Video Gamers Podcast - Gotham Knights - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Gaming sidekicks Michael, Josh and Paul are swinging into your ear holes with our latest gaming Deep Dive of Gotham Knights. Recently released to mediocre gaming reviews, we soar over Gotham to tell you whether this game is worth your time as a hero, or if it’s a true villain amongst triple A titles.    Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Remi, MarbleMadness, Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad   Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Hello, citizens of Gotham City, and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three dads who love gaming, and today we will be deep-diving Gotham Knights. But before we jump into today's content, please take a second to rate our show five stars and leave a written review. Please also consider supporting our show on Patreon. Support starts at five bucks a month,

and not only will you be helping us stay in business, you'll also get two bonus Squadcast episodes every month. You can sign up at MultiplayerSquad.com. I am your host, Paul. And joining me, he is our Robin today. He's thinking about creating a bit of a talent in the Belfry, but it's just for research. It's Michael. I was not prepared to go first, but I know that when you say

citizens of Gotham City, I'm like, oh, you mean the oppressed people that are just constantly... What city could possibly have this much crime with this many vigilantes around? These poor citizens. I feel bad for our listeners if we are a Gotham City podcast. That's all I have to say. Gotta do what you can to try to move out to the suburbs. Gotham City is not a great night. Night City is like, hey, what a great place to raise kids with a picket fence. Yeah. 90% chance of trying to get kidnapped in this city. And then joining me and Michael, he's our Red Hood still dripping in goo from the Lazarus

pit he crawled out of. It's Josh Paul. When you started introducing Robin, I started shaking my head because I was like, if you call me Robin of it's josh paul when you started introducing robin i started shaking my head because i was like if you call me robin it's over like and then you went with michael which is great so we're still best friends paul everything is great it's okay if i'm the weakest character robin's not a weenie in this game it's not like in the movies oh we're gonna talk about robin so sure we will all right well before we jump into the deep dive, we do have a little bit of housekeeping to do. First of all, we have a brand new Patreon supporter that we need to give a shout out to.

We want to say thank you so much to Discord user Remy, who signed up as a legendary supporter. Dude, I'll tell you what there is there is a new way to come in hot on the discord server and that is just be brand spanking new show up as a legendary member and everybody loses their mind it was a phenomenally warm welcome it was super cool for us to see um we haven't even chatted about which game remy is going to get to pick for us to review yet. Cause we're kind of busy with games until the end of the year, but Remy, thank you so much. And way to make an entrance.

Yeah. Remy shows up and he's like, Hey everybody. And the name is already here. She, I guess I don't know. Uh, and the name is already in gold. Like boom, drop the mic. Remy way to go. I love it.

Nice entrance. It's coming in like the kool-aid man all right and then josh you got a couple of reviews to read before we jump in you know this this game's all about heroes uh and but people that leave reviews for the podcast is the real hero in this story and we've got two of them uh this first one comes in from clint pillman and it's titled one star and it says if you rated these guys as one star i hope you are camped and killed in every call of duty match you ever play love the podcast always fun i even listen to the games i wouldn't play hope all the best in 2022 and beyond fellas signed i camp and kill you

oh thank you i camp and kill you we know that guy yeah we do know that guy and also to be fair we have never received a one-star review which is super cool we have but it was basically like i absolutely love your podcast oops i clicked the wrong number of stars and left one star. So yeah. So thank you, Mr. I Can't Even Kill You. And then this next one comes in from Frugie 2.0. And it's titled, This is Great. And it says, I love this pod. I am a 13-year-old who loves gaming.

And I don't know why, but I like listening to these elderly, crotchety old men talk about video games. Graypod! Only minorly crotchety. Only when it calls for it. Alright, guys, I do have a question. Which of the three of us is the most crotchety when it comes to games? Easily you. Oh, it's Josh.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page here, guys. You're also the most elderly, so basically that review was written for you. You know what, Ferugy thank you for singling me out i appreciate that so i might have considered introducing josh as our alfred and then i scrapped it at the last second it's the best though alfred can't grow a beard maybe so i i camp and kill you in frugity 2.0 you are the wind beneath my wings i can fly higher than an eagle because of you thank you heroes very nice well i think that's all the housekeeping

we have for today batman and commissioner gordon are dead the citizens of gotham city need our help these crimes are not going to prevent themselves boys let's deep dive Gotham Knights. That music makes me so jazzed. The music gets you hyped. It does actually get me hyped too, man. I'm not going to lie. It's not bad. All right.

Now, regarding spoilers, I did want to say here at the top that we will talk about the setup of the game. We're going to at least mention the names of the villains that you fight. We will give a major spoiler warning later. So if you haven't yet played the game, I think you're good to go. Feel free to listen. Just wait for the spoiler warning and we'll let you guys know how far forward to go in order to keep everything, all the major spoilers free. All right. Now, when we start these deep dives, we always start with a description of the game on Steam. This one's pretty bad. Here's how it reads. Batman is dead.

It is now up to the Batman family, Batgirl, Nightwing, Red Hood, and Robin to protect Gotham City. All right. So that's not wrong, but that's about the shortest number of words you can use to describe this game. Way to leave out Alfred, too. Man, no respect for that guy. None at all. All right. Now, for a little bit of background here, are you guys fans of DC and Batman lore?

I mean, I know we know this answer a little bit with Michael, but I was just kind of curious. What's your guys' history with Batman and DC? It's okay for me like i mean i love superhero stuff i grew up with comic books and all that and everything and man i watched the old superman with christopher reeves in it you know and all and all that stuff so it's like i'm familiar with the dc universe the only problem is it's far inferior to the marvel universe incorrect i mean i know michael's some weirdo that thinks dc is somehow better um you know i'll just let current society be

the judge of that and say which is the more popular franchise okay dc okay because disney took off with the movies and made them all happy and funny and stuff with marvel that's fine but wait a minute disney could have bought dc but Disney's smart. They want to make money and not lose money. Well, also, DC didn't really have a franchise at the time. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. Sony doing their... Anyways, so, no, I think

that I like DC because I've always liked very character-driven things, like stories that are like The Watchmen, that are very driven by the characters and what the character would do, not so much having the plot drive the character and i think dc's heroes typically have more tragic backstories and have more depth and i think that's probably just why i've more attached myself to those characters so dc a little bit better than marvel to me probably because i feel i'm more that's about it i think yeah i i was never a huge fan

of comic books i never read any when i younger. I'm not crazy about comic book movies, but I will say the Batman movies are the ones that stand out the most to me. I absolutely love Batman Returns, The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is phenomenal. The Batman. I'm not sure that Marvel has made any movies that reach the highs of those, although the whole obviously marvel is a lot they're they're pumping out much better movies at this point monetarily they're making a lot more money too yeah i mean you try to compare avengers and justice league it's a pretty stark difference in quality and what you want to spend time in um but as far as like deeper batman lore i don't know about you guys i had never even heard of Nightwing or Red Hood. I did know Batgirl and Robin, but for me, this was a lot of new information. I had heard of the Court of Owls,

but I didn't know what any of that stuff meant. So for me jumping in, I was pretty blind to all this. And I'm guessing Josh is probably in the same boat. I was. I knew Robin. I had heard of Batgirl. That's it. I'd never heard of Nightwing before or Red Hood. We did a Twig episode a while back, and I jokingly called Red Hood Deadpool because they straight up copied Deadpool on that one. But I don't know very much. I mean, I'm with you, Paul. I absolutely love the Batman movies. The Joker, I thought was phenomenal. But they've been very hit or miss. Everybody knows Gotham City, phenomenal, but they've been very hit or miss. Everybody knows Gotham City, so at least they've done good on that part. But I really did not know

much going into this game. I didn't know the characters. I didn't know who I wanted to play. I knew a little bit about Gotham City. I know a little bit about the villains, obviously Harley Quinn, the Penguin, and stuff like that. But I have that base level of understanding when it comes to DC lore. And that's how I went into this game. Which is funny, because right at that same episode we talked about, when we revealed the characters, like, okay, you get Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, and Red Hood. But Nightwing and Robin are the same guy, just different alter people. I was annoyed with that like yeah with a long history of comics

i guess at different times those different characters overlapped and in this game they you know kind of separated it all out kind of created their own lore in that regard um let's try to break down a little bit of the story of Gotham Knights. So this game opens up on a very long extended cut scene where we see a fight between Batman and I'm sorry, but I have to ask you guys, maybe Michael is the resident expert. How do you correctly pronounce his name? Because I think in this game they say Ra's al Ghul. Yeah, it really because it's a comic, it's Ra's al Ghul, Ra's al Ghul, Ra's al Ghul. I've always pronounced it Ra's al Ghul. Yeah.

