Adventures in Engineering

The wanderings of a modern ronin.



I'm expecting to get flamed by fanboys of this game for not being rabidly in love with it. People often seem to have a hard time separating "this is my opinion" from "this is the absolute truth" - even when such is explicitly stated. Well, FWIW: nothing in this review is absolute truth; this is only my opinion.



Arkham Asylum is a fun game. And it has fantastic production values. And it kept me up until 5:30am on three different nights. And yet... I find myself not liking it as much as I should. Oh, it's not that I *dislike* this game. But I feel like I ought to be a rabid fanboy about this game, and yet I'm not. Why is that? Well, let me tell you some of the reasons - that should make this review a bit more interesting. I mean, if you want to know all the great things about Arkham Asylum, you can read any of the ten thousand reviews by rabid fanboys who love it to death. But if you want to know what someone thought the game's flaws were? That's going to be a little harder to find...



My one-sentence summary is that Arkham Asylum is a super-model. Amazingly gorgeous, huge amounts of money dumped into every visual aspect of it... but the more you get to know it, the more you find that there's not a lot of depth underneath the pretty.





I think what it comes down to is probably two things:



1) Too much re-use of the same gameplay - enemies, levels, game mechanics, gadgets.



2) I don't have an HD TV.



#2 is probably easier to explain, so I'll tackle that one first. More and more games are being made with HD TV in mind. The easiest way to tell if this is true for any particular game is to play it on a standard-def TV and see if in-game text is tiny, blurry and mostly unreadable. Arkham Asylum mostly avoids this pitfall by not having much text. About the only text you really need to read is the Riddler Puzzle text that appears at the top of the screen. I have a mid-range SD TV, and that text is damn close to unreadable - even when you press your nose right up against the glass.



But more generally, the lack of HD hurts this game badly because so much effort was put into the visual aspects. It's like a nerd with bad eyesight looking at a super-model without his glasses. I mean sure, you can tell she's pretty... but how much prettier is she really? I can tell that the 3D models for all the thugs you're constantly fighting, and all the bosses, were extremely well done. But playing on an SD TV, you'll never see it. It all gets blurred out like bad water-colors. The over-the-shoulder and high-up camera angle doesn't help in this regard, either. The camera is too far away from things to get a good look at them.



But, oh well, you won't notice all this graphical goodness anyway... because you'll spend the whole game in Detective Mode! Detective Mode is Batman's x-ray vision. You can see people through walls as brightly-colored skeletons, and interactive objects (like doors and vents) are highlighted in red-orange. Pretty much everything else (including all that gorgeous, unbelievably pretty level design and all the excellent character models) are damped down to practically nothing. Just a dull, dark midnight blue. The game encourages you to stay in detective mode all the time for several reasons. The first is that it allows you to instantly spot enemies that are either far away or hidden behind walls. The second is the afore-mentioned ability to easily spot non-obvious exits like vents. Detective Mode is also required to follow chemical trails or fingerprints when you're tracking someone - a game mechanic that gets badly overused. Near the end of the game, I started forcing myself to turn Detective off, just so I could see the levels normally for once. Then I went around a corner and stumbled right into the laps of three thugs with machine guns, and got killed. It was detective mode all the time after that. Lastly, some of the Riddler Puzzles require you to be in detective mode just to see them.



Since we're on the subject, let me talk about the puzzles. I felt like they really didn't add much to the game. There are three forms of Riddler Puzzle: question mark trophies scattered around the levels (usually in hard to reach places), "take a picture of object described by this clue" puzzles, and "spot the question mark drawn with invisible ink". The latter being the one you need detective mode for. Of the three, the only one I actually liked was the last. Those were interesting because they'd break up the question mark into multiple pieces, then paint each piece on a separate object, all done in such a way that you'd have to go to a certain place in the level for all the pieces to line up. Pretty much aping those



Also, the reward for solving these puzzles was pretty flimsy. Some "interview tapes" with the various characters being analyzed by shrinks. I think out of maybe 20 or 25 of these, one was worth listening to. I did rather like the "Chronicles of Arkham", which are these stone tablets you scan rather like the "take a picture" Riddler puzzles. However I had a big "huh??" moment when I scanned the last one. Maybe it's just me, but, uh... that shit just don't make no sense!! Whatever. Suffice it to say I didn't feel like these added any real replay value. I think just before I went into the last battle, I had something like 336/340 Riddler Puzzles solved. And I really didn't think about them that hard. The only ones that taxed me at all were the sewer question mark, the Tweedledum/Tweedldee one, and the question mark on the arch capstone (which had a "clue" that gave you no actual clue about its location).



