this is the best incarnation of the Gotham mythos OF ALL TIME

individually there are thing that others have done better. I prefer harley quinn from studio squad and theres a few small changes i would make

overall - its still the best painting of gotham of all time
the matt reeves batman didn't even do Riddler properly

Feel free to consider this a snap judgement review as I am still going through Arkham Knight. Furthermore, this review is meant as a review for the entire package, not as a review for the individual games. Arkham City and Arkham Knight are pretty much neck and neck for my favorite video game, so I think you can pretty easily figure out how I feel about these games as games.

When Arkham Trilogy was first announced, I was immediately very thrilled. I never expected the Arkham games to be brought to Switch, it just seemed too good to be true. I've yearned for years to be able to play these games on handheld anytime I want (please ignore my barely-used Steam Deck), so this was an immediate Christmas wishlist item for me. But I very quickly realized - how the hell was the Switch going to run Arkham Knight?

Well, before we answer that question, we should first answer if it can even run Asylum and City. The answer is a rather resounding yes. Throughout my playthrough of these two games, I ran into no real issues. Maybe sometimes I would go through an area too fast and would have to wait a moment after opening a door for things to load, or a slight hiccup every now and then, but it wasn't very common, and was just a blip overall. I would honestly go as far to say that this collection is worth it for these two alone. A practically flawless experience for practically flawless games.

(That's a joke, these are not flawless games at all)

One thing I think is a bit funny is that this version of Arkham City brought back Batman and Catwoman's armored suits. These were previously Wii U edition exclusives as the previous Return to Arkham rereleases didn't bring the suits back. However, this version did not bring back the Wii U version's B.A.T. Mode, meaning that, in terms of content, the Wii U release is still the definitive version of the game. Granted, the B.A.T. Mode is just a minor upgrade to Batman and the Wii U release has much more glaring issues, but still, it gives me a slight chuckle.

So I'm sure you've all heard how this version of Arkham Knight is "awful" and have seen the cherrypicked images making the models look bad. Well I'm here to say that... well, this version definitely isn't pretty. Batman really does just look Like That in this release, but honestly, he always had a weird, not-quite-right look to him in these games, the lack of some textures of the Switch version just accentuates it more. Looks wise, beyond the up-close models, it isn't nearly as good as the original game, which I personally consider to be one of the best looking games out there (probably Arkham bias), however, the game at its core just looks so good that I still sometimes find myself stopping and staring out at the city, despite the clear drop in graphics.

Then there's the performance which has quite handily taken a bigger strike than the other two games. The frame rate is not consistent and definitely not 60 FPS (I honestly don't know what it runs at cause I usually don't really notice lower frame rate in general), and it's most obvious when zooming through the streets in the Batmobile. It's definitely not the best. However, I can't say that it has crashed on me during gameplay yet - funny enough, it's crashed on me twice when I was trying to stop playing so there's that, but nothing during actual gameplay -, nor has the frame dippage been as poor as Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's DLC. Which is kind of impressive to me with how much strenuous I would assume Arkham Knight is. Basically, this version of the game is clearly not as good as the original.

But you knew that already, right? I mean, if you heard the phrase "Arkham Knight on Switch", you would know without even seeing it that it wasn't gonna be perfect or pretty. It's frankly so obvious that to expect it to run as well as the PS4/Xbox One releases is just ignorant. And saying it's "awful" is just a lie. Yes, if you have a way to play Arkham Knight elsewhere, I would posit that you would be better off doing so. But if you don't have any other platform or just want to have it handy on the Switch, this version does its job the best you could hope for. A lesser product wouldn't have put forth the clear effort to make things work, no less succeed.

Finally, it's nice to see them add a small new thing to Arkham Knight all these years later. If you haven't heard, this version of the game adds the suit from 2022's The Batman (which will be permanently added to other versions eventually). It... frankly looks kind of odd in this version, but I still think it's cool to add anything at all, it wasn't necessary.

With all that said, let me send you off with my favorite line in these games

UPDATE: After playing a lot more of Arkham Knight, I can say that the game is prone to crashing in some instances. Notably, in more labor-intensive Batmobile sections (such as Scarecrow's Nightmare), and weirdly enough it would happen when I was closing out of the game anyway. More importantly though, as of writing this, there is at least one Riddler item that you cannot get no matter what, and there's possibly more. Patches are being worked on, but it's still notable that you cannot 100% complete the game as of now.