Always. And before even Batman Begins, for me, it was Ra's al Ghul. So it was weird to hear them call him Ra's and Ra's in this. Okay, number one, the fact that they called him Ra's when it is clearly spelled Ra's al Ghul. And if you've seen Batman Begins, you know it spelled Ra's al Ghul. And if you've seen Batman Begins, you know it's Ra's al Ghul in that. So then they go like, oh, it's Rache. And every time my brain would just scream at the screen and go, it's Ra's! Quit calling him Rache! Yeah, I think everyone in this game says Rache al Ghul, which kind of threw me.

But in any case, Rache and batman are fighting batman is mortally wounded and he hits a self-destruct of the bat cave so basically everything crumbles in batman dies rachel ghoul dies and the self-destruct also sends out a message to the four playable characters in this game basically lets them know that you know that Bruce will no longer be able to keep Gotham City safe. He is passing on the baton. The four of them need to continue the fight without them. And he lets them know that he has a backup base and backup files at a place called the Belfry, where you end up setting up shop for the course of this game. So that's kind of how the game starts out. As far as setting up story for the rest of Goth game. So that's kind of how the game starts out.

As far as setting up story for the rest of Gotham Knights, what would you guys add on to that? I mean, the Court of Owls winds up being the big bad guys in this game. That's the mystery that you're trying to solve, winds up being the main plot point. The Al Ghuls do play a part in it. We'll get into spoilers later, but they introduced that right away because it's in the opening cutscene. So story-wise, this is you as whichever hero

you're going to choose, or all four of them because you get that option, is sort of falling into the role of, hey, we're no longer Batman's sidekicks. We are the heroes of this city since Batman is gone. We better try to stop crime as a sidekick? Do you get an instant promotion if your hero dies as a sidekick? I think so. That's how you're the next one up.

It's like the vice president. Yeah. It's like the vice president becomes the president. Okay. I wasn't sure if you had to take a test or something like that. No license, no permit. No. No. You're just straight up next up.

So just anybody can be a hero if you were a sidekick? There's no union or anything? I mean, if it's The Dark Knight Rises, you just got to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a pretty good cop who likes kids, and then you get to become Batman. Okay. That's it. You know. So anyway, that's what happens to our sidekicks they uh they become uh the vigilantes of gotham city at first you kind

of get a little bit of a lead that sends you down this path of investigating the court of owls that's really the plot of the game i mean this game's not super heavy on plot no that's really all of it i can't add anything to it except a little bit of lore. The Belfry is a real place in the comics, but it was made by Tim Drake and not by Batman. There we go. Hmm. Very nice. I think what I would add onto that story wise is that the character

development of the four are that all of them definitely have their own self doubts. None of them feel ready to take up the cowl. And so over the course of the game, they do grow more confident in their abilities and as you level up and add more skills they start to perform better and you do get these little cut scenes in the belfry over the course of the game where they basically come to the realization okay this is actually something that i can do and so you do

see a little bit of development in that regard. And as we're investigating the Court of Owls, we are going to end up crossing paths with some famous villains. In this game, the primary ones that you're going to face are Harley Quinn, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, Talia Al Ghul, and the Court of Owls as a whole. Those are the villains um i don't know about you guys but like i it was i feel like this game is kind of missing a lot of that batman feel when you don't have batman and you don't have joker and you don't have two-face i don't know for me i kind of felt like we're playing with a lot of b cast from batman is that kind of how you guys felt yeah so here's what it is batman is um oh my goodness i wrote the name of the show the

heisenberg show breaking bad this is like better call saul where you're like it's it's missing a bit of it it doesn't have you know heisenberg but it still kind of feels like it kind of it's like batman it's adjacent yeah it's batman adjacent yeah. I'm with you, Paul. You know, Harley Quinn has gained a lot of popularity recently, but let's be honest. I mean, she,

before then it was like, she was nobody. Um, clay face, like who, you know, the penguins in this game, but it's kind of like,

I mean, the penguins, like a four foot tall, that guy, like he's not intimidating, you know, as far as that goes and then it's like mr freeze the last time we saw mr freeze was in batman forever which was an

absolutely a terrible movie you know and so it's like dude like you couldn't pick better villains to to put in your video game is it licensing i don't know why but i'm with you i do feel like it was like they kind of went well we're not allowed to hit the a tier villains so let's hit the b and c tier villains guys yeah i think a lot of it too is because a lot of the other batman games focus on the joker as the main antithesis to the batman and so like well we'll just kind of throw in the b squad since the gotham knights are also kind of the b squad yeah it, it almost feels like Teen Titans in a little bit of a weird way, like you're getting the second tier. So getting into the gameplay aspect of Gotham Knights,

Michael, can you talk a little bit about the day-night cycle that governs Gotham City? Yeah, so Gotham Knights, really the name of the game, can be spelled two ways. It can be spelled with the K, which means you're a knight, like the Knights Templar, or Knights because like with an N-I-G-H-T-S, which means you play the entire game at night. Because for the most part, you're doing everything at night. All the action you're doing at night, all of the things that you're going out,

all your fighting and all that stuff, that's all happening at night. Now, during the day, you are in a place called the Belf which we also cover which we covered earlier which basically like an auxiliary bat cave it's like bat cave light and the whole point of that is that's where you like have your boards where you put together all of the things you know like the uh the evidence and so forth you know like the crazy people with the red strings and stuff on the walls you're that person where you've got red strings pointing to evidence and so forth you You can craft your gear, do your upgrades, you kind of plan your day of fighting, you know. And so when you go out at night, you go and you find clues, you don't necessarily know what those clues are. But then when you get back to the

belfry, they all get uploaded in the back computer. And it kind of shows you where the premeditated crimes are going to be the next night. So it just kind of helps you keep the game going. And every once in a while, when you come in And every once in a while when you come in there, almost every day when you go in there, you have a cut scene real fast that kind of keeps the story progressing. So it's a natural break. And let's just keep going with the story when you get to the Belfry. Yeah, it's almost like it starts the next chapter each day.

Now, I will say I thought this was actually a pretty clever mechanic because Bruce Wayne feels okay during the day when the sun is out. Batman does not. Batman has to come out only at nighttime. And so when you've got these four characters running around in spandex and masks, it's not going to look right when you have Nightwing doing acrobatics at high noon in the middle of the day. So I really love the fact that it's always nighttime in Gotham City, and that's exactly the way that the game should be. That's when crime is taking off the most. I guess everyone's left to their own devices during the day, but at least at night, we're out

here prowling the city, helping keep the streets safe. As far as combat goes, Josh, do you want to give us a little bit of a rundown on how fighting works? Yeah, it's a big part of the game. I mean, you are going to come across bad guys and criminals and things like that. And so this is a large portion of the game. You can approach it in a lot of different ways. The game kind of gives you the tactic that you can swing up to buildings and stuff. And so you kind of always have this bird's eye view when you're coming up to an area where there's going to be crime going on. You can kind of scout things out and then you can kind of decide,

are you going to go in stealthily and do like stealth takedowns on people to not alert all the other bad guys? Are you going to just go in fist swinging, you know, and just fight, you know, anywhere from four to like 12 guys at a time. This combat is somewhat similar to the Arkham series. They do borrow some of the stuff from that. I won't say it's not a clone, and I don't think it's necessarily meant to be, but it does use some of those aspects. So you are fighting multiple bad guys at a time. You are chaining together combos. If you time your button presses and you go from a light attack to a heavy attack, your guy can do these different combos. The enemies will, their fists or their weapons will kind of light up with like an alert symbol almost to say,

hey, you're about to get hit. So then you can dodge out of the way. And if you time your dodge perfectly, you can do like a perfect attack and stuff like that. So there is some nuance to the combat system in this game. And then that is further compounded by the characters that you play, because every character handles a little bit differently. And the game tells you this. They say, hey, Robin is more meant for stealth and the stealth takedowns. And he's got abilities that help him get out of mass combat so that he can get back in stealthily and stuff like that. Red Hood is pretty much the only ranged primary character in the game. He can melee and fight like that, but he just relies on his guns.

