Digital Foundry digs into Batman: Arkham Trilogy on Switch

Nintendo fans finally have a chance to enjoy an award-winning trio of Batman games in Batman: Arkham Trilogy. After being delayed at the last minute, the package is now available both physically and digitally on Switch. Unfortunately, it seems that even with the extra time put into this one, the end result leaves a lot to be desired.

Digital Foundry has put the game through its paces, and they’ve come away thoroughly unimpressed with what they’ve found. You can see the complete technical breakdown above, but if you’re just looking for the finer points, you can read a bullet point list below.

Batman: Arkham Knight

• sub-30fps frame-rates with near-constant drops
• frame delivery is highly variable with frequent stutters over 100ms
• occasional super-high frame-time spikes that can last for over two seconds
• the game sometimes hangs at 0fps indefinitely
• degraded texture detail and material properties with missing indicators
• loss of lighting detail
• extremely low-resolution textures and pared-back distant geometry
• far less enemy commotion and traffic
• clouds in the sky have been greatly simplified
• bat signal texture is very low resolution
• more basic character models with blob shadows
• post-processing is reduced across the board
• less-defined depth of field and completely missing motion blur
• destructible elements often \pop out of existence when hit while driving
• fixed 810p resolution in docked play
• no anti-aliasing
• portable mode drops to 540p

Arkham City

• higher-res self-shadows that suffer from minor alignment issues
• no depth of field
• rather slow texture loading at times
• renders dynamically at up to 1080p docked (often 900p) and up to 720p portably (normally full-res)
• lacks anti-aliasing
• frame-rate dips
• decent stretches of the game do run at 30fps

Arkham Asylum

• dynamic 1080p/720p split and similar typical resolutions
• often drops below its 30fps target, hanging in the mid-20s for extended periods
• some frame-time inconsistencies