When this game was first announced, I was torn. It looked, and if you're watching someone still kind of looks, like a button-mashing, mindless beat 'em up kinda game. Well first off, let me say it is and it isn't. Batman has a wonderful combat system that takes seconds to learn and a lot of practice to truly master. While you can just sit there and pound on the x button until every enemy is beaten to an unconscious, never dead, heap on the ground, you can also gracefully and seamlessly dive around the map, countering attacks, breaking arms and throwing enemies into each other in a fluid and fun way I have never experienced in any other game. Of course getting all of these moves requires a little bit of playing and getting experience, but it doesn't take long and is definitely not hard.
You start off the game bringing in the Joker from one of his typical escapades he tends to go on, the little scamp. You get a mini tour of the first building of Arkham Asylum, showing you just how secure and cut off it really is. Then the poop hits the fan and Joker escapes, trapping you inside the Asylum and forcing you (like it takes coercion) to play his little game. Joker takes over Arkham and from here the plot unfolds into a wonderfully long drama including many villains from the Batman microcosm. Once you get out of the first building, the whole of Arkham island is open to you. No part of the island is blocked off to start with, although you can't go into all of the buildings, and you can either go straight on with the story or you can explore every "kook and granny" of the island to look for the Riddler's Challenges. The Riddler's Challenges are a series of riddles and findable items all throughout the game that you try to find for experience and unlockables.
Exploration and open-ness is a big part of the Arkham Asylum experience. As you go through the game early on you will see areas with some of the Riddler's trophies and so on that you can't get to. As you get farther in the game, you will unlock the means of getting to these items, which makes it so you won't get out of building x and then be done with it forever. Another thing I like is when you are presented with a combat situation, you have a lot of different options for overcoming it. You can run in and beat the snot out of the enemies in a single, usually short, brawl (unless of course they have guns), or you can go about it in true Dark Knight style, picking them off one by one using myriad fun and creative ways. If you can interact with something, you can probably use it to take your enemies out.
Interaction is where Batman's detective vision comes in. Any time you are playing you can switch between regular vision and detective vision. Detective vision is Batman's most useful tool. It bathes everything in blue, with interactive items, points of interest and enemies all colored and marked in ways that make them stand out. In detective mode you can find out everything from what an object is for to the heart rate and mental state of your foes. It is an important tool for progressing through the game, but at times it almost seems to important. With all the Riddler's challenges scattered around, as well as other things you might normally miss, you almost don't want to go out of detective mode, as the risk of missing something that you may regret later. This is only a minor issue, but it's something that bothered me nonetheless.
Speaking of spending too much time in something, there is also the issue with vents. The whole of Arkham is expansive, with floor space of at least a couple of square miles, but sometimes I swear you spend more time in vents than anything. Need to get to a room that's blocked? Get in a vent! Need to find a sneaky way around enemies? Well, head for the vents! Is there a Riddler trophy around? Check the vents! It's annoying and it kind of kills the pace of the game. Plus, with the fantastic graphics this game displays, I want to spend more time taking it in, not crawling through a square vent with square walls and the occasional cobweb.
Speaking of graphics, the cutscenes are wonderfully rendered, other than the fact that Batman's mouth looks a little slimy. Everyone in this game has gotten a makeover, but it almost seems like an attempt to make everyone sexy. Scarecrow has exposed abs, Harley Quinn's outfit is skintight with a bare midriff, Poison Ivy's outfit is... well an open jacket top and that's it. The voice-acting is also spot-on, but the dislogue can go from wonderful wand witty to downright gruff and corny in an instant. Batman sure likes to repeat himself. (e.g. "I'll never let you win.... never!", "There's always a way in... always." and, to mix it up, "There's always a way out... always.") but his lack of vocabulary is offset by the Joker's wonderful and amusing lines, as well as the conversations between guards. If you enter a room and hear guards talking, it's always worth the wait to hear them finish before wiping them all out.
The cast of Arkham Asylum is nothing to be ingored, either. Of course you have Batman and the Joker, but you also have a great number of other super-villains making appearances, both well-known and somewhat more obscure. Additionally, the boss fights with these villains can be a blast. No two bosses are alike, and they really worked hard to make it feel like you're fighting the person you're actually facing. In most games you could put boss a's outfit on boss b and it wouldn't be any different., whereas in Arkham Asylum when you're fighting Ivy, you feel like you're fighting Ivy, and so on.
Arkham Asylum also offers a bit of challenge. While the enemies may sometimes seem to be oblivious to your presence (you can literally walk up behind them and touch them and they won't always notice you), there are a lot of spots that still end up being wonderfully challenging. On the topic of challenging, there are also 16 challenge maps (18 if you got Dem Bones and Crime Alley DLC codes) that really put your skills to the test. Eight of them are combat challenges, which pit you up against an increasingly large number of various enemies in a number of different arenas. Every arena has it's unique characteristics, and using them to your advantage is the key to getting a high score. Then there are my personal favorites, the predator maps. These put you in a room with a number of guards and taks you with certain ways of taking them down. Some are easy, such as perform a silent takedown, and some are just devious, such as take three enemies out with three different explosive walls at the same time. They're a lot of fun and will teach you some of the less obvious ways you can take down your opponents.
With fun combat, fantastic graphics and voice-work and a decent story, Batman Arkham Asylum is a wonderful game and one you should definitely consider purchasing. It is one of the better games on the Xbox 360, and one that will pull you in for quite a while. The mission variety is fantastic, the non-linear gameplay is a nice bonus and it's definitely good to see a Batman game that's actually good.
Overall Score: 96%
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