'Batman' a near-perfect superhero game
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One of the best parts about “Batman: Arkham Asylum” is discovering all of its little nuances. “Arkham Asylum” combines a great Batman story with very good gameplay mechanics, and despite a few missteps, the result is an amazing game that kept me totally engaged from start to finish (and a bit further).
First and foremost, the game gets Batman right. More specifically, it nails what it must feel like to be Batman on a moment-to-moment basis. You walk confidently into a waiting pack of pipe-wielding thugs, swiftly disarming and incapacitating each with dispassionate grace. You slip through the shadows in a room filled with gun-toting goons, dragging them one at a time into the darkness and leaving the rest in a slowly growing state of confusion and panic. You isolate chemical compounds from the whiskey in a man’s breath, then use the trail of vapor to relentlessly follow him through a huge building.
It actually gets to a point where your illusion of bat-competence is so great that failures in combat are almost disconcerting. You haven’t just lost some life, you’ve let Batman get hit in the head with a lead pipe by some random thug. You are directly responsible for the universe being somehow wrong.
It’s like Superman getting mugged on the subway.
Batman and the rest of the cast are also perfectly portrayed by the voice actors and their script, which goes a long way toward making the game completely engrossing on a moment-to-moment basis. The primary voice actors from the animated series were brought in, and they all did excellent work. Mark Hamill’s Joker is particularly brilliant, infused with a flamboyant and joyous menace. Once the Clown Prince seizes control of Arkham’s PA system, you hear him more than anyone else. Whether he’s offering Batman mocking hints or taunting his own thugs as you pick them off, his jibes never get old.
One of the game’s more subtle stars is the control scheme, which works consistently through four different types of gameplay. The same setup that works well for the intricate, beautifully animated melee combat also works for the stealth and exploration sections. This lets “Arkham Asylum” produce a great sense of variety without the loss of cohesion that many such wide-focus games suffer.
The game also elevates another common game trope, the hidden collectible. The collectibles here are worked into a side story, all carefully placed by one of Batman’s foes with a penchant for puzzles. Some of them contain yet further side stories, and finding them all provides a number of satisfying narrative conclusions that represents a wonderful departure from the standard find-some-dog tags-and-get-an-achievement model of most games.
“Arkham Asylum’s” setting pulls some of the best aspects from every incarnation of the character -- the deep mythology of the comics, the life and vibrancy of the animated series, and the darker yet more grounded tone of the recent movies. The strong central concept -- Batman trapped behind the walls of Arkham with all the inmates he has helped to place there running wild -- is brilliantly expanded upon, and the game is well-worth playing for just about anyone.
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