Nightwing is your super fast, agile guy that's doing backflips and jumping around everywhere. And then Batgirl is kind of your brawler type. She's just staying in the fight, just beating people to a pulp kind of thing. So there's a lot of different ways that you can go about it. Even if you're a melee character, you do have a ranged attack. And even Red Hood has the melee attacks and stuff like that. But that's kind of the basics of combat in this game. You guys want to talk a little bit about how momentum works and momentum abilities? I think that's what set this game really apart from the Arkham trilogy. The Arkham trilogy, I haven't played in a long time.

I could be remembering wrong. I remember an awful lot of just button mashing A, A, A, A, A, dodge with B, A, A, A, A, A, kind of over and over and over. In this one, you do have this whole momentum system that I think is pretty clever. Yeah, the momentum that I found actually that I liked about the momentum system is it wasn't just a matter of, okay, you've charged up a super move, use your super move. Some of these momentum abilities are really quick. They take like a second to do. And some of them are like a series quick they take like a second to do and some of

them are like a series of additional combos you have to do which take up to five seconds and they can be interrupted so i thought it was kind of nice to see that like you've got to time the momentum ability properly real fast because i didn't cover this i don't know if you covered it or not but essentially momentum bills are charging up like essentially you do enough really cool things take less damage, do more damage, you charge up a bar that's a momentum bar, and it gives you special abilities. And I think by the end, I had, like, six

for each of my characters. But it's just really cool because it gives you a more fun layer into the combat. It's not so much just, hey, light attack, heavy attack, heavy attack, light attack, light attack. That's a combo, you know? It was more of, like, you can do a quick combo and then roll into something that's truly unique and cool for each character. And that's what really set them apart.

Yeah. So each character has their own completely different momentum abilities, and you have a total of eight. So if you're playing on PC, you can press a quick tap, one, two, three, four, or you can press and hold, and it's a completely different ability. And so as you get this momentum, it's really just like, almost like a mana bar, if you will, but it doesn't deplete over time. You can just bank all your momentum,

wait until the next major fight, and just start blowing it on all these crazy abilities. But to give you like an idea of a little bit of what these abilities look like, with Nightwing he's got like one ability where he puts out his nest and so he basically like kind of hits the ground and it shoots out these blue sparkles in a giant half sphere and as long as you stay inside the nest it's continually healing you and it's also damaging all the other enemies that are

inside it so if you're surrounded by a lot of enemies you pop your nest and now you can just kind of brawl out in the open it doesn't matter if you get hit a bunch of times you're going to heal through it all but then he also has other abilities like where he can spin in a circle and he's just spinning his batons doing aoe damage to everyone around him or you can just simply uh strike the ground and you'll get a whole line of ice that shoots straight out and you can hit enemies with that from a little bit of range and so it's certainly not just button mashing you're also managing your momentum and then at the same time you're also balancing your range because your range abilities are not not terribly detailed or fully baked in this game

it definitely feels half-baked but you can still manually aim at things almost like aim down sights if you will and look around it's not just auto aim on whatever's close to you so you do have a little bit where you're mixing back and forth with all that kind of stuff uh i was kind of wondering did you guys try doing a lot of stealth or did you just brawl or did you do a combo of both? I did a combo of both. If I was in a building and there was guys that were easy to stealth takedown, I definitely did the stealth takedowns. And I did that for multiple rooms at a time. It was kind of like the, oh, well, this setup works for me to drop down behind somebody, choke them out,

move on to the next guy, and so forth. But then there was some where I was just like, you know what? I'm not going to spend the time trying to stealth kill all these guys. Let's just go. Yeah. I think that... Here's the way that I played the game. Every time you do a mission, there is a bonus objective. And in about 50% of those bonus objectives, it says stealth kill at least three or four people. And I would stealth kill all those people. And then I would just brawl out. I did that a lot as well, Michael. And I think that's something that's really clever with the fighting in this game.

So every time you engage in that fight, like Michael is saying, on the top left of your screen, it'll tell you a little mini quest. And that's going to give you that bonus XP. So it keeps things a little bit fresh. I mean, you can choose to ignore it, and if you want to just brawl with heavy attacks every time, you can do that. But the fact that they do give you those mini quests encourages you to try all the different styles.

Now, for me, I don't know about you guys, there was one way to kill people that was way better than any other way. Do you guys know what I'm talking about which one throwing people off the roof throwing people off the roof baby nothing was more satisfying than beating a guy to a pulp and as once you get them down to like a third health you can grab them and then you can either start punching them or throw them or interrogate them them. Or interrogate in some cases. I very quickly found out that I could just throw people off the roof. And they continually talk in this game about how we don't kill people.

Guys, I threw 400 people off of roofs. Those people did not survive. What kind of bullets is Jason Todd using if he's not killing people with his dual pistols? Or throw people off the river? Rubber bullets. Right. Right. You know the little gel ones that they have now instead of Nerf? I definitely didn't throw as much as I would like to have, mostly just because I was impatient

and I didn't want to, like, oh, they're a third health. I can finally grab them. I typically just went and just beat the tar out of them. But it was funny the couple times I did it. Oh, yeah. It would have been way better if there was at least one wilhelm scream in this game when he threw someone off the roof i didn't hear one wilhelm scream so did you guys rotate between the characters a lot or did you kind of zero in on one early i was kind of curious to know how that worked for you guys i tried every character um i instantly disliked Robin. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was

his face. I commented to you guys. I thought his face was very punchable. I just instantly was put off by Robin. I don't know why. I just could not stand that guy in this game. And so I initially wanted to go Red Hood. I was like, oh, this guy's going to be great. He's the big tough guy. He's got guns. That seems fun. But his play style just did not jive with me, man. And then it was like, okay, well, let me try Batgirl. She was neat. And I just kind of... I tried all of them for a night or two and then just went, yeah, Nightwing's my guy. This is the guy that I like the best. I'm just going to play him. I'm not going to force myself into rotating through all these characters. I'm just... I'm a Nightwing main now, guys. Yeah. So something to mention here, and this is kind of how I approach each of the characters because i wanted to play all four of them to at least get their knighthood unlocked and what the

knighthood is essentially it's about an hour's worth of work that you have to do to unlock a fourth skill tree which gives them more special abilities mostly revolving around momentum abilities and so i was like okay i'll start, I'll start with Nightwing because it said acrobatics in the description. I was like, I want to do some parkour. I'm a parkour guy. That's what I want to do. And so I played him for probably about the first five hours or so, parkoured like crazy. And then I'm like, okay, I'd like to try Batgirl because I do want to learn the story. I know that each of the characters have their own story inside the story where you can learn more about them. The fact that she's Jim Gordon's daughter who was trained by Batman and they both just died means she might have a really good story.

