From the passenger seat: Batman Arkham Asylum

a small percentage of the bats you'll be seeing in game

I love to play games. There's no question that I could waste an entire day on the couch playing a good or even passable videogame. One thing that I also occasionally will do is spend an entire day watching someone else play a single player videogame. This puts me in the interesting position of seeing what the games has to offer without having to put in any of the effort or have any of the stress; I can simply sit back, give out advice, help with a puzzle or two and enjoy the game. Of course, I would never review a game that I didn't actually play myself, so instead I'm writing this to discuss some of the things that struck me about the game as an observer who only occasionally handled the controller.

Yesterday, my friend and I finished up Eidos and Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was originally released on August 25th for both Xbox 360 and PS3. I watched about 85% of the games story happen, but I won't ruin any of that for you, I'll just say that it's a fairly good take on the Batman universe, giving him the darkness that his character has had since Frank Miller penned The Dark Knight Returns, but also retaining the cartoonishness of some of the characters that films so often lose in their attempts to be more realistic. I didn't see all the villains that I would have wanted to, but I suppose there are only so many you can cram into one game. I expected, since it was the asylum where all villains are usually held, that they would all be making appearances in some form, but the best you get for most of them are biographies with their backstory and first comic book appearance. The villains who do show up are well done, with the exception of Harley Quinn who, for some reason, just doesn't fit in. She sounds great, all the voice work is excellent, paricularly the Joker and the Riddler, both of whom you will hear frequently, but she looks a bit like a cheerleader dominatrix who doesn't know how to apply makeup. Batman himself looked just the tiniest bit wrong to me as well, but then again, something about that costume has always looked wrong to me.

One of the big features of the game is Batman's "detective mode." Underneath the silly costume, gadgets and martial arts, Batman is primarily a detective, and in Arkham Asylum they use this as a means to pointing out key objects or giving you useless tips about enemies heart rates with the flick of a button. Detective mode is so useful that my friend, very annoyingly, played most of the game with it turned on, and while it will highlight things you might have missed, it also totally covers the games graphics. The strangest part of it is that you see an x-ray of enemy's bones when the mode is turned on, but this is never utilized for anything. It would have been cool if you could watch your enemies bones being broken as you fought them, but this never happened. As it was, there was no need to see x-ray's of anyone, it never makes sense that you see x-rays of anyone, and it mostly just served to hide the game's excellent graphics.

Batman has an array of gadgets in the game, but with the exception of the batarang, they're all designed to allow you to get from one spot to another. This would have been fine since the batarang has a huge range and can be auto-aimed at enemies, but it felt underpowered. When you hit an enemy with the batarang, they would fall to the ground and be dizzy for a few seconds. This gave you some time to run up and knock them out, but was useless if there was more than one enemy because you can be sure that someone will punch you in the head before you have time to do the knock out animation. I realize it would have been too easy if you were allowed to beat all your enemies from a distance, but if you got hit in the head multiple times with a bat shaped boomerang, you would likely be out cold. The Joker must have screened all his henchmen for their ability to take multiple blunt blows to the head with the batarang in mind.

The fighting in the game usually only takes one of two forms; either you're facing unarmed men and can just run up and beat them all unconscious with your fists or they have guns and you'll have to take them out one-by-one with stealth to stay alive. The unarmed fighting is a lot of fun, and all you have to do is hit the attack button and point your stick in the direction of enemies to do huge combos, but you will also need to counter or dodge sometimes, and certain enemies require you to hit the stun button before you can get a hit in. These guys will take a serious beating and still get up, but without a weapon they don't stand a chance. The stealth gameplay, on the other hand, is not great. It makes sense that Batman is only bullet resistant and after about 200 or so he would be knocked down, and I know that he is known for moving about in the shadows, but the stealth in the game is less fun than it should be because there is no clear way of knowing whether enemies will spot you or not. Often times you can swing right by someone or be crouched a few feat above them and they won't spot you, but other times, in the same exact spots, they'll see you and you'll have to run away in the most nonsense way possible, by swinging back and forth between gargoyles. Over ten years ago Metal Gear Solid brought us the ability to see fields of vision, and it made stealth tolerable. Today, Batman can only see his enemies skeletons and heart rates. There are also too few ways to actually take out enemies with stealth, and one of them is locked until you purchase it with upgrade points.

I did play about an hour of the game myself, and I found the controls to be pretty easy in most cases, often with prompts popping up on the screen to remind you. My only complaint has to be that you have to tap the button rapidly to open vents or tear down walls. This is a very gamey mechanic that doesn't add to the realism or the fun of the game. I think we are at a point in games where we can hit a button to open something and not feel bad that we weren't in full control while it was happening. The gameplay felt a little heavy at first, since there was no dedicated jump button and batman will saunter around at a leisurely pace, but once you get used to it, it feels perfectly natural. Zipping to the tops of buildings and other structures is also a lot of fun, although it sometimes feel artificially limited in what you can grab onto with your 'batclaw.'

The games good points are many; the graphics, the voice work and the story are all very good by videogame standards, and I really enjoyed that the island was open to explore any time, limited only by which gadgets you had, and that it wasn't strictly linear even though there was only one story event you could be doing at any given time. The whole experience is less than ten hours, but this is about what you can expect from a videogame these days. There is some added value through the hidden collectible items you'll have to hunt down and the challenge mode, which asks you to take out enemies as quickly as you can, but I can't imagine anyone coming back to challenges time and time again. I'm not aware if downloadable content has been announced for the game, but I could easily see some extra story missions being added at a later date, especially since there is an item in the menu called "downloadable content."

Batman: Arkham Asylum is available now for Xbox 360 and PS3, and if this were a review, I'd recommend it, whether you're playing or just watching.