I’ve been doing more gaming the past couple days than is probably healthy. Last week I picked up Arkham Asylum in a mid-week Steam sale, and thought I’d share my thoughts on it (since I was thick and didn’t think to bring my laptop with me so I’m cut off from playing it). Keep in mind I’m only about halfway through, and that my previous Batman exposure has been fairly casual: most of the movies, and a desperate desire to read The Killing Joke.
The game feels exactly how you’d want a Batman game to feel. It has its dark moments but at the same time plenty of humor. The Joker in particular feels really balanced, not too gruesomely psychotic but not too cartoony either. You can laugh along with him as he threatens your demise, while still kind of feeling that his threats have weight (insomuch as we know no one is going to kill anyone meaningful in this game, I mean it is BATMAN after all). The story is entertaining enough to hold the game together, kind of silly in a way you'd expect from anything the Joker cooks up, but has some parts that are interesting and occasionally even moving. All in all it feels a tiny bit secondary to the sheer fun that is running around being BATMAN. There is an epicness factor to that that doesn't get old.
The gameplay has a nice variety to it, switching from combat to stealth, and finding your way through passages by using tools from the famous utility belt. Some of my favorite sequences are when the thugs can’t find you and you get to pick them off one by one. There are also these sidescroller-ish sequences that you think would be really jarring, but they’re always well-introduced, as Scarecrow takes over Batman’s mind and adds some nice character depth. Granted the game started to feel a little repetitive after about 5 hours, but that’s longer than some games actually run.
I’ve heard a lot of praise for the combat system, and to be honest, I haven’t played a whole lot of fighting-required games on the PC, but it feels pretty damn smooth, and relatively intuitive. The only exceptions are these guys with electric baton things, which are a pain when mushed in with large groups of thugs, but even then they’re manageable.
The controls very occasionally get a bit confusing, especially after jumping in after not playing for a week, but I’m guessing that’s common of games with lots of different commands. I wish they hadn’t used “push down on the mouse scroll wheel” as a button, considering how sensitive those things are, but so far I haven’t run into any time sensitive issues on that command, so it’s been okay. I’m probably being a bit harsh on the controls, 95% of the time they work well. The camera is totally intuitive, or, to put it another way, I haven’t had to think about the camera at all until I sat down to write this, which is really how it should be.
As far as replay value goes, there isn’t a whole lot of one. I mean, it’s pretty damn linear, at least so far, so playing again won’t mean a totally different experience. There is an achievement-esque system set up by the Riddler, where you have to get to trophies he’s placed and solve riddles and things. The nice thing about this is that, rather than just being to keep the achievement whores happy, they unlock some pretty cool stuff, character bios and stuff that are worth a look-through. My personal favorites are the interview tapes scattered on various desks, fun-yet-creepy looks into the minds of some of the villains you’re fighting.
To me, the best measure of a game is how infectious it is. A really good game, like a really good book, seeps under your skin and has you thinking about it as you go about your day. And as I sit here writing this, I’m sincerely regretting not having my laptop with me so I can play some more. This leads me to say that I thoroughly recommend Arkham Asylum. Totally worth 30 bucks on Steam.
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