Well-made, but underwhelming for a non-Batman devotee
I can usually appreciate great action/adventure games regardless of whether I'm a fan of the source material. With Batman: Arkham Asylum, however, I really think your enjoyment of this game escalates with how much you love the overall Batman franchise. It's an extremely well-made game at its core, with sumptuous visuals and hyper-detailed textures, immersive environments, and reasonably fun stealth game mechanics and hand-to-hand combat.
I just don't necessarily feel this lives up to its Game of the Year pedigree for the non-Batman fan. There's a lot of fan service in here, with tons of character details sprinkled throughout the decrepit prison cells, hallways and caves. Ooo ... it's the cell where Two-Face lived! Look ... some leftover artifact from The Penguin! Details like this are easy to see why series fans went gah-gah over the game, but they fall a little flat if you're not familiar or don't really have much invested in the franchise.
Arkham Asylum feels like a truly authentic translation of the comic series, with all the gadgets (batarang, grappling hook, etc) faithfully reproduced and an emphasis on sneak attacks from the shadows, acting like a hidden predator, and glorious fistfights. The game also tries to get across the "detective" element of the character with some mild investigative sequences, but the storyline never quite reels you in to the point where you feel like you're in a genuine "whodunit". The varied game mechanics on their own are interesting and fun, but not exactly earth-shattering. There's a repetitive nature to the game's structure -- as if the developers had three key game ideas (detective mode, fistfights, stealth exploration) and replay them over and over and over to fill out a full campaign.
Perhaps I would have been more sucked into Arkham Asylum if the storyline and characters really grabbed my attention as well as the Christopher Nolan movies, Frank Miller comics or some of the better scripted single-player games (Uncharted, Bioshock). Unfortunately the quality of the storyline is about on par with a typical afterschool cartoon or comic book. Voice-acting is actually quite good, so it's too bad I just wasn't interested in what they were saying.
Arkham Asylum is definitely one of the better games of 2009, and I honestly wish I was a more devout Batman fan so I would have gotten more out of this well-crafted adventure. I read other reviews that stated this game would win over anyone, regardless of how much you care about the Batman series. I find it pretty tough to agree with that.
