Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Once upon a time, games based on official superhero or movie licenses were so notoriously bad that they would hit the bargain bin barely weeks after the initial release. Hardcore gamers thought of them as sloppily-made shovelware designed to cash in a hot property and to trick non-gamer friends and relatives into buying them as gifts. By and large, this is still true for games based on movies. None of the box office success of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen carried over to its videogame adaptation. But it’s no longer really true for superhero games. Both Spider-Man 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction were considered solid games and this year’s Wolverine was generally well-regarded.

But it’s Batman: Arkham Asylum that has completely blown that old adage out of the water. It’s not just a good game, it’s easily one of the very best games of the year for any platform. Part of the reason is that it retains the same creative team that was behind the critically acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series including writer Paul Dini and voice actors Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill as Batman and the Joker respectively. But mostly it’s because Rocksteady Studios had a clear vision of what kind of game they wanted and successfully resisted the temptation to be overambitious or to try too hard to fit in too many elements from the Batman mythos.

The result is a highly polished, tautly paced and absolutely fantastic action game that genuinely succeeds in making you feel like a superhero. And not just any superhero, mind you, but the limb-breaking, ass-kicking, gadget-toting super ninja that Batman is. The core of the game is old-school beat-them-up action in a semi-open environment. Interspersed are sequences where Batman must stealthily take down enemies who are too dangerous to face in open combat. Of course, this being a superhero game, there are also scripted boss battles, each of which have unique mechanics.

As I’ve previously noted the combat uses only a small number of inputs. The repertoire of commands for Batman consists of hit, dodge, block and stun. Gadgets include the batarang and the batclaw mix it up some but these basic moves are then used to string together combos. The actual animation for any given command is context sensitive but the results are invariably awesome. This being Batman, there is strictly no killing, but the violence is plenty frightening all the same, what with moves like twisting arms until the joints pop, breaking legs, grabbing thugs’ heads and bashing them on the ground.

The real beauty of the system is that at lower difficulty levels, novices can simply button-mash their way to victory and still look cool while doing it, but players looking for a more challenging experience can find plenty of depth. If you’re good enough you can wade the midst of a dozen or more thugs and take them all down in one long, uninterrupted combo that looks like a perfectly choreographed dance. As the game progresses, more varied goons are introduced to make things interesting. Knife-wielding thugs can’t be blocked and must be stunned with your cape before you can hit them. Enemies carrying stun batons can’t be attacked head on at all and you must roll over them to hit them from behind.

In areas where all of the enemies have firearms, Batman must switch to stealth tactics to quietly take them out one by one. This includes sneaking up on an enemy from behind to knock them out, hanging on a ledge by your fingertips and grabbing a thug who walks by and even pulling out the floor from under a group of them to knock them out. As you earn experience points, you unlock gadgets and moves that further increase your tactical options such as the ability to pull up thugs passing underneath a stone gargoyle you’re perched upon or to instantly knock out a thug once you’ve achieved a certain combo multiplier in melee.

Everything is fluidly animated with an insane amount of attention to detail. Batman’s cape flexes realistically when he glides through the air. The rope behind the grappling hook uncoils smartly as it shoots towards a target. Even Batman’s suit accumulates small rips and tears as the night goes on. One minor quibble that many players have mentioned is that the detective vision, a special mode you can toggle on that has Batman seeing through the sensors built into his cowl, is so useful that you feel tempted to leave it on all the time. This allows you to track the movements of enemies even through walls and to notice clues and various points of interest. The problem with this is that you won’t then be able to see all of the fine graphical detail.

The overall story itself is nothing particularly exciting. Once again Batman captures the Joker and delivers him to Arkham Asylum. But the Joker seems to give up too easily, setting off Batman’s inner alarms. It turns out that the villain had planned for this all along and had even had his gang of goons transferred to the asylum beforehand. He quickly takes control of the asylum with the help of Harlequin, trapping Batman inside and taking everyone hostage. The player’s job is to guide the Dark Knight in his mission to save everyone and recapture the bad guys.

Despite the unremarkable setup, what’s makes the writing in this game so special is how intimately familiar Dini is with the characters and how skillfully he uses them. For example, during the opening sequence when Batman escorts the Joker into Arkham Asylum, the player just knows that the Joker will escape. It’s just a question of when and how. At one point the bound Joker is wheeled into an elevator together with Batman and several guards. Suddenly the elevator jerks to a halt and the lights cut out. If the Joker had escaped then, it would have been groan-worthy. Instead, when the lights come back on, we see that Batman has the Joker’s throat firmly in his grasp. What could have been a lame cliché is subverted into a crowning moment of awesome.

Some of the most memorable storytelling sequences occur in the various confrontations you have with Scarecrow but to describe too much would spoil the experience. Suffice to say that not only do they demonstrate Dini’s knowledge of the characters and the mythos, they exploit the tropes expected by videogamers to great dramatic effect. I can’t really say the same for some of the other boss battles in the game however. They’re Metroid-style battles which forces you to learn a specific sequence of actions and then repeat that sequence again and again until the boss is dead. While this does make every boss encounter unique, they feel inelegant compared to the rest of the game, like something that is done just because that’s how videogames traditionally have always done it. The final battle against the Joker is a good example. While suitably challenging and epic in scope, it also feels out of character for the character and out of place for the story.

Some of the other concessions to videogame convention break immersion as well, though I don’t see how else they could have done it. Batman gains access to new gadgets automatically from his arsenal as part of the plot but while it makes sense for a hero in a videogame to gradually become more powerful, it’s a bit ridiculous on Batman’s part to limit himself to a few devices early on and only allow himself to use a new gadget every now and then. What reason would he have for not deploying all of the resources at his disposal from the get-go to save the day? From a game design perspective, limited the tactical options in the beginning is a good idea while the player is learning the game and expanding the available options gradually gives the player a sense of growth and improvement that helps make the game feel fun, but I wish it could have been handled better within the storyline.

Still, these are all relatively minor complaints in what is undeniably an amazing game. While there’s no multiplayer component, the game does have challenge modes that unlock as you discover the Riddler’s trophies and solve his riddles over the course of the game. These add to the game’s already impressive longevity. I, for one, could play some of the melee challenges all day trying to get my score up as high as possible. The item hunts are also one of the best examples of this sort of thing I’ve ever seen in any game. Not only does the game give you a list of all of the hidden things in every area, but one of the hidden items is actually a map of the area which shows the approximate location of every hidden item there. This is why I was motivated enough to hunt down and find every one of them when I usually ignore silly item hunts in games like Far Cry 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV.

All of this means that unless you’re allergic to action games or something, you really need to buy this one. It’s basically the culmination of what everyone thought superhero games should be. Playing this is like indulging all your childhood fantasies about being a badass superhero. I can’t wait to see what else Rocksteady Studios can bring to the table.