Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum, what can I really say about it? Bottom line first, it’s one of the best games I’ve played in quite a while. That’s not to say that it’s perfect, but it was definitely a breath of fresh air amidst the dog shit that I’ve been playing recently. Well I’ll review this like no one has ever reviewed this game before, so this is all fresh news to my lovely young reader… someone reads these right?

The game starts with Batman escorting the Joker into Arkham after catching him doing, uh, something, with the mayor. They never really elaborate on it. As Bats is talking to Commissioner Gordon, he expresses his suspicion over the Joker’s easy capture, and thinks there may be more to what happened than meets the optical receptor. So he brings him in, Joker escapes, B-man follows, and now he’s stuck in Arkham Asylum with all the crazies, trying to rescue whatever staff he can and thwart the madness that ensues.

The plot in the game is different from a lot of games because it likes to branch out, a lot. There’s the main plot, which, while not going to melt your face off or anything, is well done, pervades throughout the entire game, and is definitely something you can picture happening in Batman’s world. The strange thing about the plot is that it focuses around the Joker, but he’s not the only bad guy. So when you encounter other villains, most of them don’t give a shit about what the Joker is doing and have their own plans in mind. You can be running around thwarting the Joker to your hearts content, but as soon as you breathe in some of Scarecrows gas, you can forget about the Joker, you’ve got bigger issues.

One thing that goes hand in hand with the plot in this game is the atmosphere. All the characters are actually fleshed out, it’s not like oh look it’s a bad guy, better kill it. Well, that’s usually how it works, but generally there’s a reason for it. You’ll encounter characters like Poison Ivy and Killer Croc, but they have their own motivations and back stories. Hell, if it wasn’t for the fact that they plaster the Poison Ivy fight all over the trailers for the game, I would have sworn she was on my side. Even on a smaller scale though, the characters are much more fleshed out than any game I can recall… ever really. You sneak into a room and the bad guys will be standing around talking to each other, and it’s always something different and entertaining in its own way. From when I snuck up to a guard tower at one point and there was two guys in it and one of them was yelling at the other one for watching TV, to later on in the game when they were talking about Jokers plan and how some of them were planning on quitting. Take all of that, add in the patient interview tapes you pick up along the way, which are doctors interviewing various villains in their psychiatric sessions, the large number of character bio’s you pick up, and the crazy story that unfolds about the creator of Arkham Asylum, and you’ve got one of the most solid story telling experiences to date.

The gameplay is broken up into 3 different areas, stealth, combat, and exploration. The basic gist of it is you will enter a room filled with dudes. If the dudes are armed (have guns) it’s going to be a stealth section, if they’re (mostly) unarmed, it’ll be a combat section. Once the bad guys are taken care of, one way or the other, you can run around and take pictures of shit, break down walls and do whatever else you feel like doing in that area. I definitely have to elaborate on the 3 though, as that is really the whole game.

Batman is apparently a strictly melee being. He likes to knock people unconscious or string them up from their toes, but he won’t kill anyone, ever. This gets old and rather annoying at points, but it’s Batman so you can’t really argue with it. On thing you will find out very quickly in this game is batman is definitely not a superhero. Granted he can throw batarangs like nobody’s business, but he can take approximately 3 bullets to the chest before he keels over. So when you walk into a room with 8 bad guys armed with assault rifles, its best not to give them anything to shoot at.

6 armed hostiles? Time for sneaky.

For me, the stealth sections were the most fun. You’ll enter a room, flip on detective mode (haven’t talked about that yet, have I?) notice that everyone’s armed to the teeth and immediately seek cover in a grate, or around a corner, or up in the rafters, or whatever. From here you go about being ninja. Sneaking up and taking people down from behind, stringing people up from the rafters, knocking down walls on people, swooping down and kicking people in the face when no one’s looking. There are tons of different ways to take everyone down; these areas are basically your open playgrounds. As with most aspects of the game, as you go they get harder. About halfway through the game the Joker will start telling people when you take one guy down and they’ll all come running looking for you. And later than that they start blowing the gargoyles, which will suck because if you’re like me, you’ve come to love and rely on them.

