Warner Bros. Games just released a new open-world, third-person, action game called Gotham Knights which is available on the PS5, Xbox X/S, and PC for $60. 

Within Gotham Knights, you get to play as one of four characters of the Batman Family, Red Hood, Nightwing, Robin, or Batgirl who take the responsibility of protecting Gotham. You get to follow multiple storylines that take you all around Gotham, fighting notable villains like Mr. Freeze, Harley Quinn, and Clayface.

It’s a new and original story in the Gotham universe, where Batman is no longer the main hero and you get to see how his kids transform into heroes after the training he’s put them through. The game has a whole new combat system compared to the Arkham Knight, a popular game series about Batman, and each character offers different skill sets and abilities unique to them and how they were trained.

The world of Gotham is as rich as ever, the game offers a large open world experience that you get to explore all the highs and lows of Gotham. While you explore, you see that crime lurks everywhere within the city, and that it’s your job to clean up the streets.

It seems like a great and ambitious vision to create since it highlights the more rookie side of crime-fighting in Gotham, but when executed in this game, it falls pretty flat. The main storylines are filled with unnecessary work that doesn’t add anything to the real story but spotlight the combat system, but then problems pop up there as well. 

The storylines themselves seem to go by extremely quick filled with repetitive actions and doesn’t build the world, villains, or even the heroes as much as the Arkham Knight series did. For the characters, you have to level up each one individually to unlock their skills unique to them and the actual combat system lacks the opportunity to counterattack and create cool combos. 

This game definitely had the potential in development, but on release, it just doesn’t live up to even the standards of a good game. I don’t know where they went wrong, but it just didn’t make it to where it could’ve.