Batman: Return to Arkham
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Batman: Return to Arkham Media
Critic Reviews for Batman: Return to Arkham
Two classic games made to look notably worse than they did over five years ago, which is one villainous masterplan even Batman can’t foil.
Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City are amazing games, but this collection doesn't stand up to the same quality. The visuals have been improved, but at a loss of the dark ambiance of the originals. The 30 fps frame rate isn't locked, with the occasional stutter marring the experience. Worse, there's no new content available here. If you own either game on PC, there's no reason to get Return to Arkham.
Two great games from the last generation, very improved in graphics but sadly still with the same frame rate.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Batman: Return to Arkham is a good game but and awful remaster. It should have improved the frame rate, visuals and gameplay, but does none of that leaving the game almost as it was.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
It’s been great revisiting two wonderful games, but the framerate drops and lighting changes take away much of the charm of playing them.
Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are two superb action games that are essential for Batman fans. The ports in Return to Arkham have good intentions but fall short of the greatness required.
While the underlying games hold up as well as they ever did, Batman: Return to Arkham as a remasterwas very disappointing — especially compared to others that masterfully retouch games like Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection or Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Of the two, only Arkham Ayslum’s remaster is worth playing through; with no additional content beyond both games’ previous DLC, I would only recommend Return to Arkham to either die-hard Batman fans or those who don’t have access to an Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
There’s only so much that the excellent Arkham Asylum and Arkham City can do for this remaster collection, however. It should have been an easy slam dunk: port the game over to the Unreal Engine 4, apply some polish, maybe through in some behind-the-scenes features, and profit! Instead, what we end up with is a poorly-optimized port which sees even the older Arkham Asylum stuttering from the game’s first moments, and some odd lighting that cuts into the otherwise excellent ambiance of both games. Then there’s the glaring omission of Batman: Arkham Origins. It all adds up to feeling like an unfinished product. If you already have both Asylum and City on their original platforms, you can safely skip this re-release.
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