Other than walking around in detective mode looking for Riddler Puzzles, you'll spend most of the rest of your time beating up thugs. I have to give them credit here, they made a good combat system. It's extremely fluid and intuitive. The problem is that, like most of the good things in this game, the fighting system itself gets (if you'll pardon the phrasing) beaten to death. For maybe the first half of the game, you fight the exact same clown-thug over and over again. Oh, sure, sometimes it's three at a time, sometimes even six. And sometimes the thug has had his texture map tweaked slightly so he's black instead of white. But these fights all go down the same way. You keep hitting the attack button until you see someone about to hit you (nicely indicated by little wavy lines above their head), then you hit the "counter" button to counter their attack. Then back to mindlessly wanking on the attack button. They do try and mix it up later on, by introducing a new thug who has knives, and you have to hit a different button to disarm him before you can attack him. (Why he knows how to block your attacks when none of the other thugs ever do is a mystery to me.) And there's eventually a third thug who carries a cattle prod and you have to jump over him and attack from behind. But it's all so repetitious and dull. The throw and combo upgrades you can buy barely make any difference, and the knockout move takes so long that you're sure to get walloped by two other thugs while you're trying to knock the first one out.



The sub-bosses suffer from similar problems. By the time you've fought your 5th mutated henchman who has the exact same attack pattern as the previous 4, you'll be asking yourself how Joker could be so dumb as to keep throwing these idiots at you, when they don't even slow you down. I think they also tried to spice things up by changing the arena you do these sub-boss battles in, but unfortunately the only "change" they could think of was: "Make the room smaller - that'll make the action more intense!!" The absurd extreme is the battle in the elevator room in the caves, where you're fighting about 15 thugs and one giant mutated thug sub-boss simultaneously. I elected simply to run around the perimeter of the room in circles for ten minutes, letting the mutated thug's constantly missed swipes at me kill the little thugs. Then I took him down easily. Okay, okay, one time they do put you in an arena with an electric floor and you have to avoid getting zapped. But they basically even repeat THAT arena a second time, during the Titan Ivy battle! What I wouldn't have given for one original fight... even the two stealth levels feel like total repeats of each other.



The gadgets. Batman is famous for great gadgets. The gadgets in this game are decent, but like everything else they're just beaten to death. You get a batarang, of course. And 18 different variations that you can buy as upgrades. Of which I found only the multi-batarang actually useful, the rest were total wastes. The batclaw was a nice idea, but they couldn't just let it stand on its own - they had to make a STUP0RZ-BATCL4W!!!!1!! that you can't get until very late in the game. And then made a bunch of puzzles all over the place that you can't get until you have the super-batclaw, thus forcing you to go back over all the levels for a 17th time once you get it. At least you won't forget where they are, since you've seen them all 16 times that you've been through the level before, because you're running around with Detective Mode constantly on. The spray-on, remote-detonate explosive was a good idea; I give them props for that. The line gun or whatever it's called is such a cop-out. I'm trying to think of a single time I used it where the grapple you have at the start of the game wouldn't have worked just as well. It basically felt like the developers said, "We need one more gadget to complete the compliment of 8. What do we do?" "Ummm... make a HORIZONTAL grapple, instead of the normal VERTICAL one." "Brilliant!!" It's like they were ripping off their own previous idea of ripping off the bat-claw. The line gun is TEH STUP0R-GRAPPLE, LAWL!!!!1!!! The security box hacker gadget was useful, and its upgrades were good, so I give them full credit for that one.



