Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham titles are some of the best superhero games of all time. The trilogy - Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, and the spectacular Arkham Knight - are polished and beautiful action games. Their recent Switch ports, however, seem a little curious. The first two titles make sense, as PS3/Xbox 360-era games, but Arkham Knight was a boundary-pushing PS4/Xbox One title with visuals that require careful retooling to run effectively on Nintendo's low-power hybrid console. As you might have grasped from the headline, that hasn't happened with the Arkham Trilogy release - so what exactly went wrong and how do the two less-demanding titles hold up in comparison?
Let's start with Batman: 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. Readouts in the 20-25fps region are common as we glide above the city, with frame-rates stabilising somewhat once we're on the ground.
Looking at the frame-time graph, it's clear that frame delivery is highly variable with frequent stutters over 100ms - so the game feels subjectively worse than the average frame-rate would indicate. We even saw Batman momentarily jerk back in our footage every so often as the frame-rates drop, which seems to be a byproduct of the camera continuing to move while Batman remains stationary for a frame. It feels a lot like the rubber-banding effect players of some online multiplayer games might have experienced, like in older Battlefield titles.