Gotham Knights launches later this week, and Warner Bros. Interactive has uploaded a new trailer detailing everything fans need to know about the game ahead of release. The new Gotham Knights trailer dives into key elements such as the game’s story, villains, heroes, open world, and gameplay mechanics.
The upcoming Gotham Knights is a co-op and single-player action-adventure game separate from the popular Arkham franchise. Although it is a Batman game, the focus is squarely on the Batfamily, featuring Batgirl, Nightwing, Robin, and Red Hood as playable characters in the wake of Batman’s death. Recently, the game has been the source of some controversy as players have discovered that Gotham Knights will only run at 30 fps on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Many believe 30 FPS is unacceptable for this type of game. Regardless of where players stand in that discussion, there does seem to be quite a lot to dig into with Gotham Knights, as evidenced by today’s comprehensive trailer.
The newly released "What is Gotham Knights?" trailer opens by reiterating that Batman is dead, setting the stage for the rest of the game. Story-wise, Gotham Knights focuses on the Court of Owls, a mysterious criminal organization in Gotham’s underbelly, but also brings back fan-favorite villains like Harley Quinn while also introducing brand new enemy factions. Perhaps one of the most notable things mentioned in this trailer is Gotham itself, being described as an all-new neo-noir rendition of the familiar city featuring five explorable boroughs. Players can traverse the city using travel methods such as parkour, the Batcycle, or individualized Heroic Travel methods to get around Gotham.
On the gameplay side, this trailer mentions Gotham Knights' use of jump-in-jump-out co-op mechanics and focuses on the distinct playstyles of each member of the Batfamily. As detailed throughout the trailer, Batgirl takes a hacking-oriented approach to combat, Nightwing focuses more on acrobatics and dodging, Robin is a gadget and stealth-heavy character, and Red Hood is a crit-based gun-fu expert. Each hero shares XP but has separate skill trees filled with new abilities to discover, along with plenty of weapon choices for each. Should players want to swap characters, they can do so at the Belfry hub, which also appears to be quite crucial to the story of Gotham Knights.
It seems like this game will skew closer to a noir mystery, even sharing some detective mode elements with the previous Batman Arkham series of games. Today's trailer did make a note of the new neo-noir take on Gotham and even showcased Red Hood pinning a criminal to a corkboard toward the end, indicating that Gotham Knights will dive even deeper into the detective side of crime fighting. Fans looking for a mystery-thriller story set in the Batman universe may get what they are looking for when Gotham Knights launches later this week.
Gotham Knights launches on October 21 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.