Gotham Knights – Zero Punctuation

Gotham Knights is an action adventure superhero sandbox game made by cunts with official DC comics branding, which opens with Batman being killed. A positive first step, I thought, I’ve long repeated that Batman is always the least interesting part of anything he’s in, a dude with infinite money who’s never wrong with all the warmth and complexity of a potato in a sock. But I should’ve realised that there is one thing more boring than a potato in a sock, and that’s a bunch of college dropouts who aspire to be a potato in a sock. So our four potential protagonists are the four most promising alumni of Bruce Wayne’s personal Neverland ranch: Robin, Ex-Robin, Dead Robin, and Girl Robin. Can Batman’s teenage fan club stroke harem take up the fight he left behind before they get distracted by the appearance of their first pubes? Maybe, if they figure out how to stop dressing like twats, first. Robin’s default outfit in particular looks like he broke the zip on his dad’s anorak. Now, Gotham Knights had a hard act to follow in the form of the Arkham series, which for all the stumbles of their final instalment were all beautifully crafted games.

Full of artful 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 driving across town in Gotham Knights. Where you bat-cycle uneventfully down mostly empty streets for five minutes as passers-by talk shit about your romper suit. But Mothy Tights meets the challenge posed by the Arkhamverse’s high standard like a recent British prime minister: by instantly caving and giving the fuck up. Push all comparison to the Arkham games out of your head, okay. They are on another fucking plane of existence. They are yukking it up on the Elysian fields right now and we’re in Tartarus’ deepest darkest shit pit. Here’s a better comparison: Bottom Shites is the DC Universe’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers. Yeah, might as well end the review right there, hey, I mean, I already used up Bottom Shites. Fine, let’s go through the motions. After tokenly playing one mission as each of the four shrinkwrapped JC Penney catalogue models available I concluded it really doesn’t matter which one you pick, the variance in special abilities and super attacks doesn’t affect your combat effectiveness as much as having gear with the highest numbers does.

I eventually stuck with Nightwing because smarmy twattiness was marginally more tolerable than angsty twattiness or just plain twattiness classic. I would’ve gone with Batgirl, but I was afraid if I’d had to watch her riding the batcycle for too long I’d eventually fall asleep and poke both my eyes out on her buttocks. So you go out into the city and immediately a few random crimes will appear on your radar, and these mostly entail the usual business of sneaky hunty picking off stragglers transitioning to fisty smashy obliterating testicles, a take at the old Arkham formula, if a bowl of diarrhoea and glue is a take at cottage pie. The stealth fucks up by making all the contextual button prompts very finicky and when I’m trying to tweak my position the slightest stick push makes my dude sprint a metre in that direction like an understimulated dog on the floor of the stock exchange. And the combat fucks up by having none of Arkham’s sense of stylish flow. It’s a lot more mindless button mashing, and you don’t counter incoming attacks anymore, you only dodge them. Countering is a smooth continuation of combat, dodging is an interruption of it.

And it hardly matters anyway because in the backend of the game when all your equipment has elemental effects, it became a lot more efficient to just stand a hundred feet away and pick away at the dudes with my ranged weapon until they burst into flames. Er, don’t worry, it was special nonlethal fire. That I made with Batman science. Anyway, you do these random copy pasted crimes in order to acquire Clue Dollars that are spent to unlock larger random copy pasted crimes that entail much the same shit but with bigger rewards. Then you go into a story mission where you do even more of the same shit except instead of randomly copy pasted stealth combat arenas it’s stealth combat arenas that merely FEEL randomly copy pasted. And even when it does begrudge you a boss fight or a puzzle, I guess the bottom line of this whole review is that the game has absolutely no substance. There’s no life to any part of it, no personality. The dialogue’s awful. Your average between-mission cutscene has our four protagonists standing around in their flatshare 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, and then someone says another obvious thing. It’s villains that make Batman media come alive, and hardly any of the fuckers bothered to show up.

No Joker, no Riddler, no, er, Penny Plunderer. You do get Harley Quinn, but then she has to be in everything DC-related in accordance with a doctrine enforced by the United Nations I assume, but she’s only a side mission and she’s phoning in her lines as well. The main story threat comes from the Court of Owls and the League of Shadows, ‘cos they’re factions and therefore justify adding another flavour of infinitely respawning goon to feed to the grind machine. Oh I guess there’s Penguin, but, well. I know I said I’d stop making this comparison, but remember when you went to Penguin’s nightclub in Arkham City, and the Penguin captures you and there’s like a whole bunch of fights and interesting rooms to explore and a big shark? That was a fucking party. You go to Penguin’s nightclub in Scrotum Blights, you go through one room of generic baddies, and then Penguin tells you to piss off. And you do. You literally piss off because he said to and go back to random copy pasted crimes. Arkham’s Batman would never meekly leave because the Penguin told him to piss off. Fucking Adam West’s Batman wouldn’t. Not before holding out the bat-swear jar.