Gotham Knights PS5 PlayStation

Gotham Knights has turned out to be a surprisingly divisive title, with sentiment seemingly shifting ever since we learned that, despite ditching a PS4 version, the game would only run at 30fps on PS5. This would, in turn, become a more prominent topic within the PlayStation community once we learned that A Plague Tale: Requiem, too, would cap out at 30fps. But framerate isn't everything, and Gotham Knights is more than just its technical performance.

Well, the reviews are in, and opinions on this one are all over the shop, surprisingly so for a AAA game. The PS5 version of Gotham Knights is currently sitting on a critic score of 69 on the review aggregate site Metacritic. With outlying scores ranging from a high of 95 and a low of 40, something is going on here that bears dissecting deeper.

Push Square's own Liam Croft enjoyed the game, awarding it a 7/10 in his review, which you can read or watch for our full thoughts on the matter. He writes that Gotham Knights features "an excellent story with top-notch cutscene direction and a fun combat system, with too many needless and confusing mechanics bolted on top. If you can look past them, there's a genuinely great game here”.

Game Informer's Matt Miller felt similarly, scoring the game a 7.25, and noting that "Gotham Knights didn’t wow me with its overly familiar objectives, combat, and activities, but it didn’t leave me sour. It’s fun to control some new heroes as they brood over Gotham from its building overhangs and uncover hidden plots against its people."

On the lower end, giving it a 5/10, IGN's Travis Northup wrote that "Gotham Knights is a consistently disappointing return to Batman’s troubled city and a distinct step backwards from the past decade-plus of Batman games," and that "from the inconsistent frame rates, to the weak story, to one-note combat that rarely feels good, there was virtually always something going wrong to make sure I wasn’t experiencing the triumphant return with my friends at my side I had envisioned”.

VGC's Jordan Middler applauded the game, giving it a 4/5, writing: “Gotham Knights provides a blueprint for a world of great Batman-verse games outside of Arkham. While it may not hit the highs of Rocksteady’s series in some aspects, the ways it excels in narrative and character development match, or in some cases supplant the Arkham series, proving themselves, appropriately, as more than worthy of wearing the cowl."

Finally, GamesRadar+'s Josh West also scored it 5/10, noting that "there’s a compelling game in Gotham Knights, but it's hidden away behind a messy UX, needless crafting and customization systems, and combat mechanics that have been stretched paper thin to accommodate four heroes”.

What we take away from these differing opinions is that there is something undeniable at the core of Gotham Knights that is perhaps obfuscated by technical hiccups. At the end of the day, only you can know whether or not that will be a dealbreaker in terms of your own enjoyment. But for what it's worth, we think there is enough good stuff here to justify rolling the dice.

Will you be picking up Gotham Knights? Can you think of another game that has run the gamut so wildly in terms of review scores? Let us know in the comments section below.

[source gameinformer.com, via ign.com, videogameschronicle.com, gamesradar.com]