Batman: Arkham Knight is back on the Steam store, and available once again for PC gamers to download, but many of them will likely advise you against doing so, as the game is still an unplayable, buggy mess.
With the breakneck speed gaming moves at, console players have almost forgotten about Batman: Arkham Knight at this point. It dropped back in June, and since then, we’ve seen a new Metal Gear Solid, a major Destiny expansion, and even a Star Wars: Battlefront beta. But while those four months have been kind to gamers, they have not been so kind to Arkham Knight.
In fact, the Steam message boards and comment sections are packed with users reporting massive frame-rate drops into the single-digits, intermittent crashing, and texture issues, many having to do with driving the Batmobile.
In fairness to Warner Bros., the publisher actually does offer up a couple of suggestions for remedying the issues, depending on your operating system. When frame rates start to drag, Windows 7 users simply need to close the game and relaunch it to solve a hard drive paging issue. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but it gets the job done.
Windows 10 users are in a bit trickier of a spot. In order to run the game smoothly and without as many issues, Warner Bros. recommends a gaming machine with at least 12GB of RAM. According to Steam’s hardware survey, just under 15 percent of machines included have that much memory, with the majority sitting at 4 or 8 gigabytes.
That’s just not a satisfying answer. This release has already gone down in history as one of the worst PC ports of a console game to date, and whatever hype was built up around the game has surely drained from it now. Only the most hardcore Batman fans are still trying to fire it up, and if Warner Bros. can’t satisfy them, this might as well be the last Batman game for PC.