Can you feel it? That sharp static in the air signals that Gotham Knights is drawing closer. Set in a world where both Batman and James Gordan have died, Gotham Knights promises to bring some of the best and brightest Batman characters off the pages of the comics and straight onto your gaming screens.
The next big game from WB Games Montreal, which also developed the Batman Arkham game series, is almost here. With the anticipated release comes some juicy info to tide us over. Judging from the trailers we’ve seen for the game so far, we already know that in the absence of Batman, the Gotham Knights, consisting of Robin, Batgirl (unless WB decides to delete her from here, too), Nightwing and the Red Hood have had to step up and take the safety of Gotham into their… capable… hands.
We also know that together, the Gotham Knights will need to stand against some of the most influential and affluent families in Gotham when they take on the organised crime group, the Court of Owls.
Trailers have also revealed appearances by Mr Freeze, Poison Ivy and Alfred Pennyworth in the game. From what we know, Gotham Knights will feature four playable characters (the Knights), each with their distinctive playstyles and gameplay specific to their character. Robin will be your character if you favour stealth; Batgirl is a kickass melee fighter, Red Hood is the character for those who love guns, guns and more guns, and Nightwing is an acrobatic god.
The game also allows you to take on the seedy underbelly of Gotham with a friend in two-player mode or go for it alone. Unlike the before-mentioned Arkham games, Gotham Knights will take place over a series of months, span five boroughs and be open-world. Although, much like the Arkham titles, you’ll be able to use many vehicles to explore and traverse the city.
If you want a more detailed look into the four playable characters, you can watch the official video trailers for them here:
Robin:
Batgirl:
Nightwing:
Red Hood:
One of the most significant changes that set Gotham Knights apart from other, more traditional action-RPG games is that your characters won’t start weak in Gotham Knights. Instead, each character will already be powerful and deserving of their “hero” (or anti-hero, if you will) mantles and will improve from there.
The game’s creative director Patrick Redding explains it best:
“It was very important for us that these heroes, our Knights are… They’re already awesome at the start of the game. It’s not a function of them being ineffective as crime fighters, quite the opposite. They are all effectively graduates of the Batman School of Crime Fighting. So when they start, they are at their most similar, in the sense that they have a lot of these basic tools of combat and stealth, and moving around in the world and using their grapple. And then it’s really over the course of the game that they fully diverge into their own flavour of what a Dark Knight of Gotham City should be.”
Gotham Knights will release for PC, Xbox Series X/S and PS5 on October 25, 2022.