This week's DF Direct Weekly kicks off with our 'hot take' on the state of Batman: Arkham Trilogy on Nintendo Switch. We film the show on Friday morning and so only had an hour or so with the game before we sat down to record, but we had to know the answer to one burning question: can Nintendo's handheld hybrid really run Batman: Arkham Knight? Hopes were high for another 'impossible port' but alas, the final game is practically a disaster, brutally cutback in every conceivable way and plagued with profound stuttering problems.
Lighting is savagely downgraded, texture quality is a total mess, shadows take a trip back to PS2 era standards and geometry is culled. Arkham Knight routinely fails to hit its 30 frames per second target, often lingering in the low to mid-20s but worse than that is the pervasive stuttering problem. Most strongly evident in the Batmobile sections, Arkham Knight is clearly facing system-level bottlenecks at every turn: streaming environmental detail at speeds has a clearly measurable impact on the CPU, while the addition of collision physics stacks on top of that, taking performance into the teens.
We've got a deeper tech review coming soon, but ultimately, this collection should never have shipped. The quality of the porting is suspect in a world where Arkham Asylum drops frames under 30fps and where the more technologically demanding Arkham City actually seems to run better on aggregate - though of course, there are the predictable struggles in denser city scenes. There's the sense that the first two games in the trilogy required more optimisation work while the entire Arkham Knight endeavour should have been canned, perhaps in favour of an adaptation of the often-overlooked Arkham Origins... or else the entire project put on pause until Switch's successor finally arrives. All being well, we're looking to deliver our full review for the Arkham Trilogy tomorrow, but having reviewed first drafts of video and text, the news doesn't get any better - in fact, it gets a lot worse.