The Method and The Madness: Batman: Arkham Asylum

As a character Batman has been crying out for a suitably powerful game adaptation. As a hero he couldn’t be more perfect; tortured dual identity, uncompromising attitude to low-level thuggery, an arsenal of gadgets and weapons, and a rogue’s gallery every bit as complex and memorable as the protagonist. Throw in decades of source material and inspiration that one could draw from film, television and comics and half of the leg-work is done for you. Alas Batman has been so criminally let-down by game-developers I reckon he’d give them a good kicking and a terse and gravely talking to himself if he could. From 2-D platformers to side-scrolling arcade beat-em ups Batman has served as one-dimensional icon to pull you in to a game otherwise indistinguishable from bland gaming tropes. It wasn’t until Lego Batman that anything close to a fully realised Batman entered onto this generation of consoles. But still, Lego Batman. Lego Batman?

Adam West would never stand for this cheery imagining of Batman!

Enter Rocksteady Studios, a British developer who felt the pain of Batman’s misinterpretation as strongly as any die-hard fan. Batman: Arkham Asylum is the gaming equivalent to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, though not quite perfect it nevertheless perfectly encapsulates the character and his world. Written by the mastermind writer of the animated series, Paul Dini, the plot has a simple premise, perfect for a game. Having captured Gotham’s most notorious ne’er do well, Batman personally escorts the Joker back to Arkham Asylum for the criminally insane. Despite he and Commissioner Gordan’s vigilance, Joker inevitably breaks free of his captors and unleashes hell on Arkham Asylum. Batman is tasked with re-taking the island from the insane inmates and figuring out as to why Joker went to all this trouble just to mess him around.

With his iconic cape and cowl, Batman makes a perfect 3^rd person action game icon. Arkham Asylum has a perfect blend of interior and exterior environments. The architecture and overall tone of the game is a subtle marriage between the contemporary influences of Nolan’s films and the Jungian Gothic overtures of the original comics. Navigating the world is exactly as you would hope it would be for a Batman game; you can grapple, glide and crawl through the various halls, labs and watchtowers. When you’re playing as the Caped Crusader you don’t want to feel that there are some areas of a room that are arbitrarily forbidden to you. What Rocksteady manages to accomplish is establish an in-game logic for making some part of the world inaccessible without making you feel as though Batman is being needlessly restricted.

As fun as it looks

  Arkham Asylum’s twin pillars of success are the establishing of fluid game continuity twinned with amazing knowledge and execution of Batman lore. Case in point, the combat, much like the navigation system, is effortlessly playable and intrinsically Batman. Combat is assigned to two buttons, attack and counter. Batman leaps, punches and high-kicks his way through rooms full of thugs with deadly grace and efficiency. Countering an enemy attack, like grabbing a piece of lead pipe off a bloke then flattening the man coming up behind you with it, all within a single move is disgustingly satisfying. Despite this, Batman is most certainly not invincible, miss-time your strike and expect a painful wang on the noodle and the threat of being surrounded and overwhelmed. However thread all your moves together and you can flatten twenty men within minutes which exactly how it should be when you’re playing as the Dark Knight.

However Batman is more than just a brawler and Rocksteady have addressed this aspect of the character with the same efficacy with some excellent stealth game-play. Every so often Batman is faced with a room full of thugs packing some serious heat, armed with looted shot-guns and assault rifles. Any attempt to take these guys head on as you would normally result in a definitely dead Dark Knight. Instead you need to be stealthy, grappling between gargoyles, awaiting your moment before executing a satisfying take down, such as the glide-kick or swooping down on a hoodlum  and then stringing him up by his ankles. As you thin the ranks of Joker’s henchman those left standing become increasingly nervous, firing wildly into the air and moving around back to back in pairs as opposed to on their lonesome. It’ll be an oft repeated assertion but Rocksteady have done their utmost in creating a game where Batman plays like the character that has been so well realised in almost every other medium.

Right after this the thug will fall back hands clasped to his face like he lost a winning lottery ticket

These two facets of Batman are articulated with such aplomb Rocksteady deemed them worthy of their own standalone modes. As you progress through the story you unlock challenge rooms for combat and “Predator Mode.” In the combat mode you have to survive successive waves of enemies and attempt to beat a high score by stringing together strike and counter combos. In Silent Predator Mode one must stealthily eliminate patrolling guards in specific ways whilst being timed. Though they didn’t hold my attention for all that long, when I was in the mood for them they proved to be an excellent way of show-casing the technical brilliance of the two game-play types.

Complementing Batman’s physical and martial prowess is a cavalcade of useful gadgets, grappling hooks and bat-arangs, all of which can be upgraded. Upgrades are purchased with experience points earned through taking out thugs like a boss, and completing Riddler Challenges and story missions. However by far your most useful tool is Detective Vision which serves as both x-ray vision and a highlighter for almost every collectible and plot-point you could mention. Though incredibly handy it’s almost too useful. As a result you find yourself wandering through corridor after corridor of xenon blue, only when you turn it off do you realise quite how much effort was made in the texturing and lighting to make Arkham Asylum as atmospheric as possible.

I See Youuuu

Aside from the main narrative, the island is full of distractions and collectibles, which unlike some games I could mention (Assassin’s creed and your bloody flags), compel you to keep collecting. In the early stages of the game Batman suddenly finds the Riddler rabbiting away in his ear, taunting him to solve myriad puzzles dotted and smeared all over the island. Though much of this involves hunting around for silly little question marks or “Riddler trophies,” what really keeps you rooting around in the bowels of the asylum are patient interview tapes and mysterious plaques. The patient interview tapes do exactly what they say on the tin, these little golden reels unlock disturbing tête-à-têtes between the Asylum doctors and the most infamous in-mates. One particularly disturbing collection involves the lesser known villain Victor Zsaz, a more conventional psychopath whose quirk is marking every one of his numerous kills with a little line, like a prisoner counting down the days to release. His audio-log devolved into a terrifying thriller which left me hanging as to whether the young woman interviewing him lives or dies. In truth these interview tapes, and the ongoing “Chronicle of Arkham”  (the account of an anonymous asylum administrator who tells a chilling tale of his own descent into depravity ) are somewhat more engaging than the main plot. As so often in games somebody who really shouldn’t, in this case the Joker, is trying to make a serum to make super soldiers, and you have to stop them. A somewhat pedestrian narrative, the main-game is peppered with some great encounters with a variety of Batman villains.

 These include a frightening flight from Killer Crocs subterranean lair, and a standout moment in which Batman grapples with both his psyche and the Scare-crow.  Having made you feel like the ultimate bad-ass Rocksteady, pull off a coup-d’état by pulling the rug from under your feet as Batman is reduced to a vulnerable wreck haunted by images of his parents death, their re-animated corpses blaming him for their demise.

Scary Spice!

Developing something new from an established IP is never easy, especially when the fan-base is as multi-dimensional as Batman’s. It’s impossible to please all of them, and many are wilfully complicit in their angry disposition, however it’s very easy to piss off all of them. A perfect example would be George Lucas who keeps retrospectively fucking with Star Wars, which though by law is his right, nevertheless manages to incense millions of fans who feel that it’s not his any more but theirs. There’s been a litany of terrible Batman games, and super-hero titles over the years, but Rocksteady did their very best to ensure they would be remembered favourably. By re-uniting the cast and writing team of the Animated Series, Arkham Asylum instantly has that recognisable quality. It’s obvious that everyone at Rocksteady felt the dearth of a decent Dark Knight experience as badly as the rest of us and they poured their heart and soul into this project. As a result Rocksteady give us the hero we not only needed but the one we deserved.