So I played her and instantly was like Nightwing is trash now because Batgirl was a thousand times better than Nightwing in every way. And also her projectiles were actually useful. Like Nightwing, I thought that his projectiles were very weak. Batgirl, her Batararangs they did work like that was my primary way of fighting was battering battering battering throw kill battering and then i went on the tim drake or not tim drake jason todd which was red hood and i immediately went back to catwoman or batgirl and never went back because red hood was so like you play nightwing and catwoman and they're so mobile they scoot around they fly around they're so mobile. They scoot around. They fly around. They do so much stuff.

And then I go to Red Hood and it's like, man, it's like I'm trying to walk around as like Arnold Schwarzenegger with bricks in his shoes. He was so slow and it's funny because I want to try all of them because I read some things later on. What's the most powerful character? And everyone's like, hey, if you want to play Red Hood, he's actually very, very

he does a lot of damage. I did not have the patience to deal with his damage and so i played batgirl for the rest of the game yeah my journey was very close to yours michael i assumed red hood would be my favorite same as you josh i played him first i ran him the first few missions he's just so slow and clunky that it was not jiving with me and i'm and i'm sorry the voice act work with redhood i thought was atrocious yeah i could not handle the bunch i said i gotta get off this guy i did tinker with everyone a little bit i tried to pick characters that made sense so the very first time i'm gonna go visit harley quinn i brought batgirl because i was like you know what these are like the only two women in this universe right now. I kind of wonder what'll happen.

And sure enough, Harley did have lines in her dialogue like us two girls. So I do think that they programmed in some different dialogue based on who you play, which is kind of neat. But I very quickly took to Nightwing. I think he's got the best jaw and he just kind of looks a little bit like Batman. He felt like the closest to Batman.

He's fast. I thought the acrobatics were kind of neat like later on you can unlock where he literally does a full floor routine dodging around everybody and then hits the ground and stuns everyone around him i thought that stuff was a lot of fun so i kind of zeroed in on nightwing too all right well we're gonna go ahead and take a short break here and we will be right back with some more multiplayer gaming podcast. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card.

The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month. Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, we are back. And the next thing that we want to talk about shortly is the crafting system in Gotham Knights. So basically, when you open your inventory, you have only three slots. You've got your suit, your melee weapon, and your ranged weapon. And over the course of the game, you do collect resources. So you find them in hidden chests, you get them off people that you fight.

And then once you go back to the Belfry, you can craft new gear. You do unlock recipes over the course of the game. And gear also has anywhere from zero to three slots for mods. Mods give you increases to things like power, health, crit damage, or elemental buildup. And you can pop and put those into your gear as you want. Did you guys do a lot of crafting? Did you switch up your gear pretty often in this game? Yeah, I crafted all the time. I literally, every time I was at the every time the belfry was crafting something that being said i feel like crafting was such an afterthought by the devs on this game what i really did was just unlock a new suit because the crafting in this game is like use

one of three different resources of which i have a million of each i never had a problem and i would just go through and be like oh that, that's my next upgraded suit. So instead of doing a drop in the open world, they were like, let's introduce a crafting system, which was really just like a drop in the open world. But that's how I got my armor and weapons. So the very first thing I would do when I would return to the Belfry is go straight to the crafting table every single time to say, Oh, what did I get while I was out on this mission at night? You're constantly getting resources. You do find mods and occasionally you find gear as well. So I would just beeline it to the crafting table. Here's the problem with this system. I'm with Michael 100%. This was an afterthought. This was somebody that said,

hey, guys, we need RPG elements in our game. Go. And somebody just went, well, I mean, we can have inventory. And somebody went, yeah, run with that. And somebody else went, we can have mods for the inventory. And someone went, yeah, put that in. And they just rushed through this. It was just an absolute throw. And this adds nothing to the game, to me, in my opinion. this would have been much better served if you had just found a chest open it up you you found a suit guys look at that or you've got a new weapon and you can actually equip the new weapons like that would be the much better route to go versus this terrible crafting system and inventory system that they had now that said i loved trying out new suits and new weapons you know in that regard.

So it's not, this is not a slander against the weapons in the game or the suits in the game and stuff like that. It's just how the game gives them to you. Like if I'm out in Gotham and I open a chest, give me two new batons that Nightwing uses and let me use them right away. Oh, but that's not lore friendly job,

but you can't do that. You, if you find something, you don't get to use it till your patrol of Gotham is over for the night and you go back to the belfry at that point it just it's a weird system they could have done it a lot better i don't know why they came up with this whole like inventory crafting system yeah and and the mods are just so powerful that you look at the gear and the gear will tell you that its power level is like 120. And then you pop in your mods and it's 890.

And it's like, oh, so it almost doesn't even really matter. It's more so the mods. I will say the one thing that I did think was neat is if you wanted to focus on stacking a certain ability, it does let you do that. I would fool around and put all of my mods with elemental buildup. And so now if I'm using batons, if I have batons that do ice damage, well, after I hit them enough times, they freeze. And now I can go wild on them.

And so at one point I was like, what happens if I just use all epic elemental buildup mods? Am I just going to be freezing everybody in one hit? And it's not that fast but it did let you tinker with it a little bit and see how it might adjust things i think the only thing that really mattered was choosing your element and your resistance on your suit that's really the only thing that ultimately mattered as long as you got your button combinations down it almost doesn't matter what gear you have you're gonna win that fight or you're gonna lose that fight after learning how everyone responds yeah easy for instance when you're going to fight mr

freeze you build up on ice resistance and put fire on your weapons yeah you probably don't need any lightning resistance or something right mr freeze all right now i do want to say i have a little bit of beef with wb and how they presented certain aspects of this game prior to release. What? We talked about this last month when we did a Twig episode. And there's a couple things I want to bring back. And I want to come full circle. Because if WB had never said anything about this, I don't think I would have as much beef.

But because they promised certain things, I do feel a little deceived, if you will. I'm Paul. they promise certain things, I do feel a little deceived, if you will. Paul, a developer would never promise something and then under deliver on that. They promised some things that sounded pretty neat. So the first thing, and those of you who listened to the episode might remember this phrase, information scarcity. So they told us, we're not just going to spoon feed you quests. We're not going to do that. You're just going to have to go out into the world and you're going to stumble across information. Maybe you stumble across a supervillain or whatever. You're going to have to piece little bits of information together to figure out what you're doing. That's not true

at all in this game. No. This game literally spoon feeds you quests from beginning to end. You go into the belfry, you get a cut scene, they give you a quest, and they tell you exactly what to do with the next part of that quest line. And it's kind of just rinse and repeat. The closest you get to this, and this is what I think they're trying to reference is that you do interrogate criminals so sometimes if you need information you can grab a guy and you beat the information out of them and they they give it they give you what you need but even then the game still spoon feeds you the quest they tell you go interrogate two freaks now go and interrogate two mob members like they're still spoon feeding you these quests information

scarcity this phrase means nothing in this game it was a bold-faced lie honestly it really was no it was and that's the part that i found extra disappointing is like okay so i the way they said it it sounded like i was going to go out and be a detective. I was going to find clues, come back, use the evidence board or whatever it is, and put it together and be like, oh, I think that Mr. Freeze is going to rob this bank here at this time. I'm going to go there. Instead, even the interrogation process that Paul just said, the bad guys don't actually say anything. They say, oh, okay, I'll tell you what I know, and then you knock them out, and you bring these points with you, these red magnifying glass points back to the belfry. They load in the computer,

and the next, yeah, it's like loot. And the next day, they're like, oh, we found a premeditated ambulance robbery for medicines at this location. But I didn't get to figure any of that out. It literally is the most spoon-fed side quest like there's not a it's not like you're going around you run to a random npc

and he's like hey man i gotta tell you there's something going down oh let me ask some questions no it literally says this is happening here yeah or like what if you found uh some kind of log book and it mentions a certain time in a certain location. Now I kind of know in my head, well, if I go there, then maybe I'll run into something. That's kind of what I thought we were going to get in this game. And you don't get that at all.