Fights, gadgets, puzzles... what am I missing? Level design. The level designs kick total ass! I loved grappling all over the levels. Fantastic stuff. You also have constant access to your cape-glide, allowing you to grapple up to high places and then glide down - including glide-kicking thugs. Fucking great; I loved every second of it. The levels are moody, detailed, excellently textured, nicely lit and generally the best thing about the game. Sucks that you won't see nearly as much of them as you should, because of constant detective mode. :P Like everything else, they beat the levels to death. I think even a very minimalist run-through of the game would require going through all of them twice, except for maybe one. The one exception is the Scarecrow levels, which will be old hat by the time you're done with the second one. Oh, they're very visually pretty, but not much fun... a pretty big contrast to the rest of the levels, which I had huge amounts of fun with. I kinda found myself wishing for more of a sandbox type world. All those tall mountains between the different part of the island looked like an awfully cool playground for the grapple. They probably couldn't do that due to technical limitations - mostly memory I'm guessing. That said, the size of the levels is just about perfect. They're just big enough that I can't quite remember everything about them, and so it forced me to explore a bit. I credit this factor more than anything else as to why I found the game so immersive. The levels sucked me in and I had a great time just getting around. They took a necessity (moving from place to place) and made it fun.



Character design? Like all the other visual aspects of the game, these are excellent. Totally wasted on a standard-def TV, but excellent never the less. When you die, you can see every little green-painted hair on Joker's head as he mocks you. Love the new sexy Harley design. Croc wasn't bad, but they built him up so much for the entire game that when you don't actually get to fight him, it's a big disappointment. That's what they get for thinking about the sequel instead of thinking about the current game. :P





So, hopefully I have some fanboy blood boiling by now, pointing out these things that I didn't personally like about the game. I want to stress again that I don't dislike this game as a whole. Not at all. It's a great game overall, and I definitely recommend it. In fact, I think it was the fact that the game was so good that made the few flaws it does have stand out more.



