It may have taken some time, but virtually every major franchise has eventually transitioned successfully to at least one of the enhanced consoles – but the lack of a decent Batman: Arkham experience for the 4K consoles is disappointing. The superb Arkham Knight never received any kind of upgrade for PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X, while the Return to Arkham patch for Sony’s super-charged PS4 ranks as one of the most disappointing upgrades we’ve witnessed – until now. Somehow, despite having access to a significantly more powerful hardware spec, the recently released X upgrade for the controversial remaster manages to be even more of a let-down. In fact, it’s easily the worst ‘enhanced patch’ we’ve seen on Xbox One X.
There’s a lot to cover here, but let’s start with the first of the two games in the collection: Arkham Asylum. To recap, this remaster transplanted the original Unreal Engine 3 experience to the more modern UE4, weaving in new visual features. Lighting, reflections, particle effects, textures, and even character faces were redone from scratch, and while the reaction to some of these changes was mixed, it’s hardly a lacklustre effort. Developer Virtuos could have ported the original game as-is to PS4 and Xbox One – and maybe it should have, by keeping it simple and only remastering the dodgy video sequences and low res textures, while ramping up resolution to 1080p. But Virtuos instead took the hard road with more involved changes – and that deserves some respect.
In common with the PS4 Pro upgrade, the X patch shows none of this ambition. The principal design objective of the enhanced consoles is to deliver smoother, higher resolution experiences for ultra HD displays. However, the fact is that both Arkham titles only target 1080p on Xbox One X – with a surprise, and somewhat unwelcome twist. Curiously, dynamic scaling on the horizontal axis is retained from the base consoles, most notably in Arkham City. Arkham Asylum sticks closer to its maximum 1920×1080 due to its relative simplicity. It still potentially allows for scaling by small margins where necessary, but seemingly this is rare to catch based on our tests. The good news is that this is an improvement over the base Xbox One’s lower bound of 1024×1080, but it’s still some way short of the 4x resolution boost the Xbox One X was architected to deliver. Arguably, X is presenting what the base machine should have delivered in the first place.
Source: Eurogamer Batman: Return to Arkham is the most disappointing Xbox One X upgrade we've seen