On the Subject of Batman: Arkham Asylum

Kelly Brook

People have been bleating on about Batman: Arkham Asylum being a great game for a while now. In between playing some games I genuinely was interested in, I thought I'd give it a try.

So far, so shit. The basics are there; it looks pretty enough, it runs smoothly enough, the controls... work. I've been using a 360 pad because it's "one of those games" which benefits from one.

One thing that bugs me about the game is how Batman seemingly isn't allowed to kill anyone. It's not that you get punished for killing people, it's that you don't get the chance. Henchman come at you armed with everything from fists to sniper rifles, by way of shotguns and pipes and cattle prods, but once you've taken (knocked) them out, you don't get to pick up any of the leftover firepower. Oh no, you must continue with only your pacifist-friendly problem-solving toolkit. Rather than humanise Batman, or make the game more challenging or whatever the fuck it's supposed to achieve, all it does for me is work against the self-conciously "dark" atmosphere of the game and make it seem cheap and shallow.

Talking of cheap and shallow, there's the dialogue. What a load of uninspired, cliched shit. The Joker is a mind-numbingly irritating and tiresome character which absolutely makes me want to kill him (just like in The Dark Knight, funnily enough), which is fair enough, but then of course you know you're not going to get the opportunity to properly cave his skull in and he'll probably just end up incapacitated and ultimately locked up again at the end of the game. Harley Quinn (or however you spell it) has a certain fancy-dress whore charm (i.e. she looks hot) but she manages to be even more of a whining, screeching, vacuous cunt. And I have to say, "Bats" is such a fucking pathetic nickname. "Oh hello, Bats. Nice to see you again". The dialogue in general is just grating and awkward and bad.

But who cares about that sort of thing, it's all about the action, right? Maybe I'm just not in tune with old-school console beat-em-up mechanics or something, but I don't seem to get on with AA's combat system. It usually seems to descend into a load of random button-mashing which, 90% of the time, will win the fight. And the other 10% you just try again and end up beating it the second time for no discernable reason. It seems like it should be similar to The Witcher's timing-based combo system, but unlike with that game in AA I don't feel the same connection to the moves. The cues are probably there, but I'm too bored by the randomness of it all to notice them.

But what turns me off the most is how tediously repetitive the game is. The whole thing is just "chase the Joker, almost catch up with him, watch him run off to another indistinguishable part of the asylum while you fight a boss". Repeat. I'm not a fan of boss battles in any case because they're usually contrived and meaningless to the story and just serve to get in the way and artificially extend the game, and that's definitely the case in AA. The random combat doesn't help.

So I'm unimpressed. Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion that gamers have either given in to the torrent of cash-grabbing, derivative wank that some developers are putting out or else are too young to be familiar with genuinely innovative and involving games and so don't have an adequate frame of reference when it comes to quality. That is especially true of the absolutely loathesome Dead Space, and to a lesser extent Assassin's Creed. Although AA isn't quite in that league of middle-of-the-road, cheap, lazy piss-stained blandness, it's certainly not the impressive experience I was hoping for.