Thoughts? I'm expecting to get flamed by fanboys of this game for not being rabidly in love with it. People often seem to have a hard time separating "this is my opinion" from "this is the absolute truth" - even when such is explicitly stated. Well, FWIW: nothing in this review is absolute truth; this is only my opinion.Arkham Asylum is a fun game. And it has fantastic production values. And it kept me up until 5:30am on three different nights. And yet... I find myself not liking it as much as I should. Oh, it's not that I *dislike* this game. But I feel like I ought to be a rabid fanboy about this game, and yet I'm not. Why is that? Well, let me tell you some of the reasons - that should make this review a bit more interesting. I mean, if you want to know all the great things about Arkham Asylum, you can read any of the ten thousand reviews by rabid fanboys who love it to death. But if you want to know what someone thought the game's flaws were? That's going to be a little harder to find...My one-sentence summary is that Arkham Asylum is a super-model. Amazingly gorgeous, huge amounts of money dumped into every visual aspect of it... but the more you get to know it, the more you find that there's not a lot of depth underneath the pretty.I think what it comes down to is probably two things:1) Too much re-use of the same gameplay - enemies, levels, game mechanics, gadgets.2) I don't have an HD TV.#2 is probably easier to explain, so I'll tackle that one first. More and more games are being made with HD TV in mind. The easiest way to tell if this is true for any particular game is to play it on a standard-def TV and see if in-game text is tiny, blurry and mostly unreadable. Arkham Asylum mostly avoids this pitfall by not having much text. About the only text you really need to read is the Riddler Puzzle text that appears at the top of the screen. I have a mid-range SD TV, and that text is damn close to unreadable - even when you press your nose right up against the glass.But more generally, the lack of HD hurts this game badly because so much effort was put into the visual aspects. It's like a nerd with bad eyesight looking at a super-model without his glasses. I mean sure, you can tell she's pretty... but how much prettier is she really? I can tell that the 3D models for all the thugs you're constantly fighting, and all the bosses, were extremely well done. But playing on an SD TV, you'll never see it. It all gets blurred out like bad water-colors. The over-the-shoulder and high-up camera angle doesn't help in this regard, either. The camera is too far away from things to get a good look at them.But, oh well, you won't notice all this graphical goodness anyway... because you'll spend the whole game in Detective Mode! Detective Mode is Batman's x-ray vision. You can see people through walls as brightly-colored skeletons, and interactive objects (like doors and vents) are highlighted in red-orange. Pretty much everything else (including all that gorgeous, unbelievably pretty level design and all the excellent character models) are damped down to practically nothing. Just a dull, dark midnight blue. The game encourages you to stay in detective mode all the time for several reasons. The first is that it allows you to instantly spot enemies that are either far away or hidden behind walls. The second is the afore-mentioned ability to easily spot non-obvious exits like vents. Detective Mode is also required to follow chemical trails or fingerprints when you're tracking someone - a game mechanic that gets badly overused. Near the end of the game, I started forcing myself to turn Detective off, just so I could see the levels normally for once. Then I went around a corner and stumbled right into the laps of three thugs with machine guns, and got killed. It was detective mode all the time after that. Lastly, some of the Riddler Puzzles require you to be in detective mode just to see them.Since we're on the subject, let me talk about the puzzles. I felt like they really didn't add much to the game. There are three forms of Riddler Puzzle: question mark trophies scattered around the levels (usually in hard to reach places), "take a picture of object described by this clue" puzzles, and "spot the question mark drawn with invisible ink". The latter being the one you need detective mode for. Of the three, the only one I actually liked was the last. Those were interesting because they'd break up the question mark into multiple pieces, then paint each piece on a separate object, all done in such a way that you'd have to go to a certain place in the level for all the pieces to line up. Pretty much aping those cool 3D perspective illusions you may have seen. But, again, you have to be in detective mode constantly to find these.Also, the reward for solving these puzzles was pretty flimsy. Some "interview tapes" with the various characters being analyzed by shrinks. I think out of maybe 20 or 25 of these, one was worth listening to. I did rather like the "Chronicles of Arkham", which are these stone tablets you scan rather like the "take a picture" Riddler puzzles. However I had a big "huh??" moment when I scanned the last one. Maybe it's just me, but, uh... that shit just don't make no sense!! Whatever. Suffice it to say I didn't feel like these added any real replay value. I think just before I went into the last battle, I had something like 336/340 Riddler Puzzles solved. And I really didn't think about them that hard. The only ones that taxed me at all were the sewer question mark, the Tweedledum/Tweedldee one, and the question mark on the arch capstone (which had a "clue" that gave you no actual clue about its location).Other than walking around in detective mode looking for Riddler Puzzles, you'll spend most of the rest of your time beating up thugs. I have to give them credit here, they made a good combat system. It's extremely fluid and intuitive. The problem is that, like most of the good things in this game, the fighting system itself gets (if you'll pardon the phrasing) beaten to death. For maybe the first half of the game, you fight the exact same clown-thug over and over again. Oh, sure, sometimes it's three at a time, sometimes even six. And sometimes the thug has had his texture map tweaked