This review's coming at us from our brothers over at GameStooge. Give it a click to read Jonah Falcon's giddy review of Batman: Arkham Asylum.
REVIEW: Batman: Arkham Asylum (PC, 360, PS3)
Batman. The Joker. Arkham Asylum gone wild.
No, it’s not the “Knightfall” storyline; rather, it’s an a new Batman adventure that traps the Dark Knight inside the infamous sanitarium for the longest night of his life. The story, written by Batman: The Animated Series scribe Paul Dini and regular voicers Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin, among others, make the game a truly cinematic experience. It's a Batman story that ranks up there with “Mad Love” and “Knightfall.”
Batman, after capturing The Joker – too easily, he correctly muses – finds himself battling what seems like the entire population of Arkham, as well as Joker’s sane-but-vicious henchmen, who’d been temporarily transferred to Arkham after a mysterious (hah!) fire broke out in Blackgate Prison. The World’s Greatest Detective must figure out what Joker’s diabolical plan is, why he’s so interested in Bane, and survive the night while hundreds of foes wear him down.
The game centers around “free flow” combat, in which the player has four mapped buttons that allows Batman to attack, counter, stun and jump. The simple controls belie the chess match the player must do to rack up combo points. The more consecutive moves the player can pull off, the higher the experience boost (or score in the combat minigame, discussed later) to earn new weaponry and skills. This prevents the game from being a button masher.
When the opponents have guns, the situation changes. When two enemies have guns, Batman will die if he attempts to attack them directly. At certain times, the game turns into a thrilling stealth game, and is the high point of the action. This is where Batman becomes the “Invisible Predator”, hiding in the shadows, picking off enemies one by one with various stealth attacks.
What makes the stealth sequences sing are the reactions of The Joker and the henchmen as you silently knock them off one by one – they grow more and more panicked as their numbers thin, and start thinking you are everywhere, til the last henchman is swinging his gun around wildly in all directions, shouting for mercy. (Note: true to the comic, Batman does not kill, ever, and he does not here. Rather, he knocks them unconscious.) Not since even Thief 2: The Metal Age has it been so satisfying to play with your enemies’ heads from the shadows.
If there’s one minor failure of the game, it’s the boss battles. While they’ve received praise elsewhere, the bosses are actually tiresome affairs that go on too long and disrupt from the feel of the game. They’re sort of reminiscient of Lisa trying to show how cute Snowball was pretending to be a baby in a carriage, while Nelson retorted, “I get it! I just don’t care!”
Every boss battle could have been shortened to get the point across; they came off instead as retro boss battles from the days of the NES. The exception to this was the suitably creepy Scarecrow scenes, in which a tiny Batman avoided the malevolent gaze of a 50-foot Scarecrow, who, like every other villian in the game, was reimagined; in his case, as a Freddy Krueger-ish creature with hypodermics strapped to his fingers. Without giving anything away, the game even has a post-credits scene in which its strongly hinted Scarecrow might be the main villian of a sequel, though the game randomly ends with either Scarecrow, Bane or Killer Croc being featured.
The other part of Batman: Arkham Asylum is the puzzles. What could have been a tiresome Crackdown-ish orb collecting affair is elevated by The Riddler himself, who mocks and taunts Batman into finding his clues. Aside from searching for orbs, er, green question marks, the Riddler has also planted riddles around the island to which the Batman must find the answer. Some are remnants of past villians, while others are searching for glowing question marks that must be aligned visually. These puzzles do more than just give the player more to do – they add experience points to earn upgrades. After the game is over, the player is allowed to wander the island to get 100% of the Riddler’s clues. It’s satisfying to hear the Riddler go from mocking about how easy the clues you manage to find are to his outrage and shock at you nearing completion, and then gets pwned when you complete his Challenge.
The game’s replayability is increased by the challenges, in which Batman can engage in two types of minigames: one is a fighting minigame in which he has to earn the most points and highest combos against a series of foes, while the predator minigames have Batman trying to take out a group of armed foes from the shadows. Aside from earning Bat Badges for performing the tasks in certain ways or with high scores, the players are also competing against others on online leaderboards.
One special note about the graphics: while the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions look pretty, the PC version is absolutely amazing. The character models, in particular, blow the console versions away. Granted, that’s de rigeur for a PC, but PC gamers can be reassured this is no lazy console port. They’ll get visual bang for their buck.
