Gotham Knights has players take on the roles of Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl and Red Hood in a version of Gotham City where Batman/Bruce Wayne has died. Throughout the journey, the band of would-be-knights must rise up and become the heroes Gotham needs. In a big change from Warner Bros. Montreal’s previous title, Batman: Arkham Origins, Gotham Knights does away with the gadget-based gameplay in favor of ability-focused gameplay. These abilities extend to combat and traversal in the open world of Gotham City.
One of the more interesting abilities are each character’s Heroic Travel ability. At the start of the game, players have two main methods of traversal. On the ground, each character can dart around on a Batcycle. From the rooftops, each sports a grapple gun that makes getting from point a to point b without touching the ground.
Heroic Travel abilities allow for speedier travel when in the air. Nightwing has his Flying Trapeze drone, Robin utilizes the Justice League teleporter to teleport short distances, Red Hood taps into Lazarus Pit energy to perform additional jumps and Batgirl unfurls her cape to glide. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t make it that clear how to unlock these abilities. It’s entirely possible to play through the entire campaign without unlocking these travel methods, particularly if you have a fondness for swapping between all three characters. So how do you unlock these new travel abilities?
Much like the Momentum Abilities, the travel abilities are locked behind challenges. Specifically, the Knighthood challenge. There are three components to this challenge:
- Timed Strike Training
- Against All Odds
- One Step Ahead
Timed Strike Training
In the Belfry, all four characters can interact with a training dummy that brings up a host of different training exercises. You’ll find Timed Strike underneath the Advanced Trainings where you’ll need to perform five Timed Strikes to complete the training.
Against All Odds
For this, you’ll need to defeat 3 Minibosses. These can be done in main missions, villain missions or while patrolling Gotham City. A miniboss counts as any enemy larger than a normal grunt sized enemies. These include Gladiator Talons, Godmothers, Shockers and Bulldozers.
One Step Ahead
The most time-consuming challenge, this requires the completion of 10 Premeditated Crimes. To find these, you’ll first need to bust random crimes. These are highlighted as white triangles on the map. Defeated criminals drop clues that are then used to locate Premeditated Crimes, which are denoted as red triangles.
Premediated Crimes come in all flavors, including stopping kidnappings, foiling bank robberies and recovering mod chips among other activities. Do note, some story and criminal quests include activities that count as Premeditated Crimes, so be sure to check your challenges regularly.
What to do after completing all three challenges
Once all three challenges are complete, you’ll need to return to watch a cutscene. After that, the Knighthood skill tree under the Abilities tab unlocks. The new travel ability automatically unlocks and you can start pouring your hard earned AP into your character’s ultimate abilities. However, there’s something very important you’ll need to be aware of…
How many times?
Some features like XP progression, the main story, criminal cases and color customization unlocks are all shared between the four characters. Some elements, however, are not and require you to progress with each individual character to unlock. Unfortunately, the Knighthood challenges fall into this category. Each of the three challenges must be completed by all four characters if you intend on unlocking all the abilities.
That means completing Timed Strike Training 4 times, defeating 12 minibosses and solving 40 Premeditated Crimes. Do all that and you’ll be able to master your characters both in combat and while traversing Gotham City.
Gotham Knights is available now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.