• Batman Arkham Knight, psudo-review


    Well a few people have already asked me and I've been kinda putting this off but I think its time to do what is right considering all the developments involved.

    As of right now, if you have not already purchased the game, you will not find the PC version for sale. Warner Brothers has pulled it and looks like it will not be available again until after the first major patch comes around.

    OK, with that bit of news out of the way let me dive into my close to 2 hours of game play that I've gotten through so far. Wait, actually let me vent a bit on the part where I updated my drivers taking me almost an hour. Yes NVidia put out new drivers knowing the potential problems, bravo, however, they did not update their automated driver delivery system, GeForce Experience, to actually download them. I spent 30 minutes updating Java to do an autodetection of my system on their website, which ended up not working as well. To me finding the manual download link and spending 10-15 minutes installing the new driver. Good fun.

    Alright, seriously, on to the review. I first ran the benchmark settings program, I do this for any game that offers it so I can check to make sure my settings are in a good place for me to play it and not have issues. There were a few points where it was sketchy but I wasn't too concerned. Looked beautiful through that thing. Now I dive in to the game. First bit should have had a bit more explaining as I could have waited forever for something to happen. They go and connect the story from Arkham City to this, in a fitting tribute I might add. I was hoping for a bit more but I was happy with it.

    Next you head into a pre-scripted scene where I noticed something was truly off. The sync between the characters mouths and their dialogue was pretty far off. I first thought it was my processor or memory not being enough for the setup, but I run Roccat Power Grid to check and everything is within acceptable levels. Next you have to walk across the room that is full of entities and complex textures, it ran sluggish. The optimization is the big problem here. I got through the sequence which could have been awesome if not the preformance issues.

    The rest of this review is pretty much the same issue where you have stuttering, lags and un-sync'ed dialogue. The combat system did get some improvements like that have for previous games but I've only been in one of these so far, so hard for me to say how good it is. Driving the batmobile, which from last article I wrote on this I was excited for, was the worst part of the lag and stuttering issues everyone has had. Driving the car should feel pretty smooth, but it felt so twitchy, probably from the issues, that it was hard to control. The car battle system is actually pretty good. Its probably the best part of what I've done so far, however, I've found the battles themselves to be lack-luster. Maybe that's because its early in the game and they don't want to make it too hard out the box.


    I've kinda tasted a bit of everything in the game and at that point I decided to not to continue any further. I wasn't going to let these issues effect my view of the game.

    Let me conclude this by saying that Arkham City and Origins both had significiant delays between console and PC releases which is probably why those games didn't have the issues that we are experiencing, however, City did have stuttering and lag and dialogue issues early, but a driver patch seemed to help that out. I even mentioned this fact in my previous article in hopes that they actually had their shit together and could do the simultaneous release but I was wrong. I am planning another article going over some of these kinds of decisions that developers and publishers make when releasing games, so stay tuned.