slightly so he's black instead of white. But these fights all go down the same way. You keep hitting the attack button until you see someone about to hit you (nicely indicated by little wavy lines above their head), then you hit the "counter" button to counter their attack. Then back to mindlessly wanking on the attack button. They do try and mix it up later on, by introducing a new thug who has knives, and you have to hit a different button to disarm him before you can attack him. (Whyknows how to block your attacks when none of the other thugs ever do is a mystery to me.) And there's eventually a third thug who carries a cattle prod and you have to jump over him and attack from behind. But it's all so repetitious and dull. The throw and combo upgrades you can buy barely make any difference, and the knockout move takes so long that you're sure to get walloped by two other thugs while you're trying to knock the first one out.The sub-bosses suffer from similar problems. By the time you've fought your 5th mutated henchman who has the exact same attack pattern as the previous 4, you'll be asking yourself how Joker could be so dumb as to keep throwing these idiots at you, when they don't even slow you down. I think they also tried to spice things up by changing the arena you do these sub-boss battles in, but unfortunately the only "change" they could think of was: "Make the room smaller - that'll make the action more intense!!" The absurd extreme is the battle in the elevator room in the caves, where you're fighting about 15 thugs and one giant mutated thug sub-boss simultaneously. I elected simply to run around the perimeter of the room in circles for ten minutes, letting the mutated thug's constantly missed swipes at me kill the little thugs. Then I took him down easily. Okay, okay, one time they do put you in an arena with an electric floor and you have to avoid getting zapped. But they basically even repeat THAT arena a second time, during the Titan Ivy battle! What I wouldn't have given for one original fight... even the two stealth levels feel like total repeats of each other.The gadgets. Batman is famous for great gadgets. The gadgets in this game are decent, but like everything else they're just beaten to death. You get a batarang, of course. And 18 different variations that you can buy as upgrades. Of which I found only the multi-batarang actually useful, the rest were total wastes. The batclaw was a nice idea, but they couldn't just let it stand on its own - they had to make a STUP0RZ-BATCL4W!!!!1!! that you can't get until very late in the game. And then made a bunch of puzzles all over the place that you can't get until you have the super-batclaw, thus forcing you to go back over all the levels for a 17th time once you get it. At least you won't forget where they are, since you've seen them all 16 times that you've been through the level before, because you're running around with Detective Mode constantly on. The spray-on, remote-detonate explosive was a good idea; I give them props for that. The line gun or whatever it's called is such a cop-out. I'm trying to think of a single time I used it where the grapple you have at the start of the game wouldn't have worked just as well. It basically felt like the developers said, "We need one more gadget to complete the compliment of 8. What do we do?" "Ummm... make a HORIZONTAL grapple, instead of the normal VERTICAL one." "Brilliant!!" It's like they were ripping off their own previous idea of ripping off the bat-claw. The line gun is TEH STUP0R-GRAPPLE, LAWL!!!!1!!! The security box hacker gadget was useful, and its upgrades were good, so I give them full credit for that one.Fights, gadgets, puzzles... what am I missing? Level design. The level designs kick total ass! I loved grappling all over the levels. Fantastic stuff. You also have constant access to your cape-glide, allowing you to grapple up to high places and then glide down - including glide-kicking thugs. Fucking great; I loved every second of it. The levels are moody, detailed, excellently textured, nicely lit and generally the best thing about the game. Sucks that you won't see nearly as much of them as you should, because of constant detective mode. :P Like everything else, they beat the levels to death. I think even a very minimalist run-through of the game would require going through all of them twice, except for maybe one. The one exception is the Scarecrow levels, which will be old hat by the time you're done with the second one. Oh, they're very visually pretty, but not much fun... a pretty big contrast to the rest of the levels, which I had huge amounts of fun with. I kinda found myself wishing for more of a sandbox type world. All those tall mountains between the different part of the island looked like an awfully cool playground for the grapple. They probably couldn't do that due to technical limitations - mostly memory I'm guessing. That said, the size of the levels is just about perfect. They're just big enough that I can't quite remember everything about them, and so it forced me to explore a bit. I credit this factor more than anything else as to why I found the game so immersive. The levels sucked me in and I had a great time just getting around. They took a necessity (moving from place to place) and made it fun.Character design? Like all the other visual aspects of the game, these are excellent. Totally wasted on a standard-def TV, but excellent never the less. When you die, you can see every little green-painted hair on Joker's head as he mocks you. Love the new sexy Harley design. Croc wasn't bad, but they built him up so much for the entire game that when you don't actually get to fight him, it's a big disappointment. That's what they get for thinking about the sequel instead of thinking about the current game. :PSo, hopefully I have some fanboy blood boiling by now, pointing out these things that I didn't personally like about the game. I want to stress again that I don't dislike this game as a whole. Not at all. It's a great game overall, and I definitely recommend it. In fact, I think it was the fact that the game was so good that made the few flaws it does have stand out more.Thoughts? Post A Comment | 9 Comments | Share | Flag | Link









