I can safely say that Batman: Arkham Asylum is THE best game I have ever played in my entire life. NO EXCEPTIONS. Think I'm exaggerating? Just buy it and you'll see. Even if you hate Batman there is no denying that it's an absolute masterpiece. If you like Batman anyway, well, that's just an added bonus. Everything about it from the graphics to the gameplay is absolutely first-class. The developers have really outdone themselves, and it's not often I get this excited over a game, even a super-hero one.
Now, I'm a huge comic book geek so when I saw the trailers for this I was instantly excited. I saw it in Gamestation the other day, traded in a stack of my old Xbox Games (half of which don't even work on the 360, so I did pretty well) and raced home. I popped in the disk, and the game started up. What followed was a definite contender for the title of "Possibly the best opening in video-gaming history". It starts with a bit of dialouge telling you that Batman's caught The Joker yet again, and as you take him back to the Asylum of the title, things get really exciting. It's like an interactive cutscene; you stroll along beside The Joker, who, despite being strapped to an operating table, taunts you with his hilarious yet creepy one-liners, and after a few minutes of walking you get to a lift with Killer Croc inside it. He's hunched over, and when he gets out of the lift and straightens up he is huge. Pant-shittingly huge. The designers really have made the game look absolutely brilliant, and all your old friends and foes make an appearance, and some have been re-made. For comic fans, this is a real treat, as they'll recongise all the old villians and think, "Hey, that's >insert name here<!"
So after you get to the bottom floor, the guards make the mistake of untying The Joker, who instantly gets free despite them both being armed, and he prances off to releases every psycho in Arkham as well as locking down the entire place, meaning nobody can get out...or in. Initially, this is seriously unnerving - after your initial elation at beating up your first group of thugs, you're faced with the daunting task of venturing further into the Asylum to find The J-Man himself, and, being night-time, it's very dark. There are dead guards everywhere, and every few seconds the intercom drones "Warning: Security Breach in Level >insert number here<". It's creepy as hell, made all the worse by the fact that Joker's watching your every move. Welcome to Arkham Asylum.
Now I'll just talk a little about the gameplay. First off, the combat system - my God, it is amazing! It's undoubtedly the best I've ever seen in a game of this type, and for a Batman game (let alone a Superhero game) that's quite an achievement. It's brilliantly fluid - you just tap the X button to strike, tap it several times to do a combo, and press Y to counter. It's simplistic, but once you get into it it works so well. You can beat up a thug, leap on to him when he's down and press R+Y to do a takedown to knock him unconcious, and as one of his mates comes up behind you to kick your head in, you can grab his leg in mid-kick and twist it, following up with a swift punch to the crotch. It sounds complicated, but it's so easy to master, and you don't even need to time it or anything silly like that - just tap Y whenever you see a little icon appear above the enemies' heads. Pressing A in the direction of a thug lets you leap over his head to strike him from behind, and you can even use your cape, matador-style, to throw enemies off-guard and stun them for a few seconds. It's so simple that a five-year old could probably master it within a few minutes, and you can quite easily rack up a 16x combo just by using one button and the left thumbstick. However, the game cleverly makes you use the stun and evade button in the later levels for disarming thugs armed with knives and stun-batons respectively. And the best part is it doesn't feel like a bolted-on gimmick - it fits in like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
The game does focus a lot on stealth, but while I initially thought this would be a bad thing it's actually one of the most fun aspects of it. I'll give an example. You pull a vent of a wall, climb through the ventilation shafts and make your way into another room with four or five thugs with guns patrolling it. You can do stealth on unarmed enemies, but taking on more than one armed thug in direct combat at a time is suicide. Pressing RB lets you grapple on to a select surface, and thankfully the Asylum has lots of gargoyles, which provide great vantage points. You grapple onto one, survey the scene, and then spring a trap for the unsuspecting thugs. You leap down onto the roof of a security station being manned by a gun-weilding thug, and put a little explosive gel on the ceiling. With that done, you use the gargoyle to traverse to the opposite wall, which a thug is standing in front of, and put some gel on the opposite side of that. Then you swing back to the gargoyle, and tap RB to blow the charges. The wall explodes outwards and knocks out the first thug, and the ceiling collapses in on the second. All this can be done without ever being seen. A quick scan of the thugs shows that their heartbeats have gone up and their conditions are "nervous". They split up and spread out to search for you, and this is where the real fun begins. If a thug walks underneath a gargoyle that you're crouched on, you can pull off an "inverted takedown", where you drop down, grab him, and sting him up for his mates to find. It's incredibly fun to watch their reactions. You can also leap off the gargoyle and tap X to do a glide kick, where you glide through the air and boot them in the face before knocking them unconcious while they're on the floor, or just do it the old-fashioned way; sneak up behind them and get them in a choke-hold until they pass out. It's perhaps my favourite aspect of the game, and it works so well that you'd be forgiven for thinking they might as well have called this Metal Gear Batman.
