Batman: Arkham Asylum

 
Batman – The Caped Crusader, The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne…he has many names, but no good video games. Sure, games have been created in the vain attempt to capitalize off of a movie or during a comic book resurgence period, but rarely did these games ever amount to anything more than a filler Christmas game that a loved one can get for the gamer in their life. With the recent release of “Batman: Arkham Asylum”, Rocksteady went out on a limb to create something we have rarely seen this generation of games, a good comic book game. Would their attempts at recreating the Dark Knight go off without a hitch or would The Batman be destined for video game failure?


Before looking at the game, you need to look at the source. Batman: Arkham Asylum takes place in, you guessed it, Arkham Asylum. The Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane was first published in a comic in 1974 with Batman #258. Back then it was considered “Arkham Hospital” and it wasn’t until 1989 when Grant Morrison and Dave

McKean wrote “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth” that it took on it’s extremely dark counterpart that we see in the video game. Arkham is where most of Batman’s bad guys go when they are too dangerous, both to themselves and others, to house in a normal facility. At times, Batman himself flirts with thoughts that he too many be insane, he does wear a Bat costume as Joker points out. It’s this source material that the developers at Rocksteady went out to reproduce. By talking with the creators of the comics and by doing extensive reading on their own part, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they nailed it. The world, the characters…everything! They nailed it and they did it flawlessly. If they would have botched the environment the game took place in, they would have lost a lot of the credibility that the game was going for. By appealing to hardcore Batman fans like myself, as well as newcomers to the series who may not know much about the history, they were able to create a world that you don’t need to have any history with to succeed, but if you do, good for you. With the environment taken care of, the developers then had to get another critical aspect of the universe right…the story.
 
  Batman, after subduing Joker in a battle somewhere in Gotham, throws him in the Batmobile and takes him to Arkham to be locked up. When he arrives, he is greeted by Police Commissioner Gordon and the staff of Arkham Asylum. As you progress through the halls to Joker’s lockup area, you’re treated to Joker’s ramblings and muses mostly directed at you. With any Batman novel or video game, you know things will eventually have to go wrong, and they do. Joker escapes and you are left alone to fend for yourself in a place that hates and fears the Batman. Joker will eventually enlist the help of some of Batman’s more famous foes – Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Bane, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, and others. With their help, Joker plans to completely overrun the facility and finally break “The Bat” along the way. It’s left up to you to make sure this doesn’t happen and that all patients are returned to their cells and subdued.

The story is straight out of a comic and the developers did a wonderful job translating it to a game. The pacing is perfect and you really are left guessing what the heck could happen next. Another thing straight out of the comic is the gameplay/fighting. Batman is a master of hand to hand combat. Having trained in China and with Special Forces, he has learned to harness the power of his body to act as a sort of weapon. Batman never uses guns and despises them so don’t expect to be walking into a room guns blazing. You’re going to have to wait for the Punisher to co

me out wit h a good game before that can happen. Combat is handles in two distinct ways in the game. Hand to hand mode occurs when you want to get up in guy’s faces and just take them down through brut e force. Since Batman is a master of martial arts, feel free to take down 8-12 enemies at a time without breaking a sweat. You can’t focus all of your attention on one baddy though. You need to seamlessly move from one enemy to the next, knocking them around and making sure you don’t get hit from behind. In the beginning of the game this is really simple, but as lead pipes and tasers are introduced to the mix, you’ll find that additional strategy is needed to really be successful with the hand to hand mechanics. The other gameplay mechanic is the invisible predator mode. This is a flashy name for stealth in Arkham Asylum. Batman has something that is called Detective Vision. When you turn this on, you can see an outline of all enemies in your vicinity as well as some other features

that allow you to solve puzzles. The color coded enemies represent the different types – those without guns, and those with. Whenever you encounter enemies with guns you have to approach the situation in a totally different way that before. Arkham Asylum is littered with gargoyle heads throughout it’s halls and these will act as your perches to spy and slip around the room unknown. Always begin each fight by watching the enemies’ movements and then making a move, because one false step will almost always mean death. A couple blows from a machine gun w ill kill Batman if you’re not careful. Batman is able to glide from the rafters, throw batarangs at enemies, and through upgrades, perform moves that will never get old no matter how many times you do them. The developers really put a lot of time into the fighting mechanic s of the game and it shows. Batman is a badass, and you are going to love playing as him.

  
You may have noticed that I don’t have anything negative to say about the game. It’s true, the game is really good, but it does have a couple down points that deserve mentioning for all fairness. Detective Mode, which incredibly useful, is also a downpoint of the game. It’s really easy to use detective mode way too much and end up missing a lot of the cool atmospheric de

tails. Crumbling walls, blood splatters on the wall, and ivy’s vines climbing slowly up a prison wall can all be missed if you’re too busy in detective vision mode. Sometimes it almost feels cheap to use it constantly and you may find yourself purposefully turning it off from time to time. I’m not sure how they could have done it any better, but it is a shame that you will miss certain things because of it. Another downpoint of the game is the villains. Sure, I love me some Killer Croc and Scarecrow, but what about the other big names? My personal favorite baddy in the Batman Rogue’s gallery is Two Face. You’ll walk by his cell, but he’s no where to be found. Same with Penguin, you’ll see a poster with him on it, but he’s nowhere to be found. Harley Quinn is necessary for the story and she used to be an employee at Arkham, so I can see while she is th ere, but Victor Zsasz? I feel like more enemies should have made an appearance. I mean, the prison was taken over and nobody escaped off of the island, so they were somewhere there. Shouldn’t I have come across them? Eh, it’s not a big complaint, and hopefully we’ll see them in the possibly sequel.

It’s easy to assume that Batman Arkham Asylum is going to be a cheap gimmick of a game that is feeding off of the license of the Batman franchise. We’ve almost come to expect that this sort of thing is an industry norm. But don’t be fooled by such thinking. Batman Arkham Asylum is a masterfully crafted game that will amaze you with the depth of it’s story and the careful execution of it’s gameplay. There’s a lot of game here, most of which I didn’t even get to talk about in this short review. From the Riddler Trophies that are scattered around the world to collect and earn experience to the audio files you can find for each prison inmate describing their first days within Arkham, collectors beware…you will become obsessed. So, the real reason you’re reading this review…should you get this game? My honest answer is a whole hearted yes. It’s the best comic book video game I have ever played and one of my top games of 2009. You can tell the developers really took the time and effort to make the game world come to life. It’s dark, it’s gritty, and at times rea lly difficult, but not past the means of enjoyment. When you finish the

game and collect all of the Riddler trophies, there’s even more game left to complete. Challenge Rooms exist outside of the main story to let you complete objectives within time frames and point totals to get on leaderboards. It’s a nice touch and adds to the game’s value. So, even if you aren’t a fan of Batman or comics in general, you’ll still get a lot of enjoyment out of this game. If you’re looking to learn more about Batman or get into the comic, this is a great place to start. The lore is all here and you will certainly learn a lot along the way. I can’t wait to see what Rocksteady do with the sequal to this game. The sky is literally the limit.