Melee for me was probably the least fun part of the game. The melee sections are almost always forced on you, there’s no way to get stealth kills or split people up or anything like that during melee sections. It took me a while to figure it out, but just constantly left clicking during melee will end up getting you killed. They really want you to time your hits and your blocks, but they don’t ever tell you that. Similar to melee, the tutorials in the game are pretty terrible. You’ll get a little popup that says left click to hit, and that’s pretty much the extent of it. So I went through the game, pretty much sucking at melee, but being adequate, then the last hour or so pretty much knocked me on my ass. I literally learned the importance of countering and dodging bad guys only in the last hour of gameplay. Or maybe it was only forced up me then? Either way.

Okay, this guy on his own wasn’t so tough.

As the game ramps up, and melee combat gets more difficult, they start throwing more shit at you. First they’ll start arming one or two in a pack, which is no biggy, just take them out first. Then they have these dudes who have knives that you can’t attack straight on, and you can never, ever counter them, you have to stun them (which I literally only ever used on the knife guys) then beat them down. Then lastly there are these bastards with stun baton things, and they’re horrible. I can honestly say I struggled with melee combat where guys had more than 1 stun baton, than I did on almost all the boss fights. You can’t counter them, if you attack them head on you get zapped and just stand there while your screen goes all crazy. You’re supposed to wait for them to attack you, dodge to the side, then hit them in the back, which sounds all fine and good except Batman’s dodge ability usually sends him just about completely across the room.

Uh, that’s a bit more than 1.

The exploration is pretty much completely for the Riddler’s stuff. He gives you a giant list of all his various shit really close to the beginning, there’s stuff to take pictures of (or ‘Investigate’ I guess) there’s the interview tapes, his maps, his trophies, the backstory on Arkham Island, and these things called something along the lines of ‘These are so valuable, why would you ever leave these behind?’… Of which I found exactly zero throughout the game, apparently they’re hidden well… or I’m blind. Even if you’re not all that interested in being a completion whore and are just enjoying the game, you’re still going to want to pick up the Riddler’s shit though, because unless you’re regularly pulling off 15x combo modifiers in melee combat, a good portion of your experience can come from his collectibles. Which is an interesting segue…

Healing in this game sucks. You heal either from experience, or at completely arbitrary points that you have no control over. There were many times when I’d go into a room, get beat down in melee combat, and have to run around and do the Riddler’s goofy crap just so I could get my health back up. Healing during boss fights? Forget about it, oh except sometimes you do, only there’s no reason why, they just kind of go ‘Grats on the halfway point! Here’s ¼ of your health back!’ And if you fuck up during a stealth part and get unloaded on and have to make a quick getaway, you’re going to be hurting, possibly for a while. Not only do the stealth segments give you basically no experience at all, but the xp isn’t calculated until the last guy in the room is taken care of.

Stupid Cryptographic Sequencer…

You’ll be getting some interesting gadgets along the way, most of which are fairly straightforward to use, which is nice because as I said, the tutorials in this game are balls. After I had been blasted in the face by trapped circuit box things for about the fifteenth time using my Cryptographic Sequencer did I finally yell (oh yes, out loud) “Okay now what the FUCK?!” And proceeded to Google the fucking thing. Allow me to explain, so you never have to go through this. There are two dials on the thing, a left and a right one. You control the left with A and D, and the right with left and right click. A sine wave will be on the indicator, and you want it to grow to the maximum height, where it will turn green. The instructions for the damn thing say A,D. L. Click, R. Click. Whaaaa? Well I figured out that turning green meant good, but I generally did this by just holding D until it turned green. So when they started being timed and required using all 4 buttons together, I was completely lost. Compare this to another gadget, say… the Batclaw. Point it at a grate and it will light up, shoot the grate and it will say Tap Space!, tap space and the grate comes off, yay!

