Batman: Arkham Asylum Review

One word to describe this game: AWESOME!  In the past, I played a lot of comic book video games with tie-ins from movies or TV shows that were from decent to god awful.  And here comes Batman: Arkham Asylum, a comic book video game that has no movie tie-ins, no TV show influence, nor is it based on a story or novel from the comics.  The story is built from the ground up, the voice acting is wonderful, and the game play is excellent.

I am not going to say much about story except for that it is up there in quality with Batman: The Animated Series, and it has to be, since the story is written by Paul Dini, one of the writers from TAS and some of the voice actors like Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill reprise their roles.  But what I am going to talk about is the game play: you ARE Batman!  You get to do all these cool things Batman do in the movies and in the comics plus much more.  The combat system is amazing, where you can string up a couple of combos and clear a room full of thugs without getting hit if you perform the combos and the counters right.  Then comes the stealth element of the game, which is a lot of fun.  In the past, games that uses stealth seems more of a chore because you have to rely on it to get through the entire game, this is not the case with Arkham Asylum.  When faced with a room of armed baddies you have to find a way to disable all of them without being seen and having a lot of slugs go through your batsuit.  Luckily there’s gargoyle statues, vents, your bat-toys, and your cowl vision enabled “detective mode” at your disposal. And seeing the Joker’s cronies freak the hell out when you take them out one by one is really entertaining.

The visuals in Arkham Asylum are pretty good too.  Based on the Unreal 3.0 game engine, you get to see how moody the asylum can be.  Sometimes there can be screen tearing and the lips don’t sync up with the voices but overall it’s good.

Now the million dollar question, is this game worth $60?  My answer is yes. After you finish the game you can go back to finish all of the Riddler’s Challenges and try to beat your friend’s score in the challenge modes, where you can do either the combat challenges or the invisible predator challenge, which add a lot of replay value.

Go buy this game whether you have a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360. IGN calls this the greatest superhero game of all time.  And to be honest, it’s hard to argue that right now.