When I was in my graphic novel phase, you could largely group what appeared on my shelves into three categories: indy's, Marvel, and Batman, who clearly stands head and shoulders above most comic book characters for all kinds of reasons.
The number of colourfully exaggerated characters he fights across Gotham City is enough to satisfy any reader, and the fact that Batman doesn't kill any of them means they can all escape the confines of their jail cells and wreak havoc again and again.
But these villains often have more than a few screws loose, so prison isn't always the right place for them. The correctional facility on nearby Arkham island, the Arkham Asylum, is more suited for the terrors that make a home on Batman's turf, and in Batman: Arkham Asylum, we get to see how even that can go all wrong.
Buckle up your Bat-belts, put on a gruff voice if you want to, and let's glide kick our way into this one.
Fun Times
It's raining, again, and the Batmobile is screaming through the streets of Gotham to deliver the Joker to Arkham Asylum. The cutscene has done all the work for us. Joker was trying to take the Mayor hostage, but Batman put a stop to that. A swift stop. An all too easy stop...
Oh, you... Joker has planned for this all along. Not only are we now deep inside Arkham Asylum, where every patient no doubt wants a piece of us, but the plan is so elaborate that Blackgate prison has been set on fire and many of its prisoners have gotten transferred here as well. Seemingly everyone who you don't want to be in one place is now on this one island.
So we better learn how to be Batman quickly...
This action-adventure will see Batman doing a lot of what he does best, and fighting against more than one opponent is high on that list. The combat system initially consists of pressing the attack button a lot, with the odd switch over to the counter button to keep on top of foes who think they're actually on top of you.
There's more to it than that, of course. It's such a fluid combat system that getting screenshots of it is a bit of a pain, not because of the camera angles or the lighting, or Batman's blummin cape or anything, but because all the fights have a sort of time dilation to them, where punches and kicks are thrown in slow motion and snap back to normal speed for emphasis on the hits.
Batman, too, is a slippery fella, near-instantly swooshing from one enemy to the next in ways that don't quite feel possible, and that sometimes look a little on the silly side. It all feels nice in the hands to control, and you can feel like a bad-ass whether you've got skills or not, but it does look unique, shall we say.
Batman isn't just brute force, but a brainy bloke too, both inside and outside of combat. Equipped with fancy technology to enhance his detective skills, he can highlight interactable objects in the environment and view skeletons through walls so that you can plan a stealthy approach and use fear and surprise to your advantage.
It's very much true to character, but I found it took a little while to get used to the button layout to do anything. The controls are nice and smooth, and the prompts are there to help me out, but I never felt like I was in charge of Batman, if you know what I mean.
I've just played Assassin's Creed II, and even though the buttons didn't match the HUD layout, I felt like I was driving Ezio. Here, I'm running Batman to where he needs to be, and he'll tell me what he needs to do, sort of thing.
Oh, and there's more slow motion when you do a massive diving dropkick and stun downed opponents, too.
I'm playing Arkham Asylum on the PC, and it looks mighty impressive. While I was interested in the character back in the day, I wasn't really interested in this game, or its sequels, despite the acclaim they got.
Harley Quinn has been instructed to lock the doors to this room and slow us down, but there are air vents everywhere in this place, and they're the perfect size for a hunched over Batman to crouch-walk through, once he rips the grate off the walls.
It's a repetitive animation that'll you'll see an awful lot of, but isn't too long, and does usually allow for all the chatter to keep taking place, as Joker and his buddies often taunt you from the nearest loudspeaker or TV set.
Arkham Asylum is set up, at least at first, as a bunch of connected puzzles for you to solve. It's fairly linear inside the asylum, so you won't get lost, and you'll be tasked with clearing out a room of enemies or, as in this case, turning on some air vents to filter Joker toxin out of the air, all while finding a way to navigate the room without descending into the Joker toxin.
The plot is one of Joker tying us up, keeping us busy chasing after him so who-knows-what can take place free from Batman interfering. Joker toxin didn't slow us down enough, so how about a miniboss?
It's here where we're introduced to dodging out of the way, and that's about all we're here for, as after a few dodges, this beast just dies.
With Joker on the move and another door locked in front of us, we've got to backtrack a little, which is a good time to introduce abilities that can be unlocked to improve our skillset. I accidentally unlocked this throw ability without seeing what else was unlocked, but I'm sure we'll manage regardless.
The more we do, the more we'll be able to unlock, and there's plenty to do in Arkham Asylum.
With no intention of listening to Joker's demands, we make our way through the facility in search of Commissioner Gordon, who has also been caught up in this hostile takeover of the asylum. If you pay attention to the story - thank goodness for subtitles - you'll learn that Joker was able to pull this off with the help of insiders, with a corrupt guard currently causing us more problems.
Interestingly, though, we're tracking this guard through the whiskey he carries on his breath, thanks to detective vision scanning seemingly everything in search of something useful to us.
More climbing and hook-shotting, more combat, more light exploration - there's only really one direction to go in, and that's where we haven't yet been.
As you may know, Batman doesn't do guns, or he certainly doesn't do so with any lethality. In Arkham Asylum, guns will wreck you, so they say. Get the wrong side of an enemy with a gun - that is, stand in front of them - and they'll shoot without questioning it (obviously).
That means you need to think like Batman and use your surroundings, and equipment, to get the drop on your targets.
Frustrations
I wasn't too good at this. Detective vision could show me that there was breakable glass or some vents you could crawl through to attack through the floor, but as I was still uneasy with the controls, I was often left with doing the same thing over and over - grapple up to the roof, hope one target is alone, glide kick the daylights out of him, then zip back up to the roof before anyone could shoot.
It worked, but I get the feeling it'll only work for now. If enemies work together and keep an eye on each other, I bet I'll be eating lead. I'm going to have to learn as many sneaky Bat-attacks as possible and use stealth and the environment to my advantage - all with controls I'm not quite comfortable with, for no real reason.
They're not that difficult, I just can't stop looking at those prompts and make them second nature.
Throughout your travels, you'll come across collectables left behind by the Riddler, who now butts into our radio feed to give us some riddles. I'm not sure what the purpose of any of them are, as it all appears to be side content - a lot of side content.
As I'm not a big fan of the Riddler and don't want to hunt down every little one of his trinkets, I'm going to ignore what I can, but for fans of Batman, there's a lot of backstory and character interviews to find and unlock to flesh out this version of Gotham City that much more.
While the map is now a lot wider than it first was, we're still given linear goals to complete, and we're still looking for Commissioner Gordon. The Batmobile alerts us to some activity nearby, and in the boot is some explosive gel, another tool in your arsenal, this one capable of blowing through walls and flooring, though only in specific places.
The Batmobile happens to be a crime scene before I turned up and slapped sense into a bunch of inmates. Gordon's dropped his pipe, and now we can follow a trail of tobacco to find him and Harley hanging out in the Medical building. Well, Harley is hanging out, Gordon is a hostage, of course.
Further Fun Times
It's never as easy as that, though. Despite staring Harley in the face, there's a fancy electrical gate separating us. They're everywhere on this island and are circumvented by shutting down their source of power, usually traceable with detective vision, or finding another route in, which is how we find ourselves in another large hall with another bunch of targets to whittle down.
Further Frustrations
Again, it's never that easy for Batman, as the hostages here have pointed me in the direction of three doctors that need saving, and each of them are found in different areas of the Medical building, and therefore likely behind different puzzles and encounters to solve.
On top of all that, as soon as I walked into the X-Ray room here, Arkham Asylum thought I wanted to see things like an actual graphic novel, one panel at a time, the frame rate crawling to single figures. I can only hope it was because of events outside of the game because it has otherwise run nicely.
The most recent checkpoint was just seconds earlier, so restarting wasn't an issue. It was the framerate that needed sorting out, though, and after an hour, this was as good a point as any to call time for the moment.
Sit tight, Gordon. Just got to save a whole load of hostages first.
Final Word
Though I can see how it will likely annoy me - my lack of skill and comfort with the controls, repetitive challenges, another mission to do before I can carry on with my primary objective - I can easily see how Batman: Arkham Asylum will impress me.
Batman, Joker, and Harley Quinn are voiced by Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and Arleen Sorkin. The story is written by Paul Dini. Those names alone ought to be enough to realise that someone, somewhere, cares an awful lot about Arkham Asylum's success.
This isn't a generic action-adventure that features Batman. It's not a movie tie-in. It's something of value, packed with things fans want to see, and as it turns out, was the first game of a series that grew rather big indeed.
Players want to feel as awesome, as powerful, and as smart as Batman, and the character deserves a story that isn't as generic as good guy versus bad guy. Arkham Asylum delivers, and like its combat system, it's fluid and packs a punch.
You'll get much more out of it if you're a Batman fan, of course, and as a bit of a fan, I can't quite answer how well it comes across to those who don't know any of these characters. I also note that the 1001 writeup says the boss fights are a bit of a let down, but if you do end up liking the game, there are many more Arkham games to come out of its success.
I'll be looking to play some more for sure, and watching it if it turns out that I'm nowhere near as capable as Batman ought to be, and that'll be fine with me.
FILLING YOU IN
What a difference a day makes. Given a few more hours, it turns out I am capable of controlling Batman, though switching between Bat-devices is still a minor nuisance. My problem now is solving the puzzles. I'm pretty much running around Arkham island in detective vision, just because it highlights points of interest in an instant, and helps me from becoming too stupid - I hope.
In the next hour I faced both the Scarecrow and Bane in underwhelming fights, and in another couple I've faced Scarecrow again, all while Joker and Harley run off with various hostages that need saving. I can't even remember what's happened to Gordon at this point, but Dr Young has just been killed, her notes safely out of Joker's hands, though. Finding them was a sort of sequence breaking pain in the arse that needed the Internet, but I got there.
All in all, I'm still not fussed about picking up all the audio logs and character bios, or hunting down the Riddler's trophies, but I'm probably going to stick with this one through to the end - especially when I read it's not too long to just tackle the story either. Marvellous.
Oh, probably should use another world around a DC property...
FILLING YOU IN FURTHER
And just like that, in much the same way as you dive into a graphic novel and don't leave its pages until you turn to the back cover, Arkham Asylum is done after 8 hours of entertainment. There's plenty more for me to do, mostly Riddler stuff and challenge modes, but I'm not really fussed about any of that. Batman has had a long hard night fighting a few of his favourite villains, seemingly for the hell of it, rather than for any grand purpose.
The story really does feel self-contained, almost so that it doesn't trample on anything that is already established, or what might come after it. "You like Batman? Here's some Batman for you." I do like Batman and have enjoyed my time with Arkham Asylum, but I've had my fill without faffing about picking up all the collectables that I'm not interested in.
Certainly worth sticking with it, though. Nothing that will shake the video game world to its core, but a solid experience nonetheless.
Fun Facts
According to then Eidos president Ian Livingstone, one developer spent two years working on Batman's cape, which would use over 700 animations and sound effects to get it to feel realistic.
Batman: Arkham Asylum, developed by Rocksteady Studios, first released in 2009.
Version played: Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition, PC, 2010.