Warner Bros. Games Montreal is hard at work putting the finishing touches on Gotham Knights, and it’s looking like all their hard work is paying off. IGN just posted the game’s first 16 minutes of gameplay, and the game’s tutorial looks like it's ready for primetime.
Like most games, Gotham Knight’s tutorial teaches players the basics of combat and traversal in case they’ve never played any of the Arkham series. It takes place right after the game’s prologue, which WB Montreal is keeping a secret right up until Gotham Knight’s launch. But based on what we’ve seen, we can assume it shows Bruce Wayne’s “death” and Batman going missing.
The first task for new players is picking your Knight, followed by grapple shots into a professor’s office. Batman was investigating this professor prior to both their untimely deaths, and Batgirl uses her detective skills to uncover a secret lab filled with sea creatures contained in giant green vats.
With the detective work out of the way, it’s time for combat. The Freaks have attacked the university due to their hatred for higher learning, but Batgirl is more than equipped to deal with them. Melee and ranged attacks are standard for each Knight, as are stealth takedowns that offer bonus XP. Finally, a fight with a whole team of Freaks and one giant Freak lets the player show off everything they learned so far.
It’s clear that Batgirl already starts out pretty strong, which was the goal all along. That’s according to creative director Patrick Redding, who spoke to IGN about Gotham Knights progression systems.
“They're already awesome at the start of the game,” said Redding. “It's not a function of them being ineffective as crime fighters, quite the opposite. They are all effectively graduates of the Batman School of Crime Fighting. So when they start, they are at their most similar, in the sense that they have a lot of these basic tools of combat and stealth, and moving around in the world and using their grapple. And then it's really over the course of the game that they fully diverge into their own flavor of what a Dark Knight of Gotham City should be.”
Gotham Knights arrives on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on October 25. Check out this recent gameplay clip for more of Batgirl in action.