Another thing I like is the "Fear" mechanic. When the thugs first catch sight of you or don't know you're in the room, scanning them with Detective Mode (I'll talk more about this in a minute) reveals their heartbeat and shows their condition as "calm". As you start to pick off their buddies, their condition deteriorates to "Nervous" and when their friends are all gone and they're the only one left, that changes to "Terrified" and shows their heart racing. Knocking them for six will lower their heart-rate and show their condition as "Unconcious", and, depressingly, most of the guards are shown as "Deceased". It is very funny, though, and the gleeful, sadistic sense of satisfaction from toying with the hapless thugs - swinging around the room tossing Batarangs at them from the shadows and picking them off one by one - is sheer brilliance.
Detective Mode is another great aspect of this game, and it sets it apart from most other super-hero games in that most super-hero games consist mainly of brainless button-mashing and puzzles that involve beating up a certain enemy to open a door. Arkham Asylum is not at all like that. It forces you to use your brain, and without Batman's cowl the game would be practically impossible to beat. Tapping LB activates Detective Mode, which lets you X-ray enemies, scan the environment for clues, pick up DNA (or in one case Tobacco) trails leading to people you're supposed to track, and solve puzzles set by The Ridder. They're usually clever little Easter Eggs to do with Batman's enemies, so comic fans won't have too much trouble as they'll know what they're supposed to be looking for. As a bonus, you can unlock little trophies if you complete enough challenges, and you can sometimes find interview tapes that let you delve a little deeper into the minds of Arkham patients. The Scarecrow's one in paticular is hair-raising - the interviewer talks calmly about one Doctor's mental breakdown brought about by the death of his family, and halfway through there's a load of crashing noises and you hear someone yell "We've found him! He's got someone in here!" while the interviewer concludes, with slight annoyance, that is difficult to continue his research under such conditions. A few seconds later, someone in the background yells "We've found Mike...oh, God, what's he DONE to him?!" and you realise, with horror, that it was Scarecrow conducting the interview all along. It's little Easter Eggs like these that make it such a dream for Batman fans.
The graphics are fantastic even for the 360's standards - Batman's cloak flows very realisticly, the speech is brilliantly synced for both Batman and the NPC's, and the ragdoll physics when you beat up the thugs are incredibly satisfying. At first I was a little dissappointed to find the game wasn't set in Gotham, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The Asylum is the perfect setting - it's seriously creepy, with dead guards everywhere, most of the rooms trashed, and when you get to the secure holding cells where the crazies are kept, many of the cells have eerie messages scrawled on the walls. Spine-tingling stuff, and the enemies look fantastic. Many of Bats' old foes have been revamped - The Joker's been kept pretty true to his comic appearance albeit with some minor tweaks, but Harley Quinn has a sexy new look, Killer Croc's now a hulking, scaly giant, and Bane's bigger and scarier than ever. The Scarecrow's got to be my favourite boss so far, and although I've always liked his look, the new design is brilliant. He's emaciated, with a variation on his classic mask so it include gasmask filters, and one hand is replaced with a glove with a love of syringes where his fingers should be. He definitely gives old Mr. J a run for his money in terms of creepiness, although I have to admit Joker's suggestive one-liners do make me shudder. The boss fight itself with Scarecrow is great - he floods the elavator you're in with his trademark Fear Gas, and for those of you who don't read the comics it's seriously nasty stuff that makes your worst fears come true. I won't spoil too much, but one part involves you walking through a Mourge of all places when the walls start spewing out bugs and the coffins all start rattling. It's a little predictable, but it's still terrifying the first time you play it, and although I'm not going to spoil the surprise by saying what the Boss fight itself involves, I have to say it's absolutely astounding, and completely different from what I was expecting. They've put work even into the thugs so they don't all look completely alike, which is pretty thoughtful of them.
All in all, Arkham Asylum is the best game I've ever played so far. Even if you hate the very fibres of Batman's existance (although I can't think why you would) I would seriously recommend you buy it.
IN A NUTSHELL:
Graphics: Drool-worthy. The villains have all had stylish makeovers, and the environments are brilliantly eerie. 10/10
Gameplay: So fun it's undescribable. The best combat system I've ever encountered, which is quite an achievement (especially for a Batman game) and taxing puzzles that manage to strain your brain without being unfairly difficult. The "fear" mechanic, and detective mode? Fantastic. Normally I don't even LIKE stealth and this is utterly brilliant. 10/10
Sound: The voice-acting is great, paticularly from Mark Hamil, who makes an astoundingly good Joker, and the NPCs' banter is interesting. The music's decent enough, too. 10/10
Lifespan: It's lengthy, but by no means any less boring because of it. 10/10
Overall Score: 10/10. If you buy just ONE game this year (although I can't think why you would) make it this one, for the love of God.