The other thing that I took issue with is that they did say, you're going to have to interrogate these criminals and put together this information because these crimes, they happen that night only. And if you don't solve it and save those people, you lose your chance. That's not true at all either. So bogus.

There's how many different things that can happen. Maybe 10 total. It's like someone's being kidnapped. These guys are robbing an armored truck and you just go, they feed you the exact same voice lines. They are rinse and repeat. You solve the same kidnap crime three times every single night you're in Gotham City. There's not a single thing that's individual or special about the crimes on any given night.

No. And even the part about planning it in the Belfry during the day, I literally, when I went on my second character, I unlocked all 10 of the crimes, the premeditated crimes you have to do to unlock the knighthood on the same night it wasn't even like i went back i would literally interrogate someone they showed me something to do i killed the i killed that group interrogated someone else from that group showed me the next thing to do so it wasn't even true that you have to use the day and night cycle yeah uh yeah i i feel like they kind of misrepresented the game in a lot of ways. Like we kind of said, what would make this game really stand apart? And we really leaned into information scarcity. We really leaned into detective work. Now, I will say that they did kind of stumble into something that I do think is kind of special, which is the detective system.

I did like the problem is it's way too easy yeah these these yeah there's there's literally nothing to solve like the very first one that you run into this game and they already showed cut scenes that showed this in the previews but it's like you can scan this room and i know there's a hidden door so how do i access it well i can look around the room and i can scan the microwave. Okay, the microwave can take a three-digit number. And I'm looking around. Okay, there's also a thermostat, which can take a two-digit number. And let's look around for numbers.

Well, here's a four-digit number. And here's a three-digit number. Which two can we maybe use? Maybe the three-digit number and the microwave that takes three digits. And so you would mark them and then click solve. And it would give you the green light. can we maybe use maybe the three digit number and the microwave that takes three digits? And so you would mark them and then click solve and it would give you the green light. And now you've solved that part of the game. Now, I think that's a fantastic system. Just make it a little tougher. In this game, a six-year-old could solve these crimes.

Yeah. I actually really enjoyed the investigation missions that you could do because I thought it was really neat. And then I quickly realized, like you, Paul, that it was like, dude, this is the easiest thing ever. Why did you not lean into this more? One of the ones is you see, I don't know, a box of matches at a crime scene, and you're trying to figure out where these villains might have come from and so you look at the knife you look at the glove you look at this thing and then you see the matches and it's like matches came from the south gotham bar and then it's like nothing everything else is just a generic response a generic like description and it's like where do you think like which clue gives you the location of the criminals. And you're like, yeah, like the, the bar maybe it's not the beer bottle that,

that is a cheap brand that tells you nothing. Yeah. And even, I thought even funnier than that is half the time, because I was playing Nightwing, Nightwing would say, Oh, there's some blood from the attacker and their DNA tells me it's this guy

who runs with the freaks. And it's like, oh, okay. So we just have this magical database that has every known criminal's DNA in it. I don't know. That part kind of drove me wild. Let's move on. Gotham Knights gives you the ability to play co-op, which I think is a great thing. For a little while, there were some rumors there might be up to four player co-op, which I think is a great thing. For a little while, there were some rumors there might be up to four-player co-op. Ultimately, in the end, it's only two. Josh, you and I did a little bit of co-op. What did you think about the co-op system? Anything that stood out to you? I mean, it's great to play with friends. Our schedules didn't align too well, so we didn't get a ton of opportunity to do co--op but we did get a chance and

it was very neat to be able to play with your friends it was like hey there's paul one of the weird things was it does not limit the character that you play in co-op so you and i were both running around in nightwing and then we were just being stupid and i'm like yeah i'm like i'm the real nightwing you know so like make me pick a different character yeah and so that part was a little weird you know another thing in the game they talked about how they're going to handle co-op and they really tried to tout all this up and it's just like it almost made it too easy at that point like i there's no almost it did yeah i mean it's we got to do a couple boss fights together so this wasn't like we just ran around and pummeled a couple low-grade criminals. We did boss fights together and things like that. It just didn't add anything for me.

It was fun to be able to play with a friend. But from a gameplay standpoint, it almost detracted from it a little bit because these boss fights that I think would have been kind of hard and fairly epic just turned into nothing. It was so easy at that point. So this makes me a little bit sad because I was the one who was out in front pace-wise, and I beat this game pretty fast. And one of the things that really stuck out to me are how long some of the boss fights are. Like, you have multiple phases. So you kind of start learning about Clayface. You fight him once. He's going to come back later.

You're going to fight him at the end of the game. They kind of have that system with all the villains. And some of these fights were really long. Like, I think it was a good 10 minutes, the final Mr. Freeze fight. I hop in with Josh, and it just so happens Josh is near the end of the game and all he's got left are these villains we hop into the final Clayface fight and it was like me the actual fighting was like 90 seconds it was bananas because Clayface only fights one person at a time I just sat back firing from range and never stopped so you know i think that's

one of the things that the co-op really hurt yeah and also if you play solo and you pause your game and walk away someone else can drop in on your game and it unpauses it and they can complete your quests and now you've missed on those cut scenes i had that happen i had that happen to me once where i just afk and I came back and I had died. I was like, what? And my quest was to return to the Belfry. So I was like, oh, someone must have dropped in on my game and completed it. That's goofy.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess you could set it for like, you know, closed game or something or friends only. Maybe. I don't know. Okay. So here's where we're going to get into into major spoilers let's talk about end boss fights we can talk about game reveals i i think there's not even really a whole lot to talk about here but if you want to keep everything spoiler

free go ahead and jump forward seven minutes and 45 seconds all right so what do you guys want to talk about toward end game stuff the boss fights i for me, that was some of the best parts of the game, to be honest. I mean, you fight Harley Quinn in multiple stages. Some of the mechanics for some of her fights I thought were kind of neat. That's honestly, for me, where I felt like the most chaotic because you have to shut down these bombs that she has rigged and fight two fairly tough bosses at the same time that fight was so hard yeah and and it's like and it's hard and if you get if you get distracted fighting the two big boss guys and then the bombs go off so then you you got to remember like oh my goodness what is that sound and this bomb's about to explode. So then you bolt over. I literally turned a bomb off with

one second left. And it was just adrenaline pumping. Like, oh my goodness, I forgot about this. Am I going to make it over there in time? I did. And I was like, oh, this is great. But for me, the boss fights were the pinnacle of the game. Yeah. I thought that the boss fights were... In a game that seemed to have a lot of repetition, the boss fights were always kind of a breath of fresh air. They were all different. They were all difficult and challenging for the most part. Yes, some of them were too long.

And some of them were too long because of the wrong reason. Like, okay, the Mr. Freeze fight, for instance. It's a three-phase fight where he's in this mech warrior type costume thing and it's mostly just dodging a bunch of red stuff on the ground during an air phase and then just beating the crap out of his legs so it was just really really long for the wrong reason but the other fights like the fact that the harley quinn fight like that was the first time i was like oh shoot that's actually pretty cool i'm fighting two different bosses that both have different abilities, and I'm being distracted by these bombs. Man, that's exactly what Harley Quinn would have you do. It's chaotic. She is like a god of chaos, and you're doing that

in that fight. Mr. Freeze, very mundane, just, oh, strong one-liner, shoot ice at you, blah, blah, big machine. That's exactly what Mr. Freeze should should be and so i did think that the boss fights did justice to the characters and i really did like that that being said if we're going to talk about boss fight boss fight telly all ghoul at the end was really really easy it was well yes and no i think she's the easiest to cheese if you know how to do it if you try to just fight her straight up with all the dodging it's one of the more difficult fights. Yeah, I guess you're right. I will say, I think the game peaks when you fight Harley Quinn, which is what, like three hours into the game? Maybe four, something like that?

