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Batman: Arkham Trilogy – Technical Review

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This is how the Batman died

I was never a devout comic book fanatic, but I had a few favourites, 2000AD and Judge Dredd, The Dandy and Beano, Eagle, Viz and of course the detective noir like no other Bruce Wayne, or Batman to his friends.

The Arkham trilogy were and remain the single best conversion of those cell stories into digital form. Not to say others told a worse tale of woe. Merely that the team behind all 3 grew up and understood the Bat as did I. In such a macabre story of child to man, it seems fitting that a likely end release of this great saga is itself a tail of despair and pain. Fresh on the back of the remarkable and passion filled Hogwarts port to Switch. In the Arkham trilogy we see a much more conservative translation to the mobile monster that struggles in almost all areas, so let’s tackle this re-run of good versus evil.

Physical chameleon strikes again.

Physical in name but digital in nature we get all 3 chapters here but only one ships on the card. Asylum is likely the least loved now but is by far the most salient. As it set the tone and roots that built into the simply stunning City and technically marvellous Arkham Knight Sequels. These ports start with a poignant reminder that even great things can become tarnished. Right from the off, as you have no choice but to start with Asylum as you kick off the DL for the others, the results are lukewarm. Looking remarkably similar yet better than the X360 or PS3 versions we see a similar visual and performance output, noted here in my comparisons.

As the knight falls

 The big game and clearly most demanding of the 3 is Arkham Knight, the effort and work here to squeeze this into the Switch is a big ask, similar to Hogwarts and the Witcher 3 on that score. All 3 were handled by small LA studio that specialises in ports, with Warner Bros outsourcing it to the team, a common occurrence within the software space. All 3 games remain the same UE3 based titles mixed with real-time and pre-rendered movie cinematics. AK took a broodier more Burton meets Nolan gothic style, something that organically grew from the darker comic book pulp feel of Asylum through city. The quality and amount they have left in is very impressive, the same seamless blend of action into real-time cinematics, vast Gotham city, active AI, combat. Flight and Batmobile is all within and on the 720p handheld screen it delivers a convincing job of looking close to the PS4 and Xbox versions. Resolution in docked mode is an impressive 1440×810 meaning we are not a vast difference from the 1600×1080 of the Xbox One version. Handheld mode must make cuts on this to a counted 960×540 and no DRS appears to be in use, which matches the UE3 console and PC originals that these are based on. And right from the off this is the focus of these ports but in particular this one as blown up on a large screen the sacrifices are plain to see, even to a blind bat. Although, the reduced demands of the Handheld mode can help some of the issues such as mips and normal loading in faster than when in docked mode. Comparing both modes, the only difference is that resolution reduction and any dynamic and resolution related elements such as post FX, textures, and filtering, meaning by and large docked and handheld are identical. The recent trend of nabbing any memory they can continues and only OS screen shots are possible with video capture disabled as the game needs every megabyte it can get, but this may help but not resolve the cuts.

 Alongside textures, AA is stripped back to nothing, textures are at least a couple rungs down on the Mip chain across the board. Objects are reduced as is Geometry complexity, models, objects, fingers all look very blocky at times. And this is both micro and macro details as large looming clock towers can look, disfigured art best. A larger reliance on flat textures and imposters for the skyline can stand out in these side by sides, as does pop-in and general word complexity, however it is still very good from a scaling point of view and I would have expected more, so the team have been keen to keep the look and art direction as close as possible.

 More cuts come in no Ambient occlusion now, SSR is gone, cube maps reduced or off, materiel layers removed, normal maps are heavily paired back which along with textures and polygon count marks the starkest shift in presentation along with light sources, specular and post effects. Motion blur is present but of a much lower and reduced amount, depth of field remains along with the Bokeh shapes, again showing the art focus was a key point. But in side by sides and back and forth the models, lighting, FX, and quality, although still excellent, lose a great deal of the impact that this, still impressive gen 8 title delivered.

Performance

That in and of itself would be both understandable and acceptable, after all a circa 5.5GB active footprint into a 3.5GB Switch along with drastic reductions in CPU, bandwidth, GPU something has to give and it does not lose all of the impact from the visual side, and it would be fine if the game was Rocksteady when it comes to performance, but this is anything but Rocksteady.

  So far so Gothic you may say, and in reality, the visual and quantitative sacrifices to the title would have me singing this as one of the most impressive ports I have played on Switch. That is until you do what ALL games need to exist for, play it and at that point all it all falls out the window.

 Even the dark Knight himself would fail this battle, the reality is some games simply cannot or should not be ported to all platforms. And what we have here is a game that would have been cancelled years ago when the development team finally convinced the sales team that this simply will not work. Even back at launch when I covered this, the game was, and remains, a work of genius from all involved, but it had performance issues. On the then new PS4, X1 and even more so PC, Memory juggling, CPU demands, extensive physics on collisions, procedural destruction, cloth, combat and even traversal. We can see frame times into the 100ms+ and single digit framerates during the extensive fast paced Batmobile segments. It is unplayable at times, as you can see with the games stuttering causing physics issues to judder batman as he flies or the Batmobile in combat. Making turns and even aiming a random game of more luck than judgment as you overcompensate for the inconsistent performance that causing the game to stutter, jump, pause and skip all over the place. Gliding across the city can also see pop-in and streaming which again causes wild spikes and then likely CPU and GPU limited battles with at least more consistent 33 and 50ms frame cadence. Itself pretty bad but compared to the bigger sections it feels a welcome relief.

 It can still hold a decent 30fps readout in slow moving sections, some interior battles and the Realtime cutscenes which is a welcome boost. It is CPU and definitely memory limited both allocation and bandwidth. But the most important aspect of a game is the gameplay and here this enhanced Unreal Engine 3 title needs more of everything to work and the Switch simply does not have the capacity to run all these things at a playable rate. The amount of CPU & Memory work under the hood in the game was incredible at the time and could cause issues on last gen consoles and even decent PCs of the time. And even the later significantly improved and patched PC version can be a demanding game. That said they are all, including the Xbox One, markedly better than the Switch can muster here and from that perspective the results are not within a level I can deem playable and certainly acceptable.

Summary

 

 As this is the biggest and certainly most demanding of the 3 Arkham titles, I wanted to get a video out ASAP over the launch weekend. And as you can see the game is still and will remain a stunning bookend to the Arkham Trilogy and hopefully the Switch itself. But although I am impressed with the work and results from the team here on such limited hardware, none of the issues here should be levied at them directly. But the reality is this title should have been pulled from the pack and instead sold for half the price with just the Asylum and City, which have their own issues I will cover in my next video, as Knight is simply not acceptable as a release from a pure gameplay and enjoyment perspective. Warner Bros have again pushed a game out knowing that it would create a backlash in the gaming space and shows they did not learn from the PC issues back in 2015. It also sullies what was a generally great launch in Hogwarts all things considered but this title feels more like the equally horrendous MK1, although that looked far worse than this. I am sorry that this is how the Bat dies on switch but the only potential saving grace, is that IF the Switch 2 is backwards compatible come next year, we may yet see the Dark Knight rise once again. But in the here and now, this is the true joker in this pack.

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