Recent reviews by Invus

A lot of fun, very nice pick up and play experience. Devs seem very receptive to feedback and good at fostering a nice community. Classes are diverse and each is thought out well, usually with multiple combos making combat fun and crunchy. Run customisation options help tweak the game difficulty to your personal sweet spot. Overall, this game is definitely worth it's current price tag, and really has the potential to sit among the best of roguelikes once it is out of early access.

A few small pain points I've experienced when playing:
- Starting with 6 revives feels like way too much on singleplayer. Balancing a singleplayer experience around that many possible revives is a huge struggle too - a balanced challenge where you use all (or at least most) resources available to win is so hard to achieve like this. It makes a lot more sense for multiplayer since these revives are shared between players. Possibly available revives at start should scale with number of players?
- Further to above, it would be nice if the "Angry Birds" modification was split into two, one which gave no starting revives and another that prevented gaining more during play.
- The timer mechanic feels a little awkward. It's a pretty strict timer, and I usually feel like I've missed out on a lot when it finishes. Also, it sucks really hard to invest a few minutes in a side quest and fail, losing previous time before the zone boss. There's also roughly never a case I'm not gonna be running the timer out entirely - rushing the boss early only makes the later stages even harder since I'm behind the upgrade curve. In effect it gives zones a fixed duration, at least for me personally. I rarely feel like I'm actually choosing between the different event options, which is probably at least partially on me. On the other hand, I've tried playing with the mod which removes the timer, which made the game way too easy. I'd run through all events and end up pretty OP by the time I get to the boss I don't want to write off this mechanic entirely - I've seen similar mechanics work really well in other games. Roboquest springs to mind, which essentially gives you extra upgrade material for finishing stages quickly and does pretty effectively encourage me to go quickly.
- The mod that removes the timer should be incompatible with the one which reduces the length of the timer.
- There's some really cool lore for the game, but you're mostly interacting with it in "codex-style" menus. You don't get much info about what is going on with the world just from playing runs. I'd love to get more hands-on with it during play. Not every game can be Hades of course, but a little chit chat between characters would be really cool.
- An option to reduce the frequency of Hero voice lines would be lovely. It's not super gratuitous, but some of them verge on annoying at times IMO.
- More variation in each stage would be nice, after a bit of playing does start to feel like the random element is just rearranging the same elements. New minibosses, events and sidequests for each stage would improve replayability a lot.
- More variation in how to play each class would be really welcome. You get different upgrades each run currently but I generally find these usually don't wildly change how I play. A couple fully alternate abilities would be really welcome.

7/10

There's plenty of flaws in Gotham Knights - the equipment system feels distracting and shallow, the power-scale levelling doesn't add much and only causes issues with being over- or under-levelled for certain missions, the boss fights are a massive difficulty spike and not all that interesting, the optimisation is much worse than it should be, movement options should definitely be available from the start, the health pack/smoke bomb system feels somewhat misguided - but all of these were more persistent small annoyances than absolute catastrophic choices for me.

The story is fairly interesting. When I saw they were focusing on the Court of Owls for the main story I thought it would be a fairly by-the-numbers introduction to them, only without Batman around. I was pleasantly surprised, and it managed to propose some ideas I haven't seen before while incorporating elements of some other comic runs. The combat is fairly fun, though a good dose of refinement would be very welcome. All the characters feel distinct with their own strengths and weaknesses. If you're a fan of the bat-family, and don't play expecting Arkham 5, I think you'll have a pretty good time. With some refinement and optimisation, I think this game could easily reach 9/10. I'm very excited at the prospect of any potential follow-ups.

EDIT: Finished the game, sadly the story falls flat at the end and post-game is very disappointing. Would revise my original review down to a 5/10 in hindsight and not recommend the game at full asking price. Decent fun if you can pick it up on sale though,

A smash clone that brings enough new ideas to the table to feel fresh, with strong tutorials and moves documentation.