‘Batman: Arkham Knight’ PC Re-Release Falls Flat, Older Reviews Being Marked As ‘Pre-Release’

Batman: Arkham Knight was pulled from Steam earlier this year due to poor performance on PC gaming machines along with various other bugs. Warner Bros. Interactive and Rocksteady Games re-released the game Wednesday with some free games in tow in an attempt to assuage disappointed buyers. Both efforts unfortunately fell flat and the situation was made worse by Warner Bros. marking user reviews on Steam prior to the re-release as “pre-release reviews.”

As an apology, Warner Bros. Interactive is giving Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY, Batman: Arkham City GOTY, Batman: Arkham Origins, and Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate to everyone that purchased the PC version of Arkham Knight prior to November 16. This did not go over well with those that already purchased the game because, as community members like KiLL3rAU pointed out, they likely have already bought all or most of the games being offered for free. Additionally, those that already own these games cannot gift them to others via Steam.

As for the actual performance of Batman: Arkham Knight, the results are all over the place. The patch notes were posted to the game’s community forums, only the notes did not go into details on what was fixed. Instead, known issues were listed such as the lack of stability for those running dual video cards in SLI, issues with hard drive paging on Windows 7, and the suggestion to have at least 12GB of RAM on Windows 10 PCs. The last one is causing confusion due to Warner Bros. not being clear that the 12GB recommendation is only for those that have paging disabled in their system settings.

Meanwhile, users in the Steam reviews are reporting issues from not being to play Batman: Arkham Knight to the game still not performing well on machines with the biggest and best hardware.

“Running this on gtx 970 and there is still stuttering when fighting, gliding and in batmobile segments. Can’t beleive they are charging people $50 to buy this piece of ****,” Subzero reported.

“I’m running a gtx 970 and an i5-4690k and I get mostly 60fps gameplay. However, when it comes to gliding and the batmobile the performance is just awful in some cases the fps goes to the mid 30’s,” Kmag94 wrote.

Only the most powerful of PC gaming rigs, typically with 16GB of RAM, is able to run Batman: Arkham Knight at a high resolution at 60 frames per second (fps) with all the bells and whistles turned on. The PlayStation 4 version of the action title is considered to be the best version and runs at 30 fps, for comparison.

Still, some users are reporting improved experiences with Arkham Knight.

“Whatever problems this game had on release I am seeing none now, it is running at a steady 60fps and no bugs that i have found so far. [Best] arkham game of the series. Do not buy this game if your computer is not up to snuff, I have a r9 390 card an fx8320 cpu and 8 gigs of ram and it runs soo good,” Martini_Time wrote.

Update: The “pre-release review” tags were removed at some point after this article was published.

Another issue has cropped up with the game and it involves Steam users’ reviews prior to today’s patch. Every review before today’s patch is tagged as a “pre-release review,” and the game’s release date has been modified to October 28, 2015. Since the game originally launched on June 23, 2015 with many fans purchasing the full game for the PC at the time, this action comes across as unnecessarily shady.

It’s not clear if the change in review status is due to action by Steam or Warner Bros. at this time. Either way, the tagging of reviews is not going over well with those that already purchased Arkham Knight and others in the gaming community.

What do you think about the Batman: Arkham Knight patch released Wednesday? Has it improved your experience? Sound off in the comments below.

[Image via Batman: Arkham Knight]