cronvek's blog

I have a few hours to myself now… Before the Twestival begins… I figured now was the time to begin a review.. the first ever. I thought that a recently published game would be the best choice for this – that would be Batman: Arkham asylum on the XBox360.   Tell me what you think!

**warning – spoilers – etc**

I am one of these folks who wish they could be sneaky. The kind of person who plays Hitman – but just goes in and blasts everyone dead. Who thinks they can TOTALLY be sneaky – but gets found within ten seconds of stepping onto the level because they started shooting while in the air while whooping loudly.

So – I did worry that batman would be one of those games I just wouldn’t be able to “do”, that the stealth factor for me would mean death so often I would require a new controller after a few hours. I am (partly) glad to inform you that this isn’t the case.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a game where you play The Dark Knight, you just caught joker and you are taking him to arkham asylum for the criminally insane. The you feel the capture was just slightly too easy – and your bat-nose is tingling. As you help escort Joker in you learn to discover that it was all a big trap for you – and now you are trapped in the asylum and the lunatics are loose but it seems Joker has some sort of master-plan here…

Yes, it seems batman is the master of gadgets and the master of shadows – I saw the Dark knight and the random batman shadows throughout. But while stealth does play an important factor in some parts of the game – thankfully you don’t need to be a master of stealth yourself to manage. No matter how much noise it must make when steel grapples embed themselves into rock to be able to support you swinging about like tarzan, these are your little havens. Generally if you want you can just flying to a group of enemies and just melee them all to death – rather than attempting any kind of take down. I heartily recommend trying this at least once, near the beginning. There is something very seemless and quite exciting about how the combat is shown.. very cinematic would be the phrase! It looks fun, and is fun to take part in! Although getting the hang of counters is quite difficult (at least in hard, where you don’t get a nice little warning of when to counter, thus you have you read body language and movements of the enemies to know when to press the button) once you master it – it looks even damn cooler.

The gadgets are a giggle – if not slightly silly (whats that? I can upgrade to throw TWO BATAMARANGS AT ONCE?!) but can be difficult to get the hang of where to use certain tools – and there are certain parts where it isn’t quite clear what to do, a certain hostage situation is one example… where the woman ends up dying anyway, however, if you don’t work out what to do in time – that is insta-kill, and depends on you knowing a certain move to achieve (at least, how I found to do it). I understand the time limit and while it is there – but I generally feel it added nothing to the gameplay overall.

However – as a game – personally I found it fantastic fun, enjoyable if a little cutesey at some points, but they got the feel of the joker, of the riddler and there are plenty of extra things that the major batman will be desperate to collect, while the general gamer will be pretty cool extra touches. Overall it is dark and sinister… but it is only a 15.

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