Batman: Arkham Asylum (Xbox 360)

"I am not a disgrace! I am vengeance! I am the night! I am ... Batman!"
8/25/2009 4:03 PM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 2

I never felt comfortable with the idea that superhero games were cursed. The readymade excuse has been attached to superhero games since the days of Superman on the Atari 2600. Yes, the vast majority of them don't get their protagonists right, but that wouldn't mean that no one can.

Batman: Arkham Asylum, the latest attempt to capture Batman in a videogame, comes to us from Rocksteady Studios. When the game starts, Batman is hauling Joker back to Arkham Asylum, the psychiatric facility that attempts to treat Gotham's worst super-psychos. But Joker has laid an elaborate trap for the Caped Crusader, one that's turned the entire place into a beguiling maze where Batman's deadliest enemies lie in wait.

Rocksteady's first success comes from creating an incredible sense of place. The sprawling halls of Arkham are a microcosm of the city Batman protects. They exude a faded gothic elegance that makes Arkham Asylum an iconic videogame location on par with BioShock's Rapture and Fallout 3's Capital Wasteland.

The asylum is claustrophobic, macabre, sad and violent; and it -- like Gotham -- needs a Batman to set things right. Along with allusions to the city's decayed glamour and crushed good intentions, the asylum also holds reminders of its ills. As the story unfolds, and hints of patient abuse and experimentation come to light, it will dawn on you that the super-villains' manias may not be the most disturbing thing on the island.

Too many of his previous games made it seem like Batman only knew how to throw one kind of punch or kick. This is where Rocksteady's second big accomplishment comes in. The freeform combat in Arkham Asylum makes it seem like you are controlling a man who roamed the world mastering every martial art he could find.

When the scrums of hand-to-hand combat start, you can attack in any direction and, as long as there is an enemy nearby, you can seamlessly continue your combo chain. You'll need to employ a mix of moves -- stun first, then punch or evade, then attack. And it goes without saying that you'll have to be sneaky. You're often lurking in the dark, on top of one of the asylum's many gargoyles -- until you swoop down to knock out a thug and disappear into the darkness. (One thing that's annoying is having to aim the camera upward when swinging from point to point or after a glide-kick takedown. It ruins the flow of a sublime moment.)

The best parts of combat are the punishing elbow strikes, crushing roundhouse kicks and brutal uppercuts that serve as finishers. Technical aspects aside, the blows you're delivering to the Arkham Asylum inmates look like they really, really hurt.

But Batman has never been all about brawn. Comics writers in the 1960s and 1970s gave him the sobriquet "World's Greatest Detective," and Arkham Asylum lets you live up to that title. The Detective Mode highlights interactive zones in the environment, tags enemies as unarmed or armed, and lets you find evidence and track it to your objective. While this may sound like a lot of hand-holding, it's not. Even with Detective Mode on, the game's layers of puzzles will challenge you.