Now, I'm a huge comic book geek so when I saw the trailers for this I was instantly excited. I saw it in Gamestation the other day, traded in a stack of my old Xbox Games (half of which don't even work on the 360, so I did pretty well) and raced home. I popped in the disk, and the game started up. What followed was a definite contender for the title of "Possibly the best opening in video-gaming history". It starts with a bit of dialouge telling you that Batman's caught The Joker yet again, and as you take him back to the Asylum of the title, things get really exciting. It's like an interactive cutscene; you stroll along beside The Joker, who, despite being strapped to an operating table, taunts you with his hilarious yet creepy one-liners, and after a few minutes of walking you get to a lift with Killer Croc inside it. He's hunched over, and when he gets out of the lift and straightens up he is huge. Pant-shittingly huge. The designers really have made the game look absolutely brilliant, and all your old friends and foes make an appearance, and some have been re-made. For comic fans, this is a real treat, as they'll recongise all the old villians and think, "Hey, that's >insert name here<!"
So after you get to the bottom floor, the guards make the mistake of untying The Joker, who instantly gets free despite them both being armed, and he prances off to releases every psycho in Arkham as well as locking down the entire place, meaning nobody can get out...or in. Initially, this is seriously unnerving - after your initial elation at beating up your first group of thugs, you're faced with the daunting task of venturing further into the Asylum to find The J-Man himself, and, being night-time, it's very dark. There are dead guards everywhere, and every few seconds the intercom drones "Warning: Security Breach in Level >insert number here<". It's creepy as hell, made all the worse by the fact that Joker's watching your every move. Welcome to Arkham Asylum.
Now I'll just talk a little about the gameplay. First off, the combat system - my God, it is amazing! It's undoubtedly the best I've ever seen in a game of this type, and for a Batman game (let alone a Superhero game) that's quite an achievement. It's brilliantly fluid - you just tap the X button to strike, tap it several times to do a combo, and press Y to counter. It's simplistic, but once you get into it it works so well. You can beat up a thug, leap on to him when he's down and press R+Y to do a takedown to knock him unconcious, and as one of his mates comes up behind you to kick your head in, you can grab his leg in mid-kick and twist it, following up with a swift punch to the crotch. It sounds complicated, but it's so easy to master, and you don't even need to time it or anything silly like that - just tap Y whenever you see a little icon appear above the enemies' heads. Pressing A in the direction of a thug lets you leap over his head to strike him from behind, and you can even use your cape, matador-style, to throw enemies off-guard and stun them for a few seconds. It's so simple that a five-year old could probably master it within a few minutes, and you can quite easily rack up a 16x combo just by using one button and the left thumbstick. However, the game cleverly makes you use the stun and evade button in the later levels for disarming thugs armed with knives and stun-batons respectively. And the best part is it doesn't feel like a bolted-on gimmick - it fits in like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
The game does focus a lot on stealth, but while I initially thought this would be a bad thing it's actually one of the most fun aspects of it. I'll give an example. You pull a vent of a wall, climb through the ventilation shafts and make your way into another room with four or five thugs with guns patrolling it. You can do stealth on unarmed enemies, but taking on more than one armed thug in direct combat at a time is suicide. Pressing RB lets you grapple on to a select surface, and thankfully the Asylum has lots of gargoyles, which provide great vantage points. You grapple onto one, survey the scene, and then spring a trap for the unsuspecting thugs. You leap down onto the roof of a security station being manned by a gun-weilding thug, and put a little explosive gel on the ceiling. With that done, you use the gargoyle to traverse to the opposite wall, which a thug is standing in front of, and put some gel on the opposite side of that. Then you swing back to the gargoyle, and tap RB to blow the charges. The wall explodes outwards and knocks out the first thug, and the ceiling collapses in on the second. All this can be done without ever being seen. A quick scan of the thugs shows that their heartbeats have gone up and their conditions are "nervous". They split up and spread out to search for you, and this is where the real fun begins. If a thug walks underneath a gargoyle that you're crouched on, you can pull off an "inverted takedown", where you drop down, grab him, and sting him up for his mates to find. It's incredibly fun to watch their reactions. You can also leap off the gargoyle and tap X to do a glide kick, where you glide through the air and boot them in the face before knocking them unconcious while they're on the floor, or just do it the old-fashioned way; sneak up behind them and get them in a choke-hold until they pass out. It's perhaps my favourite aspect of the game, and it works so well that you'd be forgiven for thinking they might as well have called this Metal Gear Batman.
