I want to start off by saying, I love Batman. He is easily my favorite DC superhero, and defiantly in my top ten list. When I first heard of Arkham Asylum, I was excited, because it was getting good reviews, so here's mine.
First, I like stealth games, I'm just hardwired that way. But Batman isn't really a stealth game. Instead of hiding from your enemies, you sit on top of gargoyles and watch them move about the room like they know what they are doing with your special forensic vision googles that let you see: through walls, your enemies teal skeletons, and their heart rates. It even isolates which enemies are armed. So the question is, why would you ever not take this mode off? I'll tell you, the artwork and landscape are really good, if you leave the forensic vision on, it's like giving an entire development department the finger. So you can see through walls and no-one can find you on the gargoyles, so your not performing stealth missions, the game calls it predator, and rightly named, as one thing you notice when you play the game is that you are picking the order in which you want to take out the guards. Because of this, I would have called it not predator, but God. You can also through as many baterangs as you want. This is great, because baterangs make great distractions for the AI that is about as helpless as kitten in a dingo enclosure. Seriously, the AI in this game is among the dumbest you will ever come across in gaming. The ads made a big deal about how the AI notices the bodies of the other guards, but they only do it because the Joker tells them there's a man down on the speakers. After that, they always say the same thing "What happened?-What do we do?-shut up and find the bat!-Batman? can you hear me? show yourself!" Speaking of finding bodies, one of my favorite things to do in the game was to drop down on a thug from a gargoyle and hang him upside down by a string, then it's like a Predator came through the room, minus the skinned bodies. The combat is flowing and beautiful, they linked all the attacks to one button, which is nice, because mashing one button is what I usually do anyway. But for only one button, you have a startling amount of control of Batman while he is fighting. Another really cool thing you can do in combat is glide kicking guards, this is where you glide down to a guard and kick him in the head, reducing his brains into a gelatin. (not really, Batman has a moral compass, so he only knocks guards out, you never kill anyone in this game.) Next, detective mode, You can trace people around the Asylum by following the alcohol in his breath or traces of their tobacco, etc. The last thing I really liked was the gadgets you could use. You have an unlimited amount of uses of each of these gadgets and you are free to use any one of them at any time. Most of these gadgets are used for crossing road blocks around the asylum like fragile walls and electric barriers, but unlike most other gadget games, you don't only use each gadget once a level for the same reason over and over again. In Arkham Asylum, most of the gadgets have practical uses in the predator levels. Take, for instance, my favorite gadget, the explosive gel, normally, it is used to break down walls by spraying it on a surface, then detonating it, but if a guard is nearby when the wall explodes, he is knocked out, this is a technique I found myself using whenever possible because you could get yourself miles away from the scene, with a good vantage point for your next target. I also liked to spray the gel on top of ladders. (you fill in the blank.) The only difficulty with the gadgets was that you had to select one at a time, so when I have a giant mutant running at me full speed, instead of throwing a baterang at his head, I found myself trying to defeat him by smacking him with a cryptographic sequencer.
The list of things I don't like is short, but valid. First, the game is supposed to be part horror, but is't not scary at all, the most scary part is when you are walking around the sewers on wooden planks and Killer Croc jumps up at random times, and then you dismiss him with a single baterang. Second, as I already mentioned, the AI is stupid, third, sometimes, you need to fight genetically altered thugs that have the mass of an elephant and a desire to kill that is stronger than the Hulk. So when you fight them, you beat them by, (not kidding) side-stepping their charge so they slam into a wall. That's only been used in games about forty billion times! Fourth, whenever I wanted to get somewhere really fast, I pushed the analog stick forward as hard as I could and I found Batman strolling along like this was his morning constitutional. I'm reasonably sure this was to let the player know that Batman wasn't afraid at all, but having to hold the X button to run is a hassle, Look, if you want to walk, push the analog stick halfway forward, then the X button can be used for it's real purpose in life, jumping.
Batman Arkham Asylum is one of the best games ever made and I would recommend it to anyone over the age of eleven. I give it a 9/10.
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