Gotham Knights – Zero Punctuation

Gotham Knights is an action-adventure superhero sandbox game created by cons with the official brand of DC Comics, which opens with the death of Batman. A positive first step, I thought, I’ve long said Batman is always the least interesting part of whatever he’s in, a dude with endless money who’s never wrong with all the heat and the complexity of a potato in a sock. But I should have realized there’s one thing more boring than a potato in a sock, and that’s a bunch of college dropouts yearning to be a potato in a sock. So our four potential protagonists are the four most promising alumni of Bruce Wayne’s Neverland personal ranch: Robin, Ex-Robin, Dead Robin, and Girl Robin. Can Batman’s teenage fan club harem pick up the fight he left behind before he was distracted by the appearance of his first pubis? Maybe, if they figure out how to stop dressing like jerks, first. Robin’s default outfit in particular makes it look like he broke the zipper on his father’s anorak. Now Gotham Knights had a tough act to follow in the form of the Arkham series, which, despite all the stumbles of their last installment, were all beautifully crafted games.

Full of clever design, personality, bespoke encounters, and while the demolition derby car racing stuff in Arkham Knight felt out of place, it was still more fun than zipping around town in Gotham Knights. Where you cycle uneventfully through nearly empty streets for five minutes as passers-by talk about your romper. But Mothy Tights rises to the challenge posed by the high level of the Arkhamverse like a recent British Prime Minister: by instantly giving in and giving up the shit. Push any comparisons to Arkham games out of your head, okay. They’re on another fucking plane of existence. They’re raging on the Champs Elysées right now and we’re in the darkest shit pit in Tartarus. Here’s a better comparison: Bottom Shites is DC Universe’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers. Yeah, might as well end the review there, hey, I mean, I’ve used Bottom Shites before. All right, let’s move on to motions. After symbolically playing a mission with each of the four shrink-wrapped JC Penney catalog models available, I’ve concluded that no matter which one you choose, varying special abilities and super attacks doesn’t affect your combat effectiveness as much. than having gear with the highest numbers does.

I ended up sticking with Nightwing because smarmy twattiness was slightly more tolerable than anxious twattiness or just classic twattiness. I would have gone with Batgirl, but I was afraid that if I had to watch her batcycle for too long, I would end up falling asleep and putting both my eyes on her ass. So you go out into the city and immediately a few random crimes will appear on your radar, and these mostly involve the usual activity of sneaky hunters taking out stragglers moving on to wiping out testicles, a take on the old Arkham formula, if a bowl of diarrhea and glue is a hold at cottage pie. The stealth is screwing up making all the popup button prompts very temperamental and when I try to change my stance the slightest stick thrust makes my dude run a yard in that direction like an understimulated dog on the stock market floor. And the fight is screwing up with no sense of Arkham’s sleek flow. It’s a lot more insane button mashing, and you’re no longer countering incoming attacks, you’re only dodging them. Countering is a smooth continuation of combat, dodging is an interruption.

And that doesn’t matter anyway, because in the backend of the game, when all your gear has elemental effects, it became much more efficient to stand a hundred yards away and go after the guys with my ranged weapon until they burst into flames. Uh, don’t worry, it was a non-lethal special shot. Which I did with the science of Batman. Either way, you do these random copy-pasted crimes in order to acquire Clue Dollars which are spent to unlock bigger random copy-pasted crimes that involve pretty much the same crap but with greater rewards. Then you get into a story mission where you do some more of the same shit, except instead of randomly copying pasted stealth battle arenas, it’s stealth battle arenas that just feel randomly copied . And even when he resents a boss fight or a puzzle at you, I guess the gist of this whole review is that the game has absolutely no substance. There is no life to any part of it, no personality. The dialogue is awful. Your average cutscene between missions has our four protagonists standing in their roommate looking like a fucking screen test for the original cast of Saved by the Bell, one of them says something obvious, there’s a long pause as a roomful of sixty overpaid writers argue over the next line, then someone says another obvious thing. They’re the bad guys who bring Batman media to life, and almost none of the fuckers bothered to show up.

No Joker, no Riddler, no, uh, Penny Plunderer. You get Harley Quinn, but then she has to be in anything DC according to some UN-enforced doctrine I guess, but she’s just a side mission and she’s also phoning into her lines. The main threat in the story comes from the Court of Owls and the League of Shadows, as they are factions and therefore warrant adding another flavor of infinitely respawning goon to power the grind machine. Oh, I guess there’s Penguin, but hey. I know I said I’d stop making that comparison, but remember when you went to Penguin’s nightclub in Arkham City, and the Penguin grabbed you and there’s a whole bunch lots of interesting fights and rooms to explore and a big shark? It was a fucking party. You go to Penguin’s nightclub in Scrotum Blights, walk through a room of generic villains, and then Penguin tells you to fuck off. And you do. You literally piss off because he said and go back to random copy and paste crimes. Arkham’s Batman would never obediently leave because the penguin told him to fuck off. Adam West’s fucking Batman wouldn’t. Not until you’ve handed the bat pot.