If you’re like me, you live for the moment in a certain type of film where the mysterious figure in the drawing room says something arch, and then presses a concealed switch. At which point there is a rumbling, or perhaps just a dignified electrical hum. And then behold! Behind the mysterious figure, the fire place, or a large oil painting, or a promising section of bookshelving, will revolve or slide away to reveal a concealed door.
I love a concealed door. I absolutely cannot get enough of them. Not just for the theatre of the opening mechanism, the gasp as an unexpected vista is created, but for the kinds of movies and literature that require concealed doors and the people who own them. And testify: this is one of the ways that Gotham Knights has made me pretty happy. For all its sins, for its shortcomings, low frame rates on consoles, bland open-world stuff and predictable plotting, for all of that, during the middle act it is absolutely the high water mark for concealed doors in video games. Nobody else can touch it. Barely a scene goes by in which a hidden switch is not discovered or a series of piano keys pressed, to send an oil painting through the floor or a see a section of Spanish tile transforming itself into a staircase leading down into the earth.
What is all this sweet work worth? Gotham Knights has disappointed a lot of people prior to its release by being a Batman game without Batman in it. Batman’s dead, baby! He doesn’t make it through the opening cut-scene. What’s the fun of a Batman game without Batman, in which you get to pick between the remaining elements of the Bat-family for your kicks? The fun, I had hoped, lay with the fact that if Gotham Knights can’t be a Batman story, it can at least be a Court of Owls story.
Source – eurogamer.net
All content and images belong to their respected owners. This article is aggregated for informational purposes only with full credit to the source.