I thought that's when the game peaks. Harley, it's got great voice acting work. There's Christmas lights that point you where to go. It's very colorful. You're chasing this balloon carrying the book or the binder. And they're playing a remix of Live in La Vida Loca. which was cracking me up because it's the perfect song to play for harley i kind of felt like that's where the game peaked and it was so early that was the first mission that got me really excited before that i was like this is kind of like just a pedestrian batman game

the harley stuff was great and think from there, the rest was just kind of downhill, in my opinion. I will say from a story perspective as well, I mean, you do investigate the Court of Owls. You have the voice of the court, which is like the head bad guy of the Court of Owls. Dude, this game is so predictable. I'm so happy you said that just now. Yep. Paul, I hadn't made it there yet, but you and I were chatting and I said, Paul, I think I know who the voice of the court is. And you were like, how far in are you? I'm like, I just figured out the first entrance.

That there is a voice. You know? Yeah, exactly. And you were like, well, who do you think he is? And I said, I mean, I guess this is a spoiler section. So I'm like, oh, it's Kane. Jacob, Jacob Kane. Yeah, and then your face didn't move.

And what did I say? I don't think you said anything. And I was like, yeah, that's it. No, I said, yeah, you're right, because there's only one character in this game that it could be. Like, yes, it's predictable. Yeah. You know, there's a very small cast of characters. And yeah, it's worst kept secret.

The ending was very cheesy, to be honest. That's a big disappointment factor for the story. You know, Batman isn't dead. Surprise, everybody. Well, he is dead. They resurrect him. Well, I mean, you know, if you're dead and then you're resurrected, are you dead still? Yeah, because it's a clone i guess i don't know

what the laws are let's go watch the sixth day with arnold schwarzenegger um let me tell you though like the whole here's the thing about the story i am a very story driven person and i was like yes i want to see like what is barbara gordon going through her story was so dumb she made little dolls of her dad complained about how she didn't know what he looked like while she was trying to make the doll of him, and then danced on a fountain that is his memorial. That's basically it. You don't get anything except her getting a little bit of confidence. And the main story, I'll do it in one sentence if I can. Batman dies, and Talia Al Ghul burns her dad. We find out there's a lazarus pit

which brings people back to life but she doesn't bring back her dad she brings back batman to put her dad's mind in batman maybe and then batman dies anyways like it made no sense to me well and the dumb thing is the whole point of the game is for Batman to hand the baton to these new Gotham Knights. And who saves the day at the end of this game? Yeah. Batman. It undermines the entire point of the game.

So I had some issues with the end of the story. Last thing I'll say is Clayface. This is just like a dumb piece of mud who wants to make a movie about how batman screwed him over what right he's like filming a movie with little clay faces it's so stupid the big thing was is that clay's face fell into a turbine and that's how batman beat him he's made out of clay right what is falling into a turbine do this like do the Terminator 2 and lower him into lava or something, man. Clearface is mad because he fell into a turbine. Okay, big deal.

It's like saying the Sandman got lost on a beach or something. It's like, you're made of sand. There's definitely a lot of plot holes. But I don't think you're playing this game for the plot and the story necessarily. I kind of was. I think you kind of are really yeah i mean i wasn't but let me let me just say real fast before we move on the part you were talking about at the end where batman saves the day what a clunky weird way to throw in a bruce uh i almost

said bruce banner uh bruce wayne like one minute long dialogue so i'm down there fighting all these things and all of a sudden we just cut away to bruce talking inside the batwing for like a minute and a half and i'm like is this happening in the past is this happening now because like he's just like he's gotta go ahead and do what he's gonna do but instead he's like you guys were always my apprentices you were always here to take over i only wish i could have been as brave as you and it's like dude you need to get this done people are dying blow up the slasher's pit now right like get out of here uh yeah i found a lot of elements of the story rather silly but it's a comic book movie you got to take it at face value right like it's not going to make a lot of sense it just is what it

is okay so now that we are all done with major spoilers we're gonna move on to reading some community reviews what you got for us josh all right as we always do you kind of have heard what we think about the game we've broken down some of the mechanics some some preliminary thoughts and you know things like that but we always like to go to the community reviews and say hey this is how people out there rated the game i always try try to find a couple of good ones, a couple of bad ones. This is actually kind of unique because I found two good ones, two bad ones, and one that I felt split the middle so perfectly that I included it in this group as well. So I'm going to burn through these fairly quick. All right. This first one is recommended. This guy has 48 hours on record and it says,

this is a fun game. If you go in looking for a masterpiece look elsewhere but it's fun the knights look fun and play fun the story is fun and gameplay is fun it's just fun bye and have fun if you're looking for an okay game this one's okay you know but he did he did give it a recommended. So yeah. All right. And then, okay. So this one is not recommended. Uh, five hours on record positives. The writing and story stuff is good. Graphics look nice when overlooking the city, nice colors. Combat can be fun, but not great. The animations are very well done. It does have co-op and there's good voice acting the negatives. The movement is atrocious. Getting stuck on things. Not very precise. It's not fun moving around this game world. Performance is all over the place, especially on the vehicles.

The game throws annoying things at you in between fighting. Going long distances till the next fight, having to do all this, all the other crappy things when you just want to fight. Gets too grindy later on. It feels like a live service game that isn't one. Make up your mind. Not much to the game world. It's very dull and lackluster open world elements the side activities are garbage loot and crafting system are trash i am just not having much fun playing to be honest rpg elements that just don't work okay uh all right sure all right so uh and then we've got another positive and it says this is 28 hours on record. Genuinely, people are making this game seem far worse than it is.

Is this a bad game? Heck no. Is this a great game? Maybe. Is Gotham Knights better than Arkham? No. But people need to stop comparing the two. Combat will be different.

Gameplay will be different. Traversal will be different. Story will be different. I'm having a lot of fun in this game and I can't wait for a friend to get in so I can play some co-op. If you want Arkham, go play Arkham. If you want to play the newest DC game that isn't like or supposed to be like Arkham, then this is a perfect game for you. Okay, sure. I think it's natural that people would compare this to Arkham.

I agree with all these reviews so far, by the way. There's a lot of good and there's a lot of bad. All right. So this one is not recommended. 45 hours on record. Do not buy this game. Even if you think you can get past the terrible optimization, the clunky movement, the terrible dialogue, the insanely confusing and overwhelming UI, even if you could look past all that like I thought I could, it's just so darn boring. It's not just repetitive. It's boring. You know how there are games where the whole game is go someplace, beat up a guy, go somewhere else, beat up a guy, wash, rinse, and repeat. But the game maybe has beautiful graphics or a fun story or interesting characters. This has none of that. And it just reminds you time and time again how

boring it is. How do you have me flipping around Gothham as red hood kicking the tar out of people and i'm struggling to keep my eyes open wow okay yep all right and then this this one is the the straight down the middle of the road now this person did give it a recommended rating they have 38 hours on record but i'll read the review and you'll see why i had to question the recommended part so all right it says a game that makes you feel like a sidekick but never a full-fledged superhero it's an okay game i guess especially if you don't compare it to an arkham game this one being mainly designed as a co-op game performance could use a major fix game needs proper end game better ui and itemizations more engaging reward system it just feels grindy and repetitive especially the longer you play and the city does not feel alive especially

with the rest the reset crime night system that plays and feels like some kind of mobile game but the story and lore is quite immersive and enjoyable at least which makes up for its flaws a solid six out of ten could improve once they support with more content but for now better to wait for a sale which should happen very soon speaking of clunky movement how often did you guys keep walking in a circle trying to like press a oh press that is the worst man this is like where you have to run halfway across the room and then make sure you run a straight line to the thing that you're trying to actually not too far yeah because otherwise if you try to actually just sidestep a little bit, it's infuriating.

It reminded me of riding Roach from The Witcher 3. Yeah, exactly. Like, oh my goodness, can I just go that way? All right, guys. So hopefully that gave you a little bit of a clue as to what people think about the game. What we do next is we try to guess the overall steam rating so what are the overall reviews for gotham knights on the scale of zero to 100 where do you guys think this is gonna fall 69 69 for paul all right i was gonna say 74 and i'm sticking with it 74 for mich. I guessed 73% initially.

