Holy Nightmare! Arkham Knight Looks and Runs Terribly on Nintendo Switch

Arkham Knight is out now on Nintendo Switch as part of the Batman: Arkham Trilogy bundle, but fans looking to pick up the title should hold off as it runs incredibly poorly. According to a member of Digital Foundry, the switch port of the Xbox One/PS4 title is awful. The game runs at an unsteady frame rate, is filled with bugs, and overall is ugly to look at. While the Nintendo Switch has a longstanding history of bad ports of old AAA games, Arkham Knight looks like one of its worst.

The Arkham Knight Switch Port Is Abysmal

Oliver Mackenzie of Digital Foundry shared a short video clip on Twitter, along with some comparison screenshots. Oliver wrote, “Arkham Knight on Switch is unacceptable. Terrible performance, poor visual quality, and game-breaking glitches. I’ll have a video on it and the other Arkham ports next week.”

The video shows the Batmobile driving around Gotham, with the game stuttering between 23 and 25 frames per second, despite it targeting 30. The world itself looks ugly, although that’s expected when it comes to these Nintendo Switch ports. To make matters worse, one part of the video shows Batman gliding to the ground and the game hitches completely, freezing for multiple seconds.

Mackenzie shared a second Tweet with screenshots showing a side-by-side between the Switch port and Arkham Knight running on an Xbox One S. The Switch screenshots look like a PlayStation 2 game, especially next to the Xbox One S. The Switch isn’t all that powerful, but getting blown out of the water by an Xbox One S is a bad look.

People aren’t surprised when more modern releases like the Hogwarts Legacy Nintendo Switch port are bad, but Arkham Knight released almost a decade ago, making this port an embarrassment. Mackenzie did not share any info on how the other two Arkham games run on Switch, although those games likely faired better thanks to being from the previous console generation.

Batman: Arkham Trilogy is available on Nintendo Switch.