You might have heard about Batman: Arkham Asylum being a great game already from somewhere else, but I would be remiss in my duties as a reviewer if I didn’t put my own two cents in.
Typically I don’t use a number scale, but today I will be using the 1 to 5 scale for giving out some scores. I’m doing this not because I want to give the game high marks, but to illustrate why I don’t think that it deserves marks as high as it is getting from most places.
Now Arkham Asylum has got a very interesting art style which does a pretty good job making you feel like you are immersed in a dark and gritty batman world. the lighting and textures fit very well and the models are, with a few exceptions, done very well and with a consistent sort of style. I admit that some of the characters I don’t care for their designs, such as Killer Croc, but at the same time I think that his design does sort of fit the game as a whole.
Also a few of the character models where reused a whole lot of times, which I would overlook if they didn’t have you speak with a bunch of them and give them separate names. I don’t take issue with the fact that the regular thugs running around the place all basically use the same handful of character models, that makes sense to not have an individual model for each individual non-dialog model in the game, in fact the reused police/guard dude model would have been fine too if they’d just humorously had the same doofy guy running around the buildings instead of pretending he was someone else.
Other graphical issues include rotating trees. Nothing pulls you out of the experience like foliage which spins around on its branches, and considering the look and feel of this game I am pretty sure they could have managed something better or just kept the plants far enough away that you couldn’t see them clearly enough that they broke the immersive feeling. A few of the environmental effects, such as the leaves in the opening cut scene, aren’t quite correct and kind of pull you out of the whole thing as well.
Lastly as the story goes on Batman’s armored suit gets progressively more ripped and beat up. This is something a lot of people liked, and maybe I would have been behind it more if the attention to detail in how the suit looked would have been on par with the fabulous cape animation, but it wasn’t so I’m not. This is Batman, and one trying to mix the recent movies with the comic book/animated world, not Superman. When Batman gets beat up his costume stays intact, with the exception of his cape, in part because it is often armored, but in part because he is freaking Batman, the ultimate unpowered super hero detective! If you are going to put semi-random holes in his armored suit, at least make it look more like a real hole rather than a weird rip/tear. The thing is supposed it be plated for crying out loud.
Overall I would have to give graphics a 4 out of 5 for these issues. Really nice, but with some prominent holes which I can’t overlook.
Sound on this game is really good. They have a nice musical score, good background sound effects, and of course some really good voice acting, but that is no surprise given the stellar cast of voice actors included. The fact that some of the dialog gets a little doofier than it ought to in spots and there is a lot of repeat dialog from random thugs (pretty normal for games) is not something I would dock it points for, so I would give it a solid 5 of 5 for sound.
Story is something that, as a RPG guy, I put a lot of weight on. This feels like a Batman story and it is a good one to be sure. I won’t go into too many details about it, but I will say that fight with the Joker is not a good choice. Not because of the fact you fight with the Joker, but rather because of what they decided to do for that fight, in addition to other issues what the Joker does is totally out of character for him and should not have even been entertained as an option. The whole point to having iconic characters is making use of their character not just their image and that convention was broken right at the end more than anywhere else in the game.
There is also a Bat Cave under the Asylum, and I still don’t know whether I think that is good or bad. Honestly I don’t know if there is previous evidence to suggest it should actually be there, but that it sort of beside the point as I must admit there is probably a supply of people who needed a Bat Cave to be included in the game.
Overall I would give the game a 4 out of 5 on story, it might only be one spot at the end that really truly bugs me about the game, but I place a lot of weight on it.
Now to the most important aspect of any game, the actual gameplay.
Many people have touted the gameplay experience of fighting in this game as being really good, however I disagree. To me it feels like a lightly broken version of Heavenly Sword, or even an old arcade brawler.
This is not to say that it is bad, but rather to say that it has been done better, and more than once to be fair. The combat animates very well, and is quite believable looking overall, but at the same time you can more or less spam the regular attack button and take down any number of thugs with no problem, the only exceptions being a few that require specific button presses in order to defeat them (although I found it wasn’t impossible, or even particularly dangerous to just bowl them over by pushing the attack button either.)
While if you decided to go with the flow it works well it suffers from a number of difficulties, primarily that there aren’t really that many chances to actually fight. More often than not you have to sneak about and get the drop on people in order to fight them. Disarming gunmen is not very easy, and usually results disastrously if there is more than one or the gun happens to land near them because they will pick it up and shoot you and you will likely just die.
That is the thing about guns in this game, whenever they are involved you are force to be sneaky and avoid the gunmen, but as any fan of Batman knows he should be able to easily take down a dozen armed gunmen at once, using not stealth, but a variety of combat moves and weapons/gadgets that he has on him at all times. Or even just a lot of faster stealth techniques. Batman uses stealth techniques in order to add to his reputation as some kind of mythical being, so the more you give off the horror movie monster vibe the better.
Instead you are forced to schlep around in ventilations ducts (something that feels like it was pulled out of a very old video game (Dark Forces for instance) or zip about off of rafters and gargoyles inside of the buildings. Schlepping about the rafters and gargoyles does feel better to me, and I do enjoy it, although it reminds me that I preferred the grappling system from Bionic Commando much better, but I suppose most people shunned Bionic Commando, so they are likely to disagree with me on that if they played it and didn’t like it.
If you didn’t ever play it, I suggest you do because it is a really good game. I may be in the minority here, but I think it is at least worth giving a try being as with Grin gone it is probably a lot cheaper now than it used to be. Honestly I will never understand exactly what people’s beef with Grin was.
Anyway, back on track, swinging from place to place in this game makes me feel like the game goes suddenly from immersive to being old and gamey. There is no real sense of motion as Batman moves from place to place on his grappling hook swings; they just feel weirdly out of place, especially considering the fact that just using the grappling hook to zip up onto ledges and gargoyles feels and looks better.
It does however strongly resemble the process in games like Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess with better graphics when you are using the hook shot for rapid grappling.
Boss fights are old pattern based numbers following very specific progression rails. I cannot think of any reason to see this as a good or bad thing inherently, however it doesn’t exactly speak to me when the manner in which Batman must fight the boss in question doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. If you take a moment to think about how you fight Bane in this game you might notice what I’m talking about, but maybe I’m over thinking it.
Lastly for some weird reason they decided to not give you all of Batman’s moves at the beginning of the game and instead use a leveling and progression system to slowly give you access to new abilities despite the fact that they are all abilities that Batman should have at the beginning of the game.
Overall I give gameplay a 2. It can be good, but the pacing of the game is terrible so the bits of it that are better done are not even available for use most of the time. I’d consider giving it a higher score if the stealthy bits were better programmed or if you had at least more of Batman’s moves at the start of the game. However, as the game is already out this is unlikely to happen.
So taken as a whole I’d say the game ranks as a solid 2.5. How do I come to that math? Story and Gameplay are weight more than Graphics or Sound, with Gameplay having the highest consideration. As it is a game, it should have good gameplay above all else.
This game fails to deliver on this, but it makes for a fairly entertaining movie; sort of like Metal Gear Solid 4, only without the excellent gameplay and an additional 90 minute cut scene after the game is over. It probably would have made it as a series of quick time events if people wouldn’t flip out at the very mention of those, but also the game just feels like they couldn’t come up with enough content for the whole thing so they just stretched out the size of all the level maps and made them mostly empty.