WB Games Montreal’s “Gotham Knights,” a spiritual successor to Rocksteady’s critically acclaimed “Batman: Arkham” franchise, has had a rocky launch.
For starters, critics and users have not been kind to the title. On Metacritic, the PS5 version pulled in a 69/100 from critics and 4.9/10 from users, the Xbox Series X version a 67/100 from critics and 2.9/10 from users, and the PC version a 66/100 from critics and 2.8/10 from users.
Those kinds of numbers put it only slightly above last year’s widely panned “Battlefield 2042,” and about on par with Square Enix’s infamous “Marvel’s Avengers”. We’re talking a long way from the superhero game highs of “Batman: Arkham City” (96/100) or “Spider-Man Remastered” (87/100), but not the worst recent AAA title like the “Saints Row” remake (61/100).
The troubles, however, go beyond the reviews. The backlash began in earnest in the wake of the announcement that the console versions of the game would be limited to 30 fps, with some of the blame being put on the need for the game to work on Xbox Series S. However, subsequent tests conducted by Digital Foundry, xGarbett and others appear to reveal poor optimisation overall as even PC’s equipped with the just released powerhouse RTX 4090 GPU are sitting between 30-60fps even with DLSS turned on.
Whilst bugs are inevitable, some wild performance issues are cropping up on the Reddit thread for the game (via TheGamer.com) from players falling through the map in the tutorial, to a meditating enemy who not only levitates but is immortal which locks people out of completing a mission. A PC matchmaking issue arose which the developers have indicated on Twitter has been fixed already.
Also popping up this week are memes comparing the game to the seven years old “Batman: Arkham Knight” with a Digital Foundry video describing “Gotham Knights” as “less than the sum of its parts”.
Perhaps most insulting is that a modder named Princec23 has taken the game’s 5/10 IGN Review Score and turned it into a suit in a player’s inventory in “Spider-Man Remastered”. The result is a roving review score that swings through New York and beats up bad guys.
It’s expected some of the issues will get fixed with further patches. “Gotham Knights” is available now for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X.
