Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Ok, there’s no doubt about this. Batman: Arkham Asylum is hands down the best action game I’ve ever played. Ever. It’s also the best damn superhero game I’ve ever played. If you’ve ever wanted to know what it feels like to be superhero kicking ass and taking names, you need to play this game now! There are so many things the game gets right that I don’t know where to start.

First, the hand-to-hand combat is just perfect. Batman is a martial arts master and this game is full of all sorts of awesome moves. Throws, punches, knee and elbow strikes, flying kicks, trapping someone’s head under your armpit, it’s all in here. The wonder of it is that the game uses a very simple and yet deep system for controlling everything. There is for example just one button for striking and depending on the context, such as where Batman is standing in relation to his enemies, where the camera is facing etc., he does a different move when you press the button.

To novices, this may look like just button-mashing. Press a single button as fast as possible as Batman does all manner of cool-looking stuff onscreen automatically. But then you add in counters, which is also another context sensitive button to intercept and block enemy attacks. Add in another button to evade attacks as thugs with knives can’t be blocked. Don’t forget that you can also use your gadgets in fights, most notably the Batclaw and the Batarang. Then you have your unlockable moves, such as the instant takedown and the throw. Not so simple now, is it?

Second, everything feels realistic and faithful to the comics. The enemies in the game are mostly thugs armed at most with clubs and knives. True to the comics, Batman is not bulletproof. Trying to tackle a bunch of goons armed with guns head on results in a dead bat. This means that when confronted with gun-toting thugs, Batman needs to play the role of the stealthy predator, hiding in the shadows to pick off the bad guys one by one. And there are so very many ways to do that.

You can creep behind a thug and silently knock him out with his friends none the wiser. You can hide around a corner and quickly grab a thug as he walks past while on patrol. If the thugs are patrolling near a ledge, you can hang off of it by your fingers and grab their legs as they walk by then string them up to hang. The easiest stealthy takedown is probably to hang upside down from a gargoyle, wait for a thug to pass by underneath and then grab and pull him up.

Then there’s the fact that the game remembers that Batman is called the world’s greatest detective for a reason. The combat and stealth portions are broken by sequences where you need to hunt for clues and trails. This part is a bit simplistic but works nicely to change the pace once in a while. Even the item hunts, a staple of many games, are well done as you get a list of exactly how many hidden things are in each area of the game so you always know how many secrets you’ve found and how many are left.

I still have quite a way to go before I finish the game, most notably because I got through about 15% of the game on Normal difficulty before deciding to restart at Hard. It’s been tough going, but fair. When I die, I know exactly what I did wrong. It’s going to be some time before I can write a full review on this one, depending on how much of a completionist I want to be about solving all of the Riddler’s puzzles, but this game is so good that I want to make it last as long as possible.