Highlights
- The Switch port of the Batman: Arkham Trilogy offers the advantage of mobile gaming, but may struggle with its graphical limitations.
- The inclusion of Robert Pattinson’s Batsuit as a skin in Batman: Arkham Knight is a major selling point for the Switch version.
- Despite the technical performance issues, having Batman: Arkham Knight on the Switch introduces the game to a wider audience, and the Battinson skin helps mask any shortcomings.
Nintendo’s Batman: Arkham Trilogy Switch ports are out now and once more fans of the Arkhamverse are invited back to enjoy Rocksteady’s iconic Batman adventures. It’s unfortunate that WB Games Montreal’s Origins was not included in this Batman: Arkham collection, but it makes sense as a Rocksteady packaging nonetheless. This isn’t the first time that the Arkham games have been brought to a modern platform thanks to the Return to Arkham remasters for Asylum and City, but this time around it may be difficult to overlook the Switch’s limitations.
The obvious boon of having Arkham games on the Switch is its mobile, on-the-go nature, and getting to play Asylum, City, and Knight anywhere on the handheld has its advantages that way. However, the clearest reward for players who decide to purchase the Batman: Arkham Trilogy is its addition of Robert Pattinson’s The Batman Batsuit as a skin in Knight. This suit is currently exclusive to the Switch port, and that’s a brilliant decision to make when there may be more downsides to Knight on Switch otherwise.
Arkham Origins Deserves Its Own Batman Trilogy Leading Up to Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham Origins is somewhat of a cult classic in the revered franchise it belongs to and its prequel story deserves to have its own sequels.
The Battinson Suit is Likely Batman: Arkham Trilogy’s Biggest Selling Point
Batman: Arkham Trilogy Performance Has Disappointed Performance-Wise
It’s arguable that Asylum and City run fine on the Switch due to how much less graphically intensive they are. City is a fair bit bigger than Asylum and has an open world, but Knight is far larger and is more technically impressive because it is a base-PS4 game.
Even that undersells Knight a bit since it now looks like it could be a game that came out today, let alone back in 2015. As a result, it was already unlikely that it would look or perform as successfully on Switch hardware.
The Switch certainly has beautiful exclusives and ports that perform astonishingly, but not many games that launched on another platform originally are expected to look or perform similarly once they have been ported to the Switch, especially if they are as graphically intensive as Knight is.
It’s terrific to have Knight on the Switch because that widens the game’s audience nearly a decade later, and fans who have not yet had a chance to play it will get the most out of it now as a great franchise bridging point while awaiting Knight’s upcoming sequel, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. That said, the Battinson skin may help mask the fact that it underperforms from a technical standpoint in the meantime.
Arkham Knight’s Battinson Suit May Be the Sole Reason Players Buy It Now
Knowing that Knight’s Switch port has issues with textures, lighting, shadows, and other graphical nuances that other platforms can achieve—let alone racing the Batmobile around the city with a decent frame rate—the Battinson skin being a timed-exclusive was likely the best choice that could’ve been made. Rocksteady and Warner Bros. must’ve had their thumb on the pulse of the Arkham community and known that The Batman’s unique suit was one that players wanted to see in Knight most.
Packaging it with the Switch port exclusively for now with no date revealed for when it may come to other platforms incentivizes fans to purchase the port despite these issues. If for no other reason, there may be many players excited to role-play as Robert Pattinson’s Batman after unofficial mods have already attempted to deliver that experience.
Having the suit leak early, whether that was intentional or not, was also advantageous because it amplified excitement about the suit’s potential before it was ever revealed as a timed-exclusive on Switch. Either way, with only a couple of months until the next chapter of the Arkhamverse arrives, the Battinson suit is fascinating to see in Knight.
Batman: Arkham Knight
Batman: Arkham Knight is the third mainline installment in the Arkham series from Rocksteady. This time, players control Batman as he tangles with a new, powerful, enigmatic villain called The Arkham Knight. Players will explore an open world and tangle with some of Batman’s Rogues Gallery on a quest to stop the villain from taking over Gotham.
- Franchise
- Batman
- Platform(s)
- PS4, Xbox One, PC
- Released
- June 23, 2015
- Developer(s)
- Rocksteady Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Warner Bros. Interactive
- Genre(s)
- Action
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood, Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- How Long To Beat
- 17 Hours
- X|S Enhanced
- No
- File Size Xbox Series
- 47 GB (November 2023)
- Metascore
- 87
- PS Plus Availability
- Extra & Premium
