A reader defends Gotham Knights and argues that its poor reputation is due primarily to people that have never played it.
Complaining about things you haven’t experienced is something that was probably going on in caveman times. Without wanting to get too political I’ll limit my comments to the world of entertainment and say that since time immemorial people have been venturing opinions about movies they’ve never seen or games they’ve never played. This has got much worse during the internet era because it’s so easy to look up information and watch sections of a film or game, that allows you to lie much more convincingly about whether you’ve done something or not.
The problem with this is that context is everything. Movie scenes can seem to have a completely different context if you only watch a small section of a scene. Even more so if you slow it down and turn it into a soundless gif – for those people who seem to think they have uncovered some great secret of the universe when they’re able to prove that, actually, those stuntmen in that action scene weren’t actually trying to murder each other for real.
Since games are so much longer, there’s rarely a specific gotcha moment and instead the herd mentality takes over. Like some injured antelope out on the plains, it’s always the most vulnerable games that get the brunt of it. The ones no one was particularly looking forward to, didn’t have very good marketing, and didn’t review particularly well. This year’s victim, that fits all those criteria, is Gotham Knights.
Unlike most of the people that have piled onto the game I have played Gotham Knights from beginning to end and found it very enjoyable. It’s not perfect, it’s true, as the comparisons to Batman: Arkham are not favourable in terms of combat or stealth. Gotham Knights isn’t terrible at either, but the game as a whole is not as focused on such things and embraces the open world concept a lot more than the Arkham games.