Batman: Arkham City (PC) - Worst port ever!

Batman: Arkham City was released for consoles nearly a month ago. Since then, the PC version has been subject to a ton of delay but PC gamers kept the faith because Arkham Asylum for the PC was an awesome port and more importantly, Arkham City looked so much better on the PC thanks to DirectX 11 and PhysyX support. After all the delays and the excuses, the PC version finally lands up on our computer and honestly, it is the worst PC port ever made.

The PC version of Arkham City packs in the same content as its console brethren so if you haven’t already accustomed yourself with our review, check it out here. The game does however come bundled with extra Catwoman missions (that is DLC for the console version) and since I never really got to play it back when I reviewed the Xbox360 version (stupid time constraint ands all), I’ll like to talk about it for a minute here.

Someone's in for a surprise

Catwoman comes with her own set of feline moves, but is obviously way weaker than Batman. However what she lacks in power she makes up for in speed and agility. Watching her traverse the length and breadth of Arkham City is a treat to the eyes as Rocksteady have given her enough moves to stand out from the Dark Knight’s shadow. In fact, they could even give her a whole new spin off game and I would totally play it. Unlike the Bat, she has a limited amount of gadgets, but all of them can be used in combat. And yes, she’s as sneaky as Batman, so taking down enemies silently is never a problem. But that’s where the good part ends.

Before you start the game, you can tweak the settings that best suits your hardware. Only issue here is that the set up screen isn’t in-game, so every time you wish to change your settings, you’ll have to start the game, see how things run and if you’re not happy with performance, quit it, make your changes and continue the same, lengthy and unnecessary process all over again. Two of the game’s highly touted features, DirectX 11 support and PhysX are broken and will hamper your performance like mad. Switching on DX11 sent my frame rates plummeting from a solid 60 to 20. Turning it off did improve frame rates, but I was still getting a ton of stuttering since I had left PhysX on. It was only after I disabled both did my performance really improve.

This definitely does not seem safe

I don’t get it; why must I after investing so much in my rig have to compromise on visuals? And hey, I’m not asking for much; I’m only holding Rocksteady accountable for the features they promised. Besides the visual issues, I also noticed a ton of sound stuttering throughout the game and at times the sound completely got cut off destroying any sort of immersion set up by the game. The final straw however was when I encountered a game breaking bug that’s not allowing me to continue the freaking game. I went online, searched for a few fixes and it seems a lot of people are facing such bugs all over hampering their progress in the bargain. A sloppy port is one thing but an unplayable game is just not acceptable.

Bring it

Words cannot describe how disappointing this is because Rocksteady set the bar real high with the PC port of Arkham Asylum. That game was technically sound and even on my modest Nvidia GTX280, it worked just fine with PhysX turned on. Here they dropped the ball completely as this game is just an unplayable mess of technical issues. If you’ve been holding out for the PC version of Arkham City, I’m sorry to say it’s definitely not worth the wait. Avoid it all costs and go in for the console version instead. If you don’t have a console, just replay Arkham Asylum all over again and save yourself the headache.

Test Rig:

Motherboard: Intel DP67BG Extreme Desktop series
Processor: Intel Core i7 - 2600K @3.40 GHZ
Graphic Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590
Ram: Corsair Vengeance 4GB DD3 @ 1600 MHZ X2
Power Supply: Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W