13 things you should know before starting Gotham Knights

Gotham Knights lets you take control of four members of the Bat-family — Batgirl, Red Hood, Robin, and Nightwing — to fight crime and solve Batman’s last case. But patrolling Gotham City’s grimy streets isn’t easy. We put together these starting tips to make your transition into the crime-fighting lifestyle a little easier.

Play whatever character you want

Yes, each member of the Bat-family has their own individual strengths. But the game is designed so that every mission — even the optional objectives — can be completed no matter which character you choose to play as. Sure, it’s fun to swap now and then and experience character-specific story beats, but from a gameplay perspective, you can choose whatever hero suits you best.

Image: WB Games Montreal/Warner Bros. Games

Play on easy to cut down the tedium

Gotham Knights is about role-playing as a DC superhero and fighting crime while experiencing a unique story in Gotham. There’s nothing wrong with turning the difficulty down to easy. In fact, it can actually make this game significantly more fun, unless having to punch the same spongey bad guys 50 or 60 times is part of your power fantasy.

Customize your outfit

Even before you start crafting new gear and upgrading your loadout, you can seriously customize each hero’s armor. From the workbench in the Belfry, your main base of operations, you can “transmog” the armor you’re wearing. That way, it keeps its stats but looks like any other set, even ones you haven’t unlocked yet. You can also change the color of the armor you actually have equipped, though the palettes need to be unlocked individually.

Do the training

Gotham Knights does a decent job teaching you how to play, so you might feel inclined to skip the training exercises available near the dummy in the Belfry. But completing basic, abilities, and advanced training will give you some XP (and, more importantly for completionists, remove them from your activities tracker). More importantly, doing training with different characters can help shed light on some of the differences in their combat styles.

Characters level together

Every time you level up as one character, the other three level up as well, keeping progress in sync. Note, though, that each character has their own ability tree with a separate pool of skill points. So it’s a good idea to check out the ability tree every time you swap characters to unlock some new powers.

Craft new gear after every patrol

Even if you don’t level up during a night of patrolling, you’ll almost certainly find new gear blueprints while you’re out beating up criminals. When you return to the Belfry, use the workbench to see if you can craft anything that’s better than your existing equipment.

Dismantle obsolete gear

The game doesn’t do a great job communicating this to you, but there’s no reason at all to keep armor or weapons in your inventory after crafting something better, since you can transmog any suit to look like any other. Highlight an item in your loadout menu, then click the left stick in, and you can dismantle it into crafting materials.

Use gear mods

Gotham Knights’ gear customization options don’t stop at armor and weapons. There’s a whole system of gear mods buried in the equipment menu. You can equip “mod chips” to items with open slots, and even fuse mods together to make new ones. You get a ton of them through the course of normal gameplay, so don’t be afraid to apply them willy-nilly.

Look out for chests

You should make a habit of looking for chests while out on patrol. Whether you’re in the middle of a story mission or simply scouring the streets for random crimes to thwart, there’s usually a chest full of materials nearby. They can be easy to miss, but you can spot them by tapping or holding the AR mode button (d-pad down on a controller).

Image: WB Games Montreal/Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

Meet with Lucius Fox whenever you can

After a certain point in the story, you’ll receive a message from Lucius Fox, the tech wizard who traditionally supplies Batman with cool gadgets. Meet up with him and complete his tasks whenever you can. He’ll help you unlock fast travel, and that’s just a start.

Do Knighthood challenges to unlock more abilities

From the start of the game, you’ll have an item in your activity tracker that refers to “Knighthood.” It’s a pretty basic set of tasks, but following through on it unlocks a unique set of abilities, including new traversal powers, for each hero.

Don’t fret over optional objectives

Missions and pre-meditated crimes usually include optional combat objectives like defeating enemies using certain moves or performing perfect evades. These tend to net you extra XP and other rewards, but that usually just means more crafting materials. Completing optional objectives can be fun and add extra challenge, but sometimes they’re just a pain in the neck, and the rewards aren’t worth stressing out too much over them.

Read your emails

Each character has their own inbox that you can check in between patrols. You can access them on the rightmost tab of the Batcomputer. They contain lots of cool DC universe Easter eggs and story nuggets.

Also, the Batcomputer’s database is a massive repository of information about the game, as well as Gotham City and the larger Batman universe in general. If you want to know more about any element of Gotham Knights, chances are good that there’s a database entry for it. Flip through now and then and, hey, you might learn something new.