Review on Batman: Arkham Asylum

Carter Allen

I have never played a video game starring a superhero and there’s a reason for that. Superheroes are predictable. They have no room for customization or expansion. We know their villains, what powers they have and what their weaknesses are and the same goes for the hero’s.

I picked up Arkham Asylum because I was bored and there was nothing else new. This game has changed my outlook on superhero games in a greatly positive way and I was surprised by how much I liked this game. Arkham Asylum begins with our masked hero driving the Joker to the institute named after Elizabeth Arkham who was subsequently named after H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional town where some of his stories take place. Ultimately the Joker escapes within the asylum and lets all the inmates out of their cells. As Batman, your job is to stop the Joker and get everything under control. After a very long scene where batman walks down a hallway while Joker yells things at him, You get into a fight with a couple of generic inmates.

Fights flow well although you find yourself jumping across an entire room to knock down the next person. Throughout the game you switch between hand to hand combat and stealth which blends very well. The stealth mechanic in the game works very well and gets increasingly challenging as the game progresses. The difference between being stealthy and just punching everyone, is guns. If you come to a room where there are armed goons then your going to have to be sneaky as bullets kill you pretty quickly.

Boss fights aren’t the most intuitive although you do get to see some off the more famous Batman villains in action. For the most part each fight is just rinse and repeat and to make it harder the game just throws more inmates at you so you have to fight them as well. Fighting Killer Croc consists of running on floating planks and throwing tiny shards of metal at him whenever he pops out of the water.

The atmosphere of the game is very nice and the mapping is beautifully dark. There is a lot of attention to detail and an amazing amount of hidden things to find (I beat the game but only completed 50 percent of what there is to do). There is a bunch of lore about the characters that you find in interview tapes and bios. As a non-comic book nerd I can safely say that if you know nothing about batman then you will probably still enjoy this game. Over all I give Batman: Arkham Asylum 8 batarangs out of 10.