Live Magazine Christmas 2016 ISSUE Live Magazine December 2016 Issue | Page 150

REVIEW

batman: return

There is little doubt that the Arkham games are some of the best gaming experiences that last generation had to offer. With a 92 and 96 on Metacritic respectively, 2009’ s Arkham Asylum and 2011’ s Arkham City received widespread critical acclaim from both gamers and Batman fans alike, thanks to developer Rocksteady’ s superb polish and the games’ outstanding voice cast, storytelling, and combat system. Last week saw the release of Return to Arkham; a remastered collection of these two games which includes all of their DLC, and the promise of updated visuals making use of the superior specs of current-gen hardware.

The first major update by Virtuos, the development team behind the remastered collection, was porting both games from Unreal Engine 3 over to Unreal Engine 4. This is relatively uncommon for the remastered space, as other re-releases( such as the Bioshock Collection) continue to use their original engines, just with updated graphics, 1080p resolution, and an improved frame rate. to arkham

The main changes you will see in Return to Arkham are favoured towards improved graphics rather than improved performance. Updated character models are the most notable difference, specifically, the textures of their clothing and skin. While their hairstyles are still pretty stiff and unnatural looking, the clothing textures of characters now show significant detail – you can even identify fabric types on an insignificant, deceased security guard. Batman himself looks incredible, with his suit, cowl and cape all looking their best.
Unreal Engine 4 also brings with it updated lighting, with noticeable changes in the colouring of cutscenes, lighting models, and the overall mood of both games. While this lighting is technically better, its effect can be a little hit or miss throughout the games. There are improved shadows and reflections, but the brighter atmosphere can reveal other graphical shortcomings, and at times can be conflicting with the dark and gritty aesthetic we’ ve come to associate with the series. Again, this is most noticeable on the character models, which are sometimes so vibrant that they can look out of place amongst their surroundings. While overall, the improvements made to graphics are welcome, they may have been at an expense to the games’ performance. Frame rate looks to be an issue for both Asylum and City, with City’ s performance on PS4 hovering around 30-35fps, with performance spikes from around 20fps up to
60fps. Asylum differs in that it has a 30fps cap, yet still experiences performance stuttering at certain points throughout the game.
The increased computing power of current-gen hardware has at least improved the loading time for Asylum. Walking through automatic doors around the island( particularly the ones that scan you in the Penitentiary) used to bring gameplay to a halt as the game repeated animations until the next area loaded. Now, these transitions are near flawless and Asylum experiences very minimal loading times. When a game gets remastered for a newer console, I think it’ s reasonable to assume that the better specs will see an improvement in performance over the original game running on older hardware. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the case with Return to Arkham. While there are definitely improvements in some areas, ultimately the game runs best in its original PS3 and Xbox 360 state. While I’ m very thankful for this rerelease( Asylum is my favourite game of all time), I’ m somewhat confused why they’ ve decided to remaster the series if it was not going to reach a decent performance.