Wait... so this isn't a Batman/Cthulhu crossover?



On second thought, that might be a good thing. Reply | Thread | Link





> so this isn't a Batman/Cthulhu crossover?



I wish. Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





I'm really enjoying the game too.



It's funny that you mentioned the "detective mode", I was wondering if I was the only one who played the game completely in that mode. It makes all the effort of the visual design moot, as you never see it in all its glory. At least not while playing. But on your 17th time through a level, you might take the time to turn it off and take a gander at all the effort they went into the design.



You described all the flaws of the game rather concisely and I find it hard to believe that any fanboy would disagree with the apparent design. Fanboys love this game not because of the game play, but because of the integration of the mythos, which was pretty fantastic. And the voice actors were pretty darn convincing.



-l Reply | Thread | Link





The voice acting was great. Gritty Batman, menacing Joker, crazy-ass Harley. The reason I liked the Chronicles of Arkham so much was the excellent voice acting there. Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





I think that most of the criticism of the game is pretty much what you went over. I found myself feeling a little disappointed by the repetition of the game in a lot of areas, and while I understand the necessity for scaling back items and "rewarding" you with them piecemeal, it doesn't seem to really add value to the game. For someone who is as forward thinking as Batman, you would expect him to have something somewhere at all times.



I thought it was a fantastic game, but like every other fantastic game I have played, emphasis on one thing pretty much meant sacrificing something else. The question is whether or not they were able to do it so that you wouldn't notice what was missing. Reply | Thread | Link





I wish they had played to their strengths more. If only they had found some way to coax people out of Detective...



What did you notice that was missing, in particular? Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





I pretty much lived entirely in Detective Mode in my first run through the game. Once I knew where everything was, it was easy enough to get through obstacles, etc in Hard mode. The two things I enjoyed most were the combat system and visual aesthetics of the game. I think you agree on that.



That being said, I felt that the sometimes arbitrary "you can't use the grapple now" was shortsighted - especially since at almost every incarnation of the character, the grapple was something that drilled into substrate and could grab onto ANYTHING. This more or less made the visuals for the game just eye-candy and not actually useful. I found this really lacking since the whole point of Batman (I thought) was to be as "ninja-like" as possible - grappling, hiding, outsmarting folks, etc. I can understand Joker telling his boys, "plant bombs and that will neutralize the Bat," but I also figured Batman would also be smart enough to use the hacking device to do something to the bombs.



I also thought that while Hard mode was actually adequately hard, I thought that while it would take much more thought and programming time, being given a New Game+ mode where you start with everything in the game would have been fantastic. The Joker is supposed to be an amazing criminal mastermind on par with the Batman, only with a different psychosis. You would think he would have figured out a way to use the Asylum security or layout to neutralize certain items or tactics. Also, it would have been gratifying if there was a New Game+ mode where enemies could actively take hostages, steal your gear (but not use it since the utility belt is booby-trapped), and generally make your life miserable in ways outside of "oh hay there are 10 thugs this time." It would be pretty challenging to figure out tactics to save hostages that aren't conveniently placed out of harm's way.



Things like that, I guess. Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





> Also, it would have been gratifying if there was a New Game+ mode where enemies could actively take hostages, steal your gear (but not use it since the utility belt is booby-trapped), and generally make your life miserable in ways outside of "oh hay there are 10 thugs this time." It would be pretty challenging to figure out tactics to save hostages that aren't conveniently placed out of harm's way.



That's a pretty good idea. It might have forced me to use some of the batarang upgrades that I didn't use at all - like sonic(/shock) batarang. Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





Some of the batarang upgrades were legitimately useful, though only in context of the challenge modes. What is really sad is that the challenge mode shows how flexible and awesome all of the gadgets are -when put together as a seamless arsenal- but you never get that until the end of the game as a means of driving the situation in a linear fashion (or so I believe).



It's pretty rad to be able to have four guys in a room on a trellis, knock off three with the grapple, quickly flip to sonic shock and then blast the remaining guy. Too bad you don't get the chance until the very end when it's pointless and not really useful. Reply | Parent | Thread | Link





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