Early review scores for newly released action role-playing game Gotham Knights vary. Some love it but several major and trusted gaming sites have alarmingly scored it at or below 5 out of 10.

Because of the nature of its design it will probably take us a week to be in a position to definitively make that call - and we will continue to play - but it's also worth sharing early impressions.

We've clocked up 16 hours and avoided "efficient" levelling or making frequent use of the difficulty slider, in order to normalise our experience.

Our characters who operate on a shared levelling system are in their early teens.

The base game's max level is 30.

New game plus raises that to 40 and it seems like that's necessary to complete each character's skill trees.

That's when we'll able to really judge it.

A Good Grind

Where we think opinions critically diverge on Gotham Knights is the grind factor.

For the benefit of non-gaming readers, grind refers to time and effort required to improve your character.

Labelled a "grind" because often games implement that as a boring and repetitive chore intended to keep players playing longer than they otherwise would just for joy.

More prevalent in online games than single player ones.

Gotham Knights is a single player action roleplaying game (with two player co-op) and comparatively, some aspects of its levelling system go against the gaming grain.

Typically your first 16 hours of play would see you become massively empowered.

Sometimes barely able to fend off a rat in your starting location to effortlessly staring down beholders or dragons.

Exactly as the developers foreshadowed, our Knights don't begin the game weak and their development enhances but doesn't super empower them.

Approached as a game rather than a targeted grind, the process is also mostly fun so it only feels like a grind in respect to one thing.

Knighthood.

Each character must individually kill 3 larger (but not boss) opponents and also successfully stop 10 pre-meditated crimes in order to unlock their Knighthood skills, including traversal.

A total of 5 larger opponents - so just an additional 2 - will also unlock additional momentum abilities.

The pre-meditated crimes require hunting down leads on one night, returning to the Belfry (your base) and following up the following night.

For a single character it is not exceedingly painful but we wanted to knock that out for all of them at the same time and that felt grindy.

Crashes aren't frequent but do occur and the game will rob you of completed crimes but not restore the un-attempted crimes to your map.

It sucks to think that you've completed this chore for another character only for the game to crash and realise you need to hunt down more leads, return to the Belfry for a map reset and spend another night on it.

That happened to us twice.

What we should have done and what we recommend to others is concentrating on the main story missions and maybe earning Knighthood for a single character until you reach Lucius Fox, which is relatively early.

His first missions unlock the fast travel system, every use of which is the only way to trigger an auto-save other than returning to the Belfry.

Fast forward a bit to what we've seen of Gotham Knights' existing end-game as shown by streamers.

Free roam crime missions have a good chance of awarding crafting blueprints and materials which allow you to continue enhancing your characters.

That again seems inspired by online games but implemented in a more palatable, fun and less chore-like fashion, i.e. the chance of getting worthwhile loot isn't extremely low.

Yesterday being the game's first day on PC we only had three players total drop in with the game's multi-player system.

Everyone including ourselves would have been more focused on advancing their stories which is necessary to unlock character abilities.

But after that point, those free roam loot rewards would be good enough to encourage maximum level players to regularly engage in drop-in multiplayer.

Which helps newer players and makes the game more interesting and fun.

So the potential genius of Gotham Knights is hitting a sweet spot in-between single and multiplayer games.

Though the developers not having framed the game accordingly and only allowing it to be reviewed the day before release, they set themselves up for 5 and lower scores.

Two days in we're inclined to disagree with those scores but they are arguably fair judging the game against single-player norms.

Having seen and been impressed by the base game, we're now much more intrigued by the separate four player co-op Heroic Assault mode which will arrive next month.

If Warner Bros. really have hit the sweet spot and Heroic Assault is also fun, Gotham Knights could be more significant than we had ever imagined.

Difficulty

On grind factor, the game's difficulty slider can be adjusted at any time and doesn't appear to punish players for cranking it down.

Especially in the early game, one of the main incentives to return to the Belfry for a reset is limited consumable health packs.

You begin each night with 7 and can get replacements as random loot, but once you're running low it's a good idea to think about advancing to the next night.

Death in this game is more punishing than most - you permanently lose a small percentage of your total crafting materials.

Those materials apparently aren't safely stashed at the Belfry. You're lugging them all around with you.

Super pockets.

The penalty isn't dire. Materials are relatively easy and simple to acquire.

But their loss is still felt and unlike most games, you quickly come to realise the value of health packs and also valiantly running away.

It's another reason to appreciate multiplayer. Other players can revive you which we're guessing spares you the resource loss.

Twice rather than returning to the Belfry to restock health packs we pushed on to get some main story missions finished, and instead cranked the difficulty down.

That significantly simplified and sped up combat because you need to worry much less about avoiding damage but didn't seem to lower any rewards.

Anyone bothered by the grind factor could just lower the difficulty and mow through everything.

That's good to have as an option and something online games can't offer, though it also completely changes combat.

Just blitzing through enemies feels more super-powered but the default medium difficulty feels much more realistic and rewarding for forcing you to approach and engage in combat more thoughtfully.

Performance

Over 16 hours we experienced about 4 or 5 crashes which by our estimation is a little above average for a new game.

Occasionally also painful. Unlock fast travel and the ability to force an auto-save as soon as you can.

System requirements list two graphics cards. Ours is actually in between those, so we're both above and below spec.

The game defaulted to lower quality graphics settings. We didn't change those except to lower FPS to 30.

Unlike what we've seen reported by many console players, we experienced no appreciable dips in performance even when riding the bike or using any of the Knight's traversal methods.

Slightly sad not to be enjoying the same visual quality that we see in trailer and streams, but it is playable.

Over the next week we'll try tweaking those settings up to see if we can squeeze some more graphical goodness out of it and how that affects performance.

The Bad?

What we've seen so far of story is ok but not brilliant.

It seems like nearly everyone is disappointed by the game's ending - which we've avoided spoiling for ourselves so won't comment on yet.

Traversal did not love up to our expectations.

Nightwing's glider feels more like a parachute. You drop like a rock.

Robin's teleport is so bad that we abandoned our plans to main him.

Maybe teleport controls make sense for consoles but you have to first leave the ground, then hit and hold space to remain in teleport, plus manoeuvre using the standard direction keys and optionally use another two keys to go up or down.

Over the next week we will attempt to determine if it's even physically possible to all of that simultaneously on a keyboard without breaking any fingers.

Red Hood's jump is better than both. Hitting space to jump is fairly easy and you can almost maintain your starting altitude.

Batgirl's glide might be easily the best. We've earned but not tried it yet.

There are optional race challenges in the game which require flight.

Haven't seriously tried any of them yet but can't imagine being able to complete them with anyone except Batgirl.

We vaguely recall developer videos claiming you could improve that and the traversal method for all of the Knights with skill points, but we're not seeing that.

Gotham Knights is out now on PC (Steam and Epic), Xbox X|S and PlayStation 5.

[ Main Image: Gotham Knights. Credit: Warner Bros. via Steam. ]