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Batman Arkham Knight is the third and final entry in the quadrilogy, following Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City and Batman: Arkham Origins, the latter of which I played, on PS3, and I found it engaging and entertaining. Hence, I was looking forward to this new entry but… what happened?
The first thing I do when looking to play a game on my PC is set the graphics to 1920 x 1080, since I’m playing on a 50″ plasma TV, but the game immediately defaulted to 720p for no apparent reason…. until I started trying to play it. There’s an option to do a PC performance test, and when the picture did come up, it growled along as if I was playing on my first PC, a 386 sx33!
I then altered this to 720p and the lowest graphics settings available, and the performance test looked more reasonable. Ok, it wasn’t stellar, but at least it wasn’t ‘Assassins Creed Unity‘. And then I started the game itself, or at least tried to. The opening plays out like a series of movie credits – at least those that showed up – and once I found myself in the cafe and able to move around, it was back to either being normal or sluggish. The game has also been locked to 30fps, which is ridiculous, but then I’d be lucky to get out of single-digit fps more often than not! Crashes have also been reported.
Assassins Creed Unity had a minimum spec of a GTX680 graphics card – and for Batman Arkham Knight it’s a GTX660, with my PC having a GTX650, and I have 8Gb RAM compared to the minimum of 6Gb), so I’d at least expect a game to give it a fair crack of the whip, but ‘Unity‘ was terrible and this is even worse. Apparently, the PC port was developed by Iron Galaxy Studios, a third-party team of 12 programmers, given just 2 months to complete it. I can see that when it’s sorted, there’s a great game waiting to break out from beyond this fog, but for now…
As Automan once said to his creator, in the possibly popular ’80s futuristic TV show, “Haste makes waste, Walter.”
For the record, I am in the process of buying a new PC, but want to get one with a GTX980 graphics card and with the prices having remained high like a bad smell for months on end since its release, I understand they’re on the verge of dropping, hence why I’m waiting. Given that it may be a couple of months before Batman Arkham Knight is patched and playable, that’ll be just fine to run it on the new rig.
TotalBiscuit is an avid gamer who has a setup that’s even more beefy than the one I want to have, and as he explains below, he’s got it running just ‘okay’. This makes a change from how it’s looking on my current incarnation, above. You can also see other footage from my experience here, which also includes the PC ‘performance’ tests in both 720p and 1080p.
In addition, Batman Arkham Knight has been suspended from sale on PC for both Steam and in stores, but is still available on PS4 and Xbox and apparently runs nice and fast on those. Alas, I haven’t got either of those consoles as of yet. However, once the game has been updated, I’ll download the update and hopefully be able to bring you a full review then.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.