Robin is good at sneaking, but Gotham Knights' stealth, from the brief section I played, didn't really materialise at all. The four main heroes, featuring Batgirl, Robin, and two guys who used to be Robin. Batgirl, who is Barbara Gordon, is good at techie things, but no opportunities to use any tech arose in the preview. Red Hood, who used to be a Robin, is a unit and likes to punch stuff - but mostly attacks with auto-aiming guns. That leads to another slightly underwhelming aspect though, which is the way the characters loosely fit into classes. At the other, late-game Robin would use a kind of electrified dash, or spin his pole like a propellor and charge about the room briefly. At one end of the scale, early-game Red Hood was pretty dire, peppering enemies with several bullets, or several more bullets. Some of those skills are slightly more interesting. All of these are delivered by mashing X, or holding it for a heavier one (a heavy attack for these heroes feels just about as strong as one Batman punch). So the result is a dozen light attacks, followed by another, more stylish flurry of light attacks. One, with Batgirl, allowed me to unleash a flurry of attacks for instance, and so I'd fill my bar by battering grunts and then save the ability for a heavy - normally an abnormally gigantic human - but even that wouldn't take them down. But this means every enemy, even the weakest, seems to take a dozen feather-tickle punches to go down, their resilience allowing you to fill that ability bar - and then the abilities don't do much either.
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Landing a series of hits builds up a bar and, when it's full, you can use an ability. Gotham Knights' combat relies on a kind of rage metre in the bottom-right of the screen. The system itself, I'd suggest, is the other part of the issue. Where the Arkham Batman would land punches with the crunch of a sledgehammer, flowing from one bone-shattering thwack to the next, in Gotham Knights they're delivered with a kind of unintentional delicacy, each roundhouse like a fly bumping into a window. In the later-game mission, combat had a bit of a punch, with some kind of sparkly purple elemental damage popping out on hit, but earlier on it felt weak, almost insipid. Gotham Knights leans more heavily into the RPG tendencies here, with the typical three skill trees (although I didn't really get the distinctions between each) and points to distribute when levelling up. Watch on YouTube Zoe went hands-on too - here's her video preview! The city's deep blacks seem more like faded browns, the rain doesn't fall as hard, there's no sense of sharpness, rankness, no distinctive air of criminal filth and grime, and with a kind of unnerving clarity to it all, like an old game that's been visually "remastered" by an AI, its atmosphere lost without its textured fog.
Gotham looks quite good, but also a little muted next to the Gotham of Rocksteady's Arkham games - especially Arkham Knight - where that glorious, gothic maximalism is replaced with more of a mediumalism. The setup sees you making a base of the Belfrey, a clock tower hideout that'll be familiar to series fans, where you can mooch about and briefly chat with the other characters, swap between them, and launch missions or an exploration of the open world of Gotham City. But at the moment it's underwhelming, and underwhelming in terms of real substance, rather than technical performance - it looks nice enough and ran without any hiccups while we played over streaming platform Parsec. It's faint praise, and I'm loath to be too harsh on Gotham Knights when we're still a few weeks away from launch. Availability: Out 21 October on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S.I played as three of them in the preview - Batgirl and Red Hood in early game scenarios, and Robin for a late-game mission and boss fight - and I can now say with confidence that they are… fine. These are, barring any surprises, who you will play as in Gotham Knights. "Like, dead-dead," as WB Montreal put it during our preview, and in his place comes four sub-heroes: Robin, Batgirl, Nightwing and Red Hood.
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