The graphics in the game are top notch, voice acting is top, music is exactly what you’d expect. The level design was one of the few places where I thought the game started to falter, but it’s kind of tough for me to say that. On one hand, I hated how some doors were just randomly blocked off until you went into room X and KO’d the 6 guys in there then randomly it wouldn’t be blocked off anymore. But even though I didn’t really like the concept of it, the only point where it downright irritated me was the Mansion. When you first go in the mansion about ¾ of the rooms will be blocked off, then when you go talk to random_guy_002 he’ll say ‘Oh you should check in the Warden’s Office blahblahblah’. At which point you have to run around the whole damn thing to find which of the 37 doors that were previously locked, is not anymore. The rest of the levels usually manage to be wonderfully linear, despite the fact that you will be going through them over and over again (Yay for reusing areas? Didn’t think so). The reason I find it hard to fault the game for the level design is that the way it’s set up, I really truly felt like I didn’t want to be there. So on one had, it’s Arkham Asylum, that’s what it should look like, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be here!

Not sure what else I expected from a place run by the Joker.

I found myself struggling a bit with the first couple boss fights, usually I’d die then during the loading screen the handy dandy tip would tell me exactly how beat the boss. But then I realized that, when in doubt, hit it in the face with a batarang. Speaking of the death screens, I found them to be a little obnoxious. It’s hard to say, I think I would have preferred a simple ‘YOU DIED’ to being taunted every time I died. Usually I’m upset enough as it is, you don’t have to taunt me.

There’s plenty of unlockables in the game, from useless ones like being able to blow up your foam independently of each other, to incredibly useful ones like super armor, and throwing 3 batarangs at a time. There’s also some trophies you unlock, that are pretty pointless, and challenge mode stuff that I haven’t looked at yet. Throughout the game you’ll get different gadgets, but you acquire them in logical ways. Pick something up from the trunk of your car, grab a new gadget from the batcave, etc. If you do want to 100% this game though, you’re going to have to wait until you have all the gadgets before you go through. Even the intro area, where you’re just learning how to move and sneak, has secrets that you can’t access until much later in the game.

Unlockables galore!

I mentioned Detective mode earlier so I should elaborate a little at least. By pressing X you flip to detective mode, which I assume is based on that crazy cellphone sonar eyes bullshit that Batman does in the Dark Knight movie, but it’s not really that powerful. You’re eyes get glowey, everything takes on a blueish tinge, and stuff that you can interact with is highlighted and impossible to miss. It’s like the batman for dummies mode, except it also lets you see guys through walls in a strange x-ray fashion, so it’s invaluable for stealth sections. At the beginning of the game I had it on almost all the time, but once I could spot grates and structural weaknesses just fine without it, I usually only used it to gauge how many dudes were in a room.

Oh and the Scarecrow areas are absolutely amazing. After the first one, as soon as you see that gas pour in through the vents you’re going to tense up, god only knows what’s about to happen.

So, what’s the final tally?

Gameplay 4/5: It’s not perfect, but it’s closer than anything that’s come out in a long time. The difficulty curve can be spiky at times, going from 3 hours of coming nowhere near dieing to failing horribly on an encounter for half an hour. But the controls are superb, the camera is top notch, and the levels flow logically.

Looks 4/5: It’s a beautiful game without being a machine breaker. The graphics can’t be argued with, and while the levels are generally bleak and unpleasing to an eye, I have to remind myself that I’m in Arkham Asylum, what’d I expect?

Noise 5/5: The music is 100% right for a Batman game, and you couldn’t ask for better voice acting, right down to the poor schmuck that’s just going to immediately be strung up by his toes.

Addictiveness 5/5: This game is nearly impossible to set down. It’s not a long game but if I could do it over again, I would have started it earlier in the day so I could just finish it all in one go.

Replayability 3/5: There are plenty of collectibles scattered throughout the game, I may even go back and get some of them, and there are challenge modes and trophies and such to fiddle around with once you beat it. But I don’t really see this as a game people are going to be playing multiple times.

Overall: 5/5

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