Asylum and City have unexpected problems, Knight is an unmitigated disaster.
Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham titles are some of the best superhero games of all time.
Their recent Switch ports, however, seem a little curious.
Let’s start withBatman: Arkham Knight- which is an unmitigated disaster on Switch.
There are a lot of problems here but performance is by far its biggest flaw.
In broad strokes, we’re looking at sub-30fps frame-rates with near-constant drops, especially during open-world traversal.
It gets worse too.
Arkham Knight is legitimately quite challenging to play here with all of the constant stuttering.
I suspect the game’s streaming systems are causing serious issues here.
That’s not all - we also recorded occasional super-high frame-time spikes that can last for over two seconds.
The game needed to be manually closed which took a while.
These glitches are a painful reminder of the game’s basic instability.
Some sections of the game do run more acceptably.
The ground textures beneath are greatly pared-back as well and all grass has been removed.
It makes for a game that’s barely recognisable as Arkham Knight.
A lot of the same concessions are evident at a distance too.
The bat signal texture remains, albeit at a laughably low resolution.
These characters also have crude blob shadows rather than true shadowmaps.
Cutscene sequences have been cropped in somewhat too, again likely to claw back some performance.
As a final note, some optimisations have had a serious impact on gameplay.
This kind of issue really shouldn’t have passed QA.
There’s no anti-aliasing on Switch, so it does tend to look somewhat rough around the edges.
Image quality isn’t great on Switch, but the game has bigger issues.
Arkham Asylum is a close match for the original 2009 PC code as well.
I couldn’t spot any significant parameters changes either, nor any shadow alignment problems or texture issues.
Weirdly though, in portable mode Asylum seems to run substantially better, though it still drops frames.
Arkham City also has issues.
Unfortunately, two almost passing ports out of three don’t allow for even the smallest of recommendations.
The other two titles do fare better, but they aren’t as good as I expected.
Both titles have their own performance issues, with Arkham Asylum in particular suffering from prolonged frame-rate tumbles.
For games that originated on the 360 and PS3, the results are sub-par at best.
At this point, I have to mark the Batman: Arkham Trilogy as a failure.
None of the games here live up to expectations - and Arkham Knight is just atrocious.
