Batman: Arkham Trilogy Sure Sounds Pretty Bad On Nintendo Switch
Batman Arkham Knight Switch screenshot
Batman: Arkham Trilogy was quietly released on Nintendo Switch last week to little fanfare. The game previously got a last-minute delay on Switch, and was released without any pre-release reviews from critics, which can sometimes be a bit of a red flag. As it turns out, those reviews probably wouldn’t have been very positive, as the game is reportedly a bit of a mess.
Digital Foundry put Batman: Arkham Trilogy through its paces, and published a report yesterday that’s pretty damning for the game. According to DF, Arkham Knight is almost unplayable in some sections, and there are some weird issues with both Asylum and City that aren’t really present on other platforms, and shouldn’t be present here.
Nintendo / WB Games
The main issue is with Arkham Knight, though. The game apparently rarely hits 30fps, and those frames are absolutely not evenly paced. Batmobile sections fare even worse, with the frame rate dropping even further and constant stuttering. Digital Foundry even reported huge frame drop spikes that could last for two seconds, and could even result in crashes.
That might be somewhat okay if the game looked nice, but it doesn’t even manage that. Shadows, reflections, and transparency effects seem to be largely absent, and some assets are so low quality that they’re just impossible to parse.
Honestly, this isn’t particularly surprising, all things considered. Arkham Knight was taxing on the PS4 and Xbox One when it launched, and pretty dang rough on PC, too, so a mobile chipset from almost a decade ago was never going to do it justice. Still, if it wasn’t technically feasible to make a playable version of this game on Switch, it probably should have been left alone.
At the very least, Arkham Asylum and Arkham City seem to be a bit better. They look pretty much identical to their original counterparts, and while Asylum is reportedly a bit rough in its performance, City is mostly okay. Maybe WB Games should have dropped Knight from the bundle and focused on making sure Asylum and City were running at their absolute best — something that really should be possible, given both games launched on Xbox 360, which is quite a bit less powerful than the Switch.
But hey, at least there’s a The Batman skin for Arkham Knight in the Switch version, which turned out to be real after initially seeming a bit fishy when it was released early on the Epic Games Store. That’s… something.
