutscene. Red Hood entered the mission alone, and Batgirl exited the mission alone. What the fuck????
Mass Effect 1, released in 2007, has party-member specific dialog depending on who you took with you. 15 years ago! Why did WB Montreal go into this four-character, 2-player game and not think "ultimately the bar we need to hit is these characters in cutscenes together."
But despite all this I did enjoy it. Primarily because I got to hang out with my friend and talk shit about this extremely busted game we were playing. Every time one of us fast traveled some short distance away from the other and the framerate tanked to 10fps, every time the network lag decided that we couldn't target the enemy the other was fighting. The 2 times we ever used the "team up attack" function because it was so tedious to try to set up we never bothered.
The last thing we laughed about really cemented the whole experience for me. I had to pick my wife up and my friend and I were in the middle of the final boss. We were extremely overlevelled being at the cap and so we obliterated the boss and when the credits started we said our goodbyes, our thanks for playings, and I put my headphones down and shot off in the car to pick my wife up from work.
When we got home 10 mins later, I went inside and kept watching the credits (they were still going). Then I heard a noise come from my headphones. I put them back on and said "Nick are you still there?" and he responded, exasperated "have you seen your messages? I'm stuck, the game won't let me exit the credits because you're still watching them." We both started laughing immediately, because how ridiculous is that? I held down the fast-forward button to skip the credits, waiting a minute while the names of all of hard-working developers zoomed by. When it reached the end of the credits for me, we got the final trophy and my friend was released from credits jail.
That's Gotham Knights. Make sure you play with a friend.