What Gotham Knights does better than other open-world games

Many of us have felt the elation of gliding in a video game. Taking off from a high point and carving a path through the sky, gently descending over the majestic view below us. We’ve felt it in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Horizon Forbidden West - but those games have just been outdone.

Gotham Knights is a great game - as you can see in our review - but perhaps its biggest contribution to video games as a whole is something that many of us take for granted in modern titles. I’m referring to Nightwing’s glider, the Flying Trapeze.

See our review for Gotham Knights here

As the game progresses, each hero in Gotham Knights - Nightwing, Batgirl, Robin and Red Hood - is granted access to an air-based method of traversal. Each hero’s mode of transport is unique, and with that, they all have their own strengths. For instance, Batgirl’s cape is her glider, and it lets you cover great distances while slowly descending, as we’re so used to at this point from previous Batman Arkham games.

Nightwing, however, is the outright winner of the glider contest as his jet-engined vehicle lets us do what so many other gliders have denied us for too long: ascend.

Warner Bros. Games / The Author

That’s right, our boy Dick Grayson is able to glide perpetually. Take off from one of Gotham Knights’ many rooftops and you may never come down. Thanks to the twin blue flames that propel Nightwing’s glider, you can go up and down and turn around to your heart’s content. Honestly, it’s a revelation for open-world exploration.

It’s a stark contrast to Aloy’s glider in Horizon Forbidden West, which can’t wait to bring you back to Earth, or Pokémon Legends: Arceus and its Braviary that can’t actually fly. Like seriously, what is that about? A flying type Pokémon that can’t go up? It may as well be a Dodrio.

Warner Bros. Games / The Author

At this point, any video game that features a glider should look at what WB Games Montréal has done with the Flying Trapeze and take a lesson from it, because it’s a super satisfying way of surveying the landscape in Gotham Knights.

Don’t you want an Aloy who never has to land while flying over the Forbidden West? Or a Link who can stay airbound without doing that weird magnet glitch with a metal block and a minecart? I know I do, and it’s hard to see a valid reason to resist the idea now.

I’m aware some games use the rate of descent to stop players from entering areas they can’t, but both BOTW and HFW have hard limits in place anyway, despite them breaking the immersion, so why not make up for that by making the gliders more like Nightwing’s? It’s time to embrace the here and now.