Batman: Arkham Asylum Review

Batman: Arkham Asylum (which I played on the PS3) follows on from the success of the Dark Knight and Batman Begins movies to offer a similar dark, brooding world and actually provide a decent franchise game.

Positives:
This game actually makes you feel as if you are the great Caped Crusader, and it is as awesome and most importantly fun, as it should be. The combat is suitably brutal and plays as its name "freeflow" suggests. There's a suitable array of gadgets that all feel great to use and are implemented reasonably well. Whether grappling to save yourself from a missed jump, ziplining across deep abysses, hacking into security systems or wielding the trusty "batarang", it all gels nicely, allowing for backtracking and collecting for the obsessive gamers as well as neat ways to take out enemies if you are more creative. There were also a lot of neat touches that just add to the great feel of the game, the hacking which relied on pointing the analog sticks in the direction that provided the most rumble was one of the better ways that the rumble feature has been implemented in a game. Also after a few hours of playing Batman would have stubble appear and they even made his batsuit (or whatever the hell it's called) get ripped up after particularly scrappy battles. There are also plenty of cameos and references to Batman's arch-enemies including Joker, Riddler, Croc, Poison Ivy and a few others from deep within Batman lore (which I am not really familiar with but it all appears to remain faithful to it). The boss battles are all reasonably neat, but I especially admired the battles against Scarecrow which seem to be a metaphor for the inner turmoil Bruce Wayne suffers, which were pretty neat (even if it was only about dodging his gaze, which meant the gameplay was average, but I appreciated the thought). Another thing that I enjoyed, even if it can piss you off a bit when you die a lot, is the way that Joker, or whichever boss you are fighting at the time, will mercilessly taunt you after every death, again they made sure to get all these little awesome details right showing how much thought and effort was put into developing it. I should probably mention the graphics which were really good and up to current standards and the sound was alright, in a way that it was not really noticeably good or bad.

Negatives:
The combat whilst generally pretty fun, could sometimes just be a case of constantly countering (especially in a room of 20 guys) and then it felt really boring. Also the stealth sections, whilst a nice idea to change up the gameplay a bit, didn't feel too amazing. It was just put on detective mode and slowly take them out one at a time, not getting caught, it was certainly not revolutionary, or allowing for too much creativity (especially given that their guns are really powerful and they have hack-bot aim). Also these two earlier posts (see here and here) mention a couple of minor negatives but they occur in other games as well and don't subtract too much from the overall experience.

Closing Comments:
Overall I just had a lot of fun playing this game and it made me want to keep coming back to it to finish up the story, which although not particularly interesting, led to lots of awesome gameplay moments. Even though I doubted the premise of Batman stuck in a prison complex there were enough different ideas and gameplay that it never feels too small or repetitive. This game is definitely good enough that I can see myself replaying it some time in the future to solve all the riddles and finish all the challenges. It was simply just a lot of fun and anyone who has had even the slightest urge to be a superhero should definitely check it out.