Another thing I like is the "Fear" mechanic. When the thugs first catch sight of you or don't know you're in the room, scanning them with Detective Mode (I'll talk more about this in a minute) reveals their heartbeat and shows their condition as "calm". As you start to pick off their buddies, their condition deteriorates to "Nervous" and when their friends are all gone and they're the only one left, that changes to "Terrified" and shows their heart racing. Knocking them for six will lower their heart-rate and show their condition as "Unconcious", and, depressingly, most of the guards are shown as "Deceased". It is very funny, though, and the gleeful, sadistic sense of satisfaction from toying with the hapless thugs - swinging around the room tossing Batarangs at them from the shadows and picking them off one by one - is sheer brilliance.
Detective Mode is another great aspect of this game, and it sets it apart from most other super-hero games in that most super-hero games consist mainly of brainless button-mashing and puzzles that involve beating up a certain enemy to open a door. Arkham Asylum is not at all like that. It forces you to use your brain, and without Batman's cowl the game would be practically impossible to beat. Tapping LB activates Detective Mode, which lets you X-ray enemies, scan the environment for clues, pick up DNA (or in one case Tobacco) trails leading to people you're supposed to track, and solve puzzles set by The Ridder. They're usually clever little Easter Eggs to do with Batman's enemies, so comic fans won't have too much trouble as they'll know what they're supposed to be looking for. As a bonus, you can unlock little trophies if you complete enough challenges, and you can sometimes find interview tapes that let you delve a little deeper into the minds of Arkham patients. The Scarecrow's one in paticular is hair-raising - the interviewer talks calmly about one Doctor's mental breakdown brought about by the death of his family, and halfway through there's a load of crashing noises and you hear someone yell "We've found him! He's got someone in here!" while the interviewer concludes, with slight annoyance, that is difficult to continue his research under such conditions. A few seconds later, someone in the background yells "We've found Mike...oh, God, what's he DONE to him?!" and you realise, with horror, that it was Scarecrow conducting the interview all along. It's little Easter Eggs like these that make it such a dream for Batman fans.
The graphics are fantastic even for the 360's standards - Batman's cloak flows very realisticly, the speech is brilliantly synced for both Batman and the NPC's, and the ragdoll physics when you beat up the thugs are incredibly satisfying. At first I was a little dissappointed to find the game wasn't set in Gotham, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The Asylum is the perfect setting - it's seriously creepy, with dead guards everywhere, most of the rooms trashed, and when you get to the secure holding cells where the crazies are kept, many of the cells have eerie messages scrawled on the walls. Spine-tingling stuff, and the enemies look fantastic. Many of Bats' old foes have been revamped - The Joker's been kept pretty true to his comic appearance albeit with some minor tweaks, but Harley Quinn has a sexy new look, Killer Croc's now a hulking, scaly giant, and Bane's bigger and scarier than ever. The Scarecrow's got to be my favourite boss so far, and although I've always liked his look, the new design is brilliant. He's emaciated, with a variation on his classic mask so it include gasmask filters, and one hand is replaced with a glove with a love of syringes where his fingers should be. He definitely gives old Mr. J a run for his money in terms of creepiness, although I have to admit Joker's suggestive one-liners do make me shudder. The boss fight itself with Scarecrow is great - he floods the elavator you're in with his trademark Fear Gas, and for those of you who don't read the comics it's seriously nasty stuff that makes your worst fears come true. I won't spoil too much, but one part involves you walking through a Mourge of all places when the walls start spewing out bugs and the coffins all start rattling. It's a little predictable, but it's still terrifying the first time you play it, and although I'm not going to spoil the surprise by saying what the Boss fight itself involves, I have to say it's absolutely astounding, and completely different from what I was expecting. They've put work even into the thugs so they don't all look completely alike, which is pretty thoughtful of them.
All in all, Arkham Asylum is the best game I've ever played so far. Even if you hate the very fibres of Batman's existance (although I can't think why you would) I would seriously recommend you buy it.
IN A NUTSHELL:
Graphics: Drool-worthy. The villains have all had stylish makeovers, and the environments are brilliantly eerie. 10/10
Gameplay: So fun it's undescribable. The best combat system I've ever encountered, which is quite an achievement (especially for a Batman game) and taxing puzzles that manage to strain your brain without being unfairly difficult. The "fear" mechanic, and detective mode? Fantastic. Normally I don't even LIKE stealth and this is utterly brilliant. 10/10
Sound: The voice-acting is great, paticularly from Mark Hamil, who makes an astoundingly good Joker, and the NPCs' banter is interesting. The music's decent enough, too. 10/10
Lifespan: It's lengthy, but by no means any less boring because of it. 10/10
Overall Score: 10/10. If you buy just ONE game this year (although I can't think why you would) make it this one, for the love of God.
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