Batman: Arkham Asylum Review and Analysis

By Sean Colgate

So let’s talk Batman: Arkham Asylum, I must say at first I was skeptical, but after a few hours playing I found this game to be extremely fun. I could not take myself away from playing this game. It was dark and had that old Batman comic feel to it. It had all the main villains in it; being able to fight Bain, Poison Ivy and the other boss fights was a good challenge. Although, after dying a couple of times it was easy to figure out what to get done to kill the boss but that does not mean that it becomes an easy task to win the fight. Now other boss fights like the Scarecrow is a good break from standard fighting with his mind control drug he taps in to Batman's mind to bring up all that is disturbing to our winged hero. He takes Batman on mental journeys threw his past bringing up his parents death, taking you through the whole alleyway where they were shot and then having to go through his maze to get the end of his mental journey to stop the Scarecrow from controlling him. Now let's talk about your last fight with the Joker, I have to say this was my most disappointing part of the game. I mean you run from him then fight all his minions. You really don't get to have a good fight against the Joker and that was a big disappointment for me because I could not wait to fight him. It was still challenging but not enough one on one fighting against the Joker.

Some other thrilling parts to this game include looking for all of the Riddler’s trophies and maps to find these little (?) marks. You never get to see the Riddler in this game but he has left plenty for you to do. Trying to find all his (?) marks is a task and kind of gives you an adventure feel to the game because even if you find all his maps that will tell you were they all are you still have to figure out how to get to them. A lot of them you need to be able to level up to get Batman's cool gadgets to work your way to get to these (?) marks. If you are having trouble finding some of these you need to climb up and line up the bottom with the top to be able to get a hold of these trophy's. Now once you have had your fun with all these little challenges and have beaten the game you can get out of the game and go to Challenge Mode.

This mode is really cool; you can have three or more rounds to free fight all of these inmates to try to get the highest score to be on leader boards online to see how well you do against the online community. They also have different achievements you can get in this mode, there is one to get if you can make it through without getting hit. Good luck with that one.

Now back to overall game play; I found the graphics to be really detailed and I have not had any glitches with regular play. This game really seemed to run smoothly and I had no problems such as jumping or things locking up on the screen. Which I’ve already had with another new game that I won’t mention but it starts with H and ends in O, but that is another review.

The free flow fighting was great and you could get great combo moves going basically flowing across the screen to each inmate you fought racking up combo points. It made the fighting fun and made me want more guys to fight at once to see what kind of combo it could rack up. Also being able to use corner cover to throw a Batterang at the armed inmates to knock out a gun or stun nightstick in their hands so you could get up and kick some ass without getting damaged faster from them was cool. That is something good to know is when a gun is involved it will kill you quicker making you feel that you are just a man not a superhero with special powers.

Thanks for reading my quick insight into this game and I would hope its enough to let you know this is an amazing game; certainly worth renting and a buy on my recommendation list. Let’s hope they make a follow up to this game.

Sean Colgate – Gamertag: Shabels1372