Unreal Game Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum

It’s not terribly difficult to understand the massive success of Arkham Asylum. Quite simply, the game is a Batman simulator, and it’s the closest any gamer has ever come to living a childhood fantasy of actually being the Dark Knight.

But it’s not enough to simply make a Batman game the allows you to fight, swing and throw batarangs, the game still has to be GOOD. And Arkham Asylum certainly ticks off that box, as it manages to blow past well established genre rivals like Assassin’s Creed and Syphon Filter with apparent ease.

There are quite a few levels of the game to discuss, but the first is without a doubt the most present. To describe why Arkham is so good in a word would be: atmosphere.

The asylum itself does something you wouldn’t imagine is possible. Despite being only one building, it creates a massive, sprawling series of environments, each of which are beautifully crafted and none of which overlap each other. Contrast that with Assassin’s Creed, which had entire differing cities to work with, yet they all came out carbon copies of each other. We haven’t seen a game with this kind of attention to environmental detail since Bioshock, and the corridors and grounds of Arkham are nearly as spooky as Rapture ever was.

This gorgeous environment serves as a perfect backdrop to the second shining facet of the game: the story. In a medium where plot has been thrown by the wayside for graphics and gore, Arkham Asylum brings it roaring back with a script fit for a new Christopher Nolan movie. The Joker takes over the place upon his arrival, sets in motion a master plan, and frees some of Batman’s most feared enemies to slow him up along the way. If this never comes to the big screen, I’ll be sorely disappointed.

Part of the reason the story resonates is because of the amazing voice acting. The creators were smart to grab the original Batman and Joker voice actors (Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, yes, that Mark Hamill). No, the Joker isn’t the vicious anarchist that Ledger’s was, but play through the game and you’ll admit that there’s plenty of room in the Batman universe for the prank-loving (but still vicious) Joker as well.

It seems strange to focus on gameplay last, as after all, this is a video game, but the other aspects of Arkham are so well done, somehow gameplay ends up being last on the list. But by no means is that a criticism, as crushing bad guys’ skulls or dangling them from gargoyles is the bread and butter of the game, and what makes it worth playing.

Combat is divided up into two types. There’s hand to hand, which pits Batman against a room full of Joker henchmen. Think Assassin’s Creed meets Tekken. The fighting is almost balletic, due to how streamlined and flowing it is, and the variety of moves Batman can execute is stunning, and after ten hours, you’ll still be seeing new maneuvers. In fact, I’m willing to say that without a doubt, this is the best you’ve ever seen the Caped Crusader fight, and that’s including every TV show and movie you’ve ever watched, both live action and animated.

Part two of combat is purely stealth based. There are various ways of taking down baddies, from sneaking up behind them, to swooping down and kicking them in the face, to hanging upside down and pulling them up into oblivion. The first time you execute that last move, it will literally send shivers up your spine. These stealth sections are in my estimation, the most fun part of the game, as instead of a button mashing fight, it’s more like a puzzle game. With machine gun fire. And psychopaths. And fear of imminent death.

Here it should be noted that despite its T rating, Arkham Asylum is a brutal, terrifying game. The things Batman does to the inmates are at times cruel and unusual (he may not kill people, but I’ll be damned if he won’t snap a femur or two) and the environment is littered with dead guards strung up like Christmas presents by the Joker. At times it can be a rather disturbing sight to behold.

So after all this, is there anything even wrong with the game? Yes, of course there is, but it’s not a whole lot. Brawl fighting gets repetitive after a few bouts, and stringing together combos can be inherently frustrating and often doesn’t make sense when your multiplier drops for no reason. In these fights, there are really only three types of enemies, and the latter two are more flat out annoying than challenging.

The biggest issue the game has is with its boss fights, whereas they’re not exactly fights per se. For example, rather than fight Scarecrow, you move through a demented dream world “avoiding his gaze” until you reach the top of the level. Rather than fight Croc, you simply run around on platforms, occasionally knocking him into the water with a batarang when he runs at you. Bane seems like a cool fight, until later on you learn that he was just a template for a string of identical bulked-up Bane clones you have to fight later. The only real boss battle that actually feels like a battle is with Poison Ivy, and she’s stuck inside a giant plant the whole time.

This boss battle annoyance continues right until the end of the game, where you have your big showdown against the Joker. Only it’s not against the Joker, it’s against waves of his henchmen, where you occasionally complete a quicktime event to hit the man himself who’s removed himself from the fray entirely.

Other than that, a few shoddy control issues (the sections where you can’t use your grappling hook are maddeningly frustrating) and a few poor voice actors (tell me why the Riddler sounds like Tobias Funke from Arrested Development) make up the remainder of the issues.

But overwhelmingly, Batman: Arkham Asylum is simply one badass game. It’s without a doubt the best superhero game ever crafted, but breaks new ground in terms of the amount of original thought that can go into a game. Add in a fun combat system and a rich environment, and you’ve got yourself a game of the year contender without question.

4 out of 5 stars