We're all pretty darn close to each other. That's kind of rare. The actual Steam overall review ratings for Gotham Knights is 72%, guys. I missed it by one. I missed it by two. I missed it by three. I can't believe I was the furthest off. That might be the closest we've all ever been to the actual score on something. Well, as your reigning superhero, that means I get to introduce this next segment.

Paul, set the mood, would you? Hey, Batgirl. I wish I were cross-eyed so I could see you twice. Sorry, but I'm about to murder your game. Oh, wait straight up murder. Wait, what? Wait, was that a spoiler? I'm not going to hide it.

I'm murdering Gotham Knights. I won't say I despise this game, guys. There were times where I actually had fun in Gotham Knights. There were times where I absolutely despised playing this game. There's just a lot that they do wrong. Can this game be fun for people? I do think it can. I did have some fun with it.

But combat gets super annoying. Making a game about melee combat and then putting enemies in your game that can dodge every single attempt to melee them is infuriating to me and the only way that the the the talon guys the little the little talent well yeah they do that too yeah yeah so it's just infuriating it's a melee combat system and you're telling me i can't melee these guys oh well you have to hit them with a charged up range attack before they'll be vulnerable to melee that is often behind you that is stupidity that's aggravating this story is nonsensical traversal in this game is terrible i wanted to at one point like just completely uninstall this game because they made me fly

actually ride my bat cycle all the way across gotham city, which took, I don't know, solid four minutes to do this one mission. And then another mission popped up, you know, where it popped up all the way on the other side of freaking Gotham city. So I had to spend six minutes riding the bat cycle over to that part of Gotham. The issue is this game. So unoptimized that on my fairly beefy PC, I was getting less than 30 frames a second whenever I was riding the bat cycle. That's unexcusable in that regard. I won't beat this thing to death. There is some fun to be had. But for me, this is an easy murder because there is more aggravation in this game than there is enjoyment. And for a $60 game that's supposed

to be a AAA title, there is so much wrong with this thing that there's just no way I can say, hey, I recommend this to people. So one question, if they had designed the characters a little bit differently and the four grabbed your attention more, do you think that would have shaken up some of the repetitiveness with the combat? No, because it was the combat system by nature. I could have been John Wick. I could have been Kratos going into Gotham City and the combat system, it was just mundane. It was once you learn how to tap your buttons and once you learn how to dodge an attack, there was no challenge. The only challenge was not wanting to punch my monitor because they put these stupid combat mechanics in the game, like dodging characters or characters that would disappear. And then you had to just sit there and wait for

them to reappear, but you had to dodge right away. The boss fight, even the boss fights, which were the highlight of the game to me, they weren't super difficult. It was mostly just mash the buttons, dodge the one attack, wait for them to do this power attack, dodge that, and then rinse and repeat over and over and over again. And it was basically like chip down their health, dodge their attacks, chip down their health, dodge their attacks, chip down

their health. It just like there was nothing redeeming about it in that regard. Sounds like Elden Ring and Dark Souls. Don't you say that, Paul. That is no different. What rating you got, Michael? So I enjoyed playing this game. I did.

That being said, that's about the only positive thing I'm about to say. So what I had in my head before I played this game was completely different than what I experienced. Remember in that episode

we talked about what would make this marry? Lean into information scarcity. Didn't happen. Lean into detective work. They scratched the surface a little bit, but it was really easy. I remember exactly when, Paul, you asked Josh, what would make this a murder? And Josh said, the combat. If it falls short, the combat. If it's not good, this could be a murder the combat while i didn't think it was as bad as josh thought it was i enjoyed the combat i thought it was repetitive that you did the same basic missions all around gotham city all the time but the combat i found was fun because i made it fun i mixed in a bunch of extra momentum moves and i decided to make it more fun

than the system was that being said it took effort for me to do so. The quote-unquote open world was so bare. I know it's nighttime, but nighttime in a city like Gotham, which is modeled after New York or Chicago, nighttime in those cities, there's still a lot going on. It doesn't matter if you were in Gotham Heights or South Gotham, it looked the same. There wasn't an elite elite area there wasn't a blah area like think about gta5 when you're on like melrose avenue or whatever it is it's all nice cars and nice you know and then you go out to the boonies and stuff like it's different parts of the world the city looked exactly the same everywhere there was no five boroughs there was no this and that it was just blah world i think it was raining the whole time although i couldn't tell the interiors were

actually pretty great they did a great job with inter couldn't tell. The interiors were actually pretty great. They did a great job with interiors in this game. Exteriors were awful. Clearly, different teams made each of those. I'll tell you, I love vanilla ice cream, but this game was way too vanilla for me with this repetitive gameplay. Aside from some of the story elements overall, I think the fact that I played it on PS5 at 30 FPS was not the worst part, says something.

And so I'm murdering this game. Only the second murder ever from Michael. But you said you had fun playing it. So how's that a murder? Here's why. It's 70 bucks. And it's just, it didn't... I had fun because I have fun playing every game.

I love playing video games. But this one overall, i don't want to go back to it like i had fun it was a fun few days that i played it it was a fun 30 plus hours ish but overall i think one of the reasons i'm murdering is because we're expecting so much more from this game based on previous batman games and based on what the devs were touting non-stop that what i got was a lackluster vanilla blackish game that was fun because it's a video game. Because video games are fun.

This one was not the most fun video game. Yeah, so I'm going to say make love to this game. This game has a lot of fun. There's a lot of fun to be had. I think where this game really fails, the open world. The open world is atrocious there's really nothing to do other than to hit your scan button run to the marker beat up three guys and

then you just go on to the next one really the only interaction you have with the city is that people will shout things at you as you drive by and in the beginning they they are like roasting you you drive by and they're like, good luck, Nightwing. You're going to need it. And like that stuff did kind of make me chuckle where at the end of the game, I'd get, marry me, Nightwing. Like people were yelling stuff like that. I thought that was neat.

But other than that one thing, driving the Batcycle sucks. There's no other vehicles on the road. It feels like an abandoned city when you play it yeah the the heroic transport or whatever they call it the knighthood transportation i'm not even sure it's faster than the bat cycle so it's like they give you fast travel the bat cycle and your knighthood travel they all feel like they take the same amount of time between loading screens or just driving that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me the story was bad the having to unlock drones the having to hack the drones to unlock

fast travel was another of those aggravation techniques like there is no reason for me to have to do that it was just a time sink it was stupid it didn't advance the plot any like that's another one of the, this game was just filled with a lot of aggravation. And the map is not large enough to really nest to necessitate that kind of fast travel. Either give me fast travel where I can go anywhere on the map or just don't have it. But to give you like the six spots or whatever, six or eight, they were too far away to really make any sense most of the time i would just travel straight there uh so i mean this game is far from perfect all that being said i think

the combat is so much better than the arkham trilogy i think it fails in every other aspect i think arkham knight is probably a better game today despite being like seven years old or whatever than gotham knights but the fact that they build in the momentum system and the fact that you can switch characters the fact that the game does throw new enemies did not bother me in the way it did josh i appreciated being thrown the talons where you would have to do a sonic ability to knock them down because otherwise it was a button masher and all of a sudden they're throwing you drone operators. So now I've got to worry about, well, do I fight the drone? Do I fight the guy? This guy's always going to evade my melee attacks. I thought that kept the combat fresh.

Personally, I never grew tired of the combat. To me, it was just that everything else was so lackluster. This game to me screams six out of 10. I had fun every single time I played. I will never go back to it. I would recommend everyone out there wait until it's on sale and then absolutely buy it. I think there's a lot of fun to go through in this game. The Batman Secret Stashes, right? I thought that stuff was fun there there is some stuff in there that's clever but it's not the batman arkham trilogy the arkham trilogy is way superior to this game in just about every way paul what did you get from the bat i did like 50 of the batman's secret stashes i swear and i'm like what am i getting from you get salvaged components so you can get content right

yeah and that does anybody know what any of the components actually are no of course not yeah one was matches one was sheets of paper yeah they they looked like very generic components it reminded me of cyberpunk in that regard where you can see what like the crafting components look like and they're very vaguely electronic slash material and yeah you can't really know um so yeah i would i would say make love the two of you are gonna murder it i get it i i don't recommend anyone pay full price but i will say at what price point do you think it's worth it 30 bucks i was gonna say. I was going to say 30. I was going to say 20.

30 or less, I say pull the trigger. And that's kind of indicative of how we feel about the game, too, which is neat. For $20, sure. It's fine. I really think I'm being extra harsh with my murder. It's just that... Here's Michael's murder guilt kicking in. No, I'm not. I'm not. It's but the whole thing is I just I'm so tired of developers promising all these great

things and the stuff they promised was bogus. So I'm murdering your game and they just threw a lot of stuff in this game that was either not finished or not fully thought out or you just didn't care. Did you guys read the emails in this game? Dude, it would tell you you have unread emails and i had like 80 and i start scrolling through and they're just like telling me about their day and i'm like i don't care about any of this and normally i love that kind of extra lore and character development and none of it mattered in this game and it was boring

to read i'm like i don't even know why they put this in this game yeah i read one of them that was nightwing and jason todd basically arguing about who ate the pizza and then alfred shuts them up in the email chain that was funny the other six that i read of the 97 i got were just blah yeah like why is this even in here all right well let's go ahead and move on to the leaderboard segment and see where this game stacks up. Okay, Josh, you want to tell the people what our leaderboard is if they're not aware? Oh, every time we do a deep dive on a game, we force ourselves to rank this game against every other deep dive that we have done. And we call that our leaderboard. Currently, we have 82 games on our leaderboard.

Top of the leaderboard, we have Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, Overwatch, Cyberpunk 2077, Disco Elysium, to give you an idea of what we think are the cream of the crop. About halfway down, we have games like Far cry 5 raft shovel knight uh rimworld lost ark v rising and some of these games that are like hey they're pretty fun maybe they're not for everybody and then way down at the bottom we have games that are just terrible undercooked overpromised or just ruined games like uh hood outlaws and Legends, Overcooked 2, Battlefield 2042, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds at this point.

So to kind of give you that spectrum of how we rank things. So starting point, I think, has got to be Saints Row 2022. We rated that 51 out of our 82. Would you guys have Gotham Knights above or below Saints Row? That's tough. I would put it below just because I made love to that game, but that's literally the only way. I murdered that one too.

This game is so much better than Saints Row, I think. So much better. I didn't find Saints Row to be aggravating. I found Gotham Knights to be aggravating, and that's the difference for me. I have a problem with these vanilla... Sorry, Michael. These vanilla video games where they are just so... They're just so formulaic. There's no innovation. There's no passion. There's no nothing. It's like,

this is a video game. It's the most generically made AAA video game that I can think of, to be honest with you. Like, absolutely nothing stands out in this game to me. The graphics are pretty, but they ran terrible. You know, so it's like, I have exception with these types of games. And maybe it's not fair to these games, because obviously, you know, Paul likes it. He said, hey, it's fine. It's still fun.

But for me, I go, this is the most routine formula game ever made. There's nothing redeeming about this game whatsoever. I'd rather spend my money to support an indie developer that is making a fun game or a AAA title that's actually a AAA title or something like that. So I know I'm a little bit more harsh on these. I would rather play Saints Row than Gotham Knights, to to be honest i know exactly where i put this game and it's because no joke while i was playing this game about 20 hours and i was like you know what i really wish i was playing wasteland three instead of this and so and then i look at like tiny's wonderland and i'm like i'd rather play borderlands 3.5

but then would i rather play star wars squadrons heck no i'd rather play this game so i'd put it in that range of 54 i can't i can't call elite dangerous out of 55 that's not where i'd put it but i'd put it behind tiny tina's that's where i'd put this game i was going to be in the mid mid to uh like better 60s i still don't know how to call these things like the early early 60s early 60s okay i was going to be in the mid to early 60s so i'm not too far off from michael on this wow so you put on par with devour oh yeah as simplistic as devour is i would i that for me the quarry was the breaking point like i would rather play devour i would rather play gotham knights over the quarry i think comparing it to devour is difficult to do they're very

right but i know but like saying it though like calling that out devour i had fun for the six hours or whatever i played with you guys on that i loved that time even though paul hated it but like this is a very different game would i rather play this in devour well i think i got all that i got out of devour would i rather go and try to do a hundred percent completion on this game maybe because i'm done with devour but like how would i compare them you know think about your first five hours of gotham nights i think that would be well you also have to build price into it because uh devour is a lot cheaper when i looked at the list i personally would have it at 42 maybe 43 uh so we got one vote for the early 40s one for the early 60s and michael for the mid 50s which happy putting it one under tiny tina's wonderland

all right i would be not having a two under tiny two under no uh proposal rejected this is going above elite dangerous for sure yeah all right fine all right so we'll put it below tiny tina's wonderland i think that's a good spot for it. There's just nothing redeeming about this game, and that's kind of the same with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. It was just like a rehash. You're better off playing other Borderlands. This game, you're better off playing other generic video games.

Better playing off other Gotham and Arkham games. You know, right. Yeah. All right, well, we can lock it in there at 55. Elite Dangerous falls once again now in the 56 spot. Take that, Michael. I guess that's the moral victory. I'll just use my golden buzzer again.

I'll have to keep using the golden buzzer like it's a beach volleyball game where I keep just beating it up in the air while you guys just slowly knock it down. Hey, don't forget,osh and i can stack those golden buzzers down right keep knocking it down 10 overall well have fun with that wasting your golden buzzers oh man all right well i think that wraps up our deep dive on gotham knights we do want to thank everyone for listening we want to thank everyone who's currently a patreon supporter if you would like to support the show like they do you can go over to multiplayer squad dot com also if you want to see all of our games on they do, you can go over to MultiplayerSquad.com.

Also, if you want to see all of our games on our leaderboard, you can do that at MultiplayerPodcast.com. And it's right there on the main page. And come follow us on socials everywhere at MultiplayerPod. Any closing remarks or thoughts, guys? Yeah, my only closing remark or thought is that I have now finally seen Paul's disappointed dad like he would give to his kids because he's such a nice, pleasant guy. But when I murdered this game and you get used to it, Michael, I'm like, he's disappointed in me. Paul's looked at me so many times when I say I'm murdering something. And he's like, no.

And I'm like, hey, man, it's a murder for me, dog. Saying Saints Row is better. I want you guys to go back and listen to the things you said about Saints Row. Dude, I could have railed on Gotham Knights a lot longer, but we're going long already. But there is a lot more I could say about why I'm murdering this game. I think we're just learning Josh doesn't really love open world games unless it's the 10 out of 10 open world game. Do you consider this an open world? This is not an open world game. It's supposed to be.

It's supposed to be, but it's not. It's semi-open world. It's aspiring to be open world. Market is open world, semi-open world reality, not open world. Alright, well we're going to shut this one down. Thank you everyone for listening. We will be back on Thursday as always for This Week in Gaming. And that wraps up paul what's our next deep dive paul

next deep dive is god of war ragnarok never heard of it um i did say i thought it was unfair michael started playing it today or yesterday and i was like oh that's gonna throw you off for gotham knights because you're gonna see what a good mich game is like. Michael never played God of War. It's Michael's first of the new reboot. Not reboots, but of the modern God of Wars. It's his first go around. So that combat's going to feel really good. Yeah.

It was like butter compared to the clunky. I'm trying to get in this air vent. I've got to try and aim four times to get in this air vent. All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for listening. Until next time, happy gaming. All right. Well, thank you everyone for listening. Until next time, happy gaming. All right. Cheers all.

See you, everybody.