Batman: Arkham Asylum

Great game going off the demo, and going to be a big hit.

The dark Gothic atmosphere of the latter films and comic books has been captured beautifully. The visuals and sound are top notch in capturing the feel, Batman looks fearsome - heavily muscled, elegant and swift in his movement yet powerful. Arkham asylum captures a beautiful blend of old fashioned Gothic asylum with modern maximum security psychiatric unit - you get the feel the place is old but has been heavily updated to cater for Gotham city's most violent and psychotic criminals.

Cutscenes are honestly a pleasure to watch the graphics and voice acting is as good as I've seen, the only slight let down is the face animation of non main characters like guards when seen in cut-scenes close up - they lack the detail and character of say the joker or batman, but hey who cares!

The game play itself though is the core of the game and an absolute pleasure. The camera is over the shoulder and a little close which… more »

Great game going off the demo, and going to be a big hit.

The dark Gothic atmosphere of the latter films and comic books has been captured beautifully. The visuals and sound are top notch in capturing the feel, Batman looks fearsome - heavily muscled, elegant and swift in his movement yet powerful. Arkham asylum captures a beautiful blend of old fashioned Gothic asylum with modern maximum security psychiatric unit - you get the feel the place is old but has been heavily updated to cater for Gotham city's most violent and psychotic criminals.

Cutscenes are honestly a pleasure to watch the graphics and voice acting is as good as I've seen, the only slight let down is the face animation of non main characters like guards when seen in cut-scenes close up - they lack the detail and character of say the joker or batman, but hey who cares!

The game play itself though is the core of the game and an absolute pleasure. The camera is over the shoulder and a little close which takes a bit of getting use to but once you do you'll feel like you really are Batman. The combat is fantastic, you really get the essence of Batman being a martial arts master in the game; groups of muscled hench men will surround you, by simply tapping a button and pushing in the direction off one you can unleash a series of masterful kicks, punches and martial arts splendour, push towards one of the other enemies instantly and you can string your attacks together - Batman will automatically flip, spin and strike his opponents in such style that you'll just sit back and say wow! You'll be treated to up close slow motion camera cuts of him striking final devastating, bone crushing final blows mid combat which only adds to the highly stylized action.

In fact the variety in which you can do it makes it all the more fun, if you want you can simply stand there for a while parrying the attacks of your enemies, catching kicks that come from behind and back fisting your enemies backwards, blocking punches and quickly striking them and pushing them away in a movie like fashion, almost taunting them with Batman's incredible hand to hand combat skills.

Your also encouraged to observe the area via a detective mode which changes your vision, this mode is useful when you want to stalk and pick off groups off heavily armed opponents where open combat would be suicidal. You can perform a veriety of silent attacks and slowly take down groups of enemies - at one point in the game the Joker came in on the PA system to tell the least remaining henchman that i had picked off all his buddies and i was hunting him, at which point he began creeping round clearly terrified looking for me, he even fired at steam coming suddenly from a vent because it startled him all the while cursing and talking to himself - it really makes you feel like the feared dark knight as you stalk these criminals who clearly have a pre defined fear of the ultimate vigilante. Even more impressive was that this was not a scripted thing that happens every time you play the game, i played through the demo several times and there is great variety in how these things happen, often triggered by your specific actions.

All in all i have never had the pleasure to play something that so captures the feel of batman so well - I hope there's more to come of these games in this style, it really captures the feel that DC created in their darker comics and i will definitely be buying this one - try the demo, its great!