It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was a team of Gotham’s finest sidekicks taking charge while Batman was away. It was a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, web-slinging his way around New York City.
I’m speaking of course, of two superhero video games that are both currently on sale during the Steam Summer Sale, one of the year’s best and biggest sales for PC gamers.
Marvel’s Spider-Man released on PlayStation 4 in 2018, but didn’t come out on PC until August 12th, 2022 (in its Remastered form). Gotham Knights was a cross-platform release that came out a couple months later, on October 21st, 2022.
Currently, the older game—Spider-Man—is available to purchase on Steam for just $40.19, a 33% savings. That’s pretty good!
But Gotham Knights has an even better deal: 70% off its $59.99 price-tag, dropping that to just $17.99. The game isn’t even a year old yet, and it’s already seeing a massively steep discount—a sale price so low, people might actually buy it.
Both are open-world action games, of course, but they are fundamentally different. By “fundamentally different” I mean that Spider-Man is excellent, one of the finest superhero games ever made, while Gotham Knights is a crash-grab that lacks any kind of identity, and a stain on the legacy of the wonderful Arkham Batman games.
That’s a funny term, isn’t it? Cash grab. You’d think if these companies wanted to grab more cash they would do more to ensure these games would sell, which in the case of a big superhero game like Gotham Knights, simply requires it to be good. User reviews, however, are “Mixed” for this title, while they’re “Overwhelmingly Positive” for Insomniac’s Spider-Man.
However, I will note something about the user reviews of Gotham Knights: Many of them say something along the lines of “not worth full price but fun if you can get it on sale.” I’m sort of paraphrasing a bunch of different reviews here, but that’s the gist. It’s not good, but maybe for $17.99 it’s good enough.
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