There are few positives to this.

The game looks good; the characters are all well acted. The story is totally fine, well foreshadowed so it all comes across as fairly non-shocking. The small details, especially in the emails, are great. But fundamentally this game is Broken.

A large beautiful Gotham city with no reason to go to any of it. It's shamefully soulless; which is a shame because you can tell the devs put a lot of time and heart into it. Whoever thought of the idea of having the credits show scenes from the story, but include the character and suit you were using at the time? A wonderful touch.

It is a shame such passion is wasted on a game with a core concept so poor.

The combat is clunkier than it needs to be, for no reason. I understand these 4 are not Batman, but this isn't their first rodeo either. And they feel terrible. What made Batman Batman was not his level 23 Pauldrons of Exceptional Strength, it was his dexterity and strength. In Gotham Knights, you WILL upgrade your suit to the next highest number, or you will not finish this game. You WILL ensure you carefully apply Frost Damage to your enemies in order to win. You WILL socket the best quality gem (Jesus H) into your weapon's gem slot to up the Critical Hit %.

Enemies do not require intelligent navigation of the correct combination of dodging, stunning, or countering -- no. Specific enemies require specific special abilities. I hope you enjoy slowly building up your Special meter to get rid of them (and you had the aforemention gear to output the damage so it's not a half an hour slog). This and the Gear Rating locks you into some of the worst, most tedious combat imaginable. If you're not spec'd for the right battle, it's all over before it's begun. Additionally, it means that different enemy types in combination with one another are basically useless because you just have to use your Special Meter to make them go away. Not consider that that enemy requires this sort of combat before the next one.

I fully appreciate that the Arkham games have a One Button approach, but the complexity was the way in which you used the 4 different buttons in combination with one another. How many enemies you had to remember the moves of. This is replaced now with: Enemies have dodgeable moves that you can punish, Enemies are weak to certain Elemental attacks, Enemies occasionally need you to do a Heavy Attack to break their guard. On paper this might come across as very similar, and fundamentally this game is about flying around a room at high speed to kick goons in the face, but to be clear: All enemies are dodged the same. All enemies are guard broken the same. No enemies are chosen to punish you for needing to perform a particular action in a particular manner. But they do need you have that Correct Gear on! I see it as a step down across the board.

Boss battles follow on -- they are all terrible. They are long and uninteresting. You dodge the same combo, you put hits in, you find the boss has hyper armour, you wait for your next chance. You use a special ability and waste a bar because *that* power doesn't work on *this* boss (hint: they basically all don't). I especially detest the Mr Freeze battle(s) & Clayface battle. (Remember when the greatest boss battle was Mr Freeze in Arkham City?!) I am stunned that they exist in this game. You do not feel the weight of your attacks to them. But you do get to see "413" show up when you land the hit because this is foremost an RPG about getting your numbers higher. There's no thought to "The combat system works like This. So the boss battle requires This." Think of Mr Freeze in City, or Deathstroke in Origins. They would require you to master a particular gameplay style. These bosses do no such thing. They are not a challenge to your skill, or your planning, they are a challenge to your patience if you don't have the right damage output.

A giant open city to crawl around in and you will spend that time fast travelling to a section and then travelling as quickly as possible to the next randomly generated Activity as quickly as possible. There is nothing to see in Gotham City. Are there collectables? Sure. You can scan large art murals. You can scan tiny plaques. Or you can touch one of approx. 4 dozen glowing batarangs that sit on empty building, next to empty alleyways. Oh. Excuse me. There are small caches left around by the Court of Owls, that require noticing symbols. What's your reward? A smattering of crafting mats. Oh joy. This game is 100% focused on "Show up and punch a criminal and then get out of there." You will not remember the minute details of Gotham City. Just the arenas you waltz around in again and again.

There is a "Detective System" which is used a small handful of times for story related puzzles and then offers an extremely watered down version for the "randomly generated" stuff where you literally just scan a crime scene and select the clue with the answer. It's a bit like watching Blue's Clues. Except you need to have noticed everything before you can leave.

The Batcycle feels slow. The fact there is no boost button is quite funny, what's the point if not to feel good? It feels like they had no faith in the vehicle. A fact that is backed up by the fact there's zero encouragement to replay any of the races. You do them, you get your XP, it disappears from your mind and the game forever. Once you get the power to fast travel, aside from a few Side Quests, you will basically spend zero time riding it.

I see people talking about the Side Quests a lot. I've mentioned them here. In the world there are a number of set invisible nodes, on which a crime may occur. That comes in one of several flavours, most of which are basically surface-level differences (prevent the break in, prevent the hack, and prevent the robbery are all the SAME crime but with different flavour-text). Once you've done one crime in that location, you've basically done them all. I just don't see the desire to fill the game with an ever replenishing set of "Show up to this courtyard and kill these dudes who are now doing This" style.

I am stunned that the spiritual successor to the Arkham games (and let's not pretend this is not what this game is) could mess all of the factors that make that game good, and just surface level copy the notes of those games (press Square to fly across room and hit in face. large city. batman is in game. villains appear) and produce this one.

The "Heroic Assault" mode is not out by time of writing, and perhaps that will magically turn around the core of the game being unmitigated bread; but I doubt it. The only way this game could have been fixed is it was thrown out.

I totally appreciate that it might be unfair to compare it to the Arkham games, but this company owns that IP; and clearly used it at a surface level to inject an RPG system; and the result is a game that feels worse to play, with ironically less replayability than it's predecessors.

Gotham Knights is not now, nor will ever be, worthy of your attention.