Recent reviews by Arima

Gotham Knights, the second generation of the Bat family is finally forced to take up the mantle of being the protectors of the city of crime after the death of the family head in an open-world coop beat em up with RPG elements. One might expect a smart, macabre and disciplined coop experience as one of Gotham's new protectors with 1-3 friends, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
The game has a lot of effort and heart put into it, I felt like I was playing something created by people who love Batman and the dysfunctional family around him, but at no point did I think that they were capable of delivering on a game about the concept they love so much.

Every moment I spent with the game felt like it wanted me to stop playing. The coop isn't designed for you to play the game with a friend, but instead is clearly just there so people can randomly pop in for a mission or two and leave, leading to endless frustration with bumping into each other, being unable to hit the same guy at the same time, and really just general inability to work together even narratively as only one player character can be part of cutscenes at a given time and most can only be initiated by the host. Story coop is limited to only two players total in a given session, not that I would want to have more in a session as the game already breaks down with two people and the only character who seems to fit into the in-mission story beats is the Red Hood.
Each cool maneuver I tried to perform was stopped by unresponsive and nonprecise controls doing whatever they felt like and often ended up costing me or taking me out of the experience. Even during cutscenes I was consistently frustrated by the stupidity or incompetence of the cast which is entirely unfitting and makes the game feel more like a Batman Incorporated trainee fighting C-tier villains instead of the experienced and expertly trained Gotham Knights™ going against members of Batman's rogue gallery.

The experience is all heart, but no smarts or skill. It has a lot of good to it, but it's always kept in check by something they bungled up which keeps it from being both hilariously bad and properly enjoyable. One good thing I can say is that the game doesn't have a cosmetics cash shop and it's all unlockable with regular gameplay.

I can't recommend it to anyone but people who want to beat people up as the Red Hood while roaming Gotham for hours, by the end of the game they manage to fail even at that with the frustrating gimmicks of the endgame faction.

it's DMC5 and it's finally out, buy it now