The game itself is great but I wish Eidos did a better job with the UI.
I like this game, a lot, but I'm not sure that I love it, and that depresses me because I want so very much to love this game. The actual game play is great. The graphics are superb, the voice acting is first class, hand-to-hand combat rocks and the gadgets are neat. So what's not to like? Basically, Eidos took a first class action arcade game and mated it to a very clunky PC interface that keeps this from being one of the best games of 2009.
As expected, in Arkham Asylum players take the role of Batman. The Caped Crusader is returning the Joker back to Arkham Asylum after a brief escape. Arkham is part Gothic lunatic asylum and part Supermax prison filled with plenty of poorly lit corridors, ineffectual guards, hidden tunnels, and seriously whacked out patients on steroids. The atmosphere reminds me a lot of the original Chronicles of Riddick without the filth and the foul language. Once inside, Joker manages to easily escape again, capturing both the warden and Commissioner Gordon, and allows the inmates takeover the asylