Recent reviews by RayCharlizard

Nancy the Crawfish is back.

Just started a new game on a fresh install of the "re-release" version of Batman: Arkham Knight. I thought everything was going pretty good, 60 fps with slight dips, couple of cutscenes ran at 30 fps but I had v-sync on. Turned off v-sync, pretty stable 60 fps while I'm gliding around and fighting baddies. You can only play Batman the way you want for so long though. The inevitable Batmobile introduction is the first mission of the game. The moment it appears on screen, as if the game mechanic itself is sucking up enough processing power to run an entire second instance of any of the other Arkham games, my fps drops to 30-40. Now the game wants me to follow some high speed police chase around tight corners and turns in the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ controlled vehicle of all time while throwing you constant "slow motion" esque stuttering. Luckily the chase lasts only a minute before you can get out of the damn thing. I go knock out another baddie, interrogate a soldier, knock his ass out too and then go back to being Bats. But then I see it. The Batmobile in all it's performance draining glory. Just looking at the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing drops my fps to a stutering 36-42 fps range. Walking to the left or right until the Batmobile is just off screen renews my 60 fps lock. Walking up to it again to appreciate it's muddy texture and weird blurring effect again drops my frame rate to stuttering mess. It's really quite something. Not since the first release of this game have I so quickly reached for Alt+F4.

On the plus side, I have successfully launched the game a handful of times to re-configure settings and run the benchmark tool and it has not yet crashed on me which is a great improvement from the original release, which would only launch about 50% of the time.

1920 x 1200 @ 60 Hz Lock
All High Settings w/ Motion Blur and Chromatic Abberation Off
NVIDIA Gameworks Interactive Paper and Debris and Enhanced Rain Enabled

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
i7 3930K @ 4.2 GHz
GTX 970 @ 1475 MHz
16 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1600 MHz
Crucial BX100 500 GB SSD

Metal Gear universe combined with Platinum Games' penchant for over the top, fantastical settings and characters and non-stop action make for a heart pumping action game that will leave you eyes dry and palms sweating. The fighting system isn't quite as in-depth as Bayonetta (which is a good thing for me, keep the 20-button combos in Soul Calibur) but nothing is spared on the side of brutality. I can deal with less button mashing in favor of precision sword cutting that lets me slice even the largest enemies into hundreds of bloody pieces.

Being that this was one of the highest rated action games of 2013 you may not have needed the above paragraph to convince you, you just want to know about the port! Great news here as well, Platinum Games has done an excellent job with their first PC release. The main downsides are that the game is locked to a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 (16:9, 16:10 monitors will be letterboxed) and that all assets are taken directly from the PS3 release of the game (so textures, models, etc. remain the same). Shadows have been greatly improved however, and built in anti-aliasing modes coupled with native 1080p rendering make for a beautiful game in motion. With a i7 3930k + GTX 670 I maintain a solid 60 fps constantly with max settings and 4x MSAA.

Don't be afraid to grab this even if it's your first Metal Gear game. It has very little to do with the main series canon besides character names and the whole Metal Gear mythos is so convoluted you need more than one playthrough of each game to have any idea of what's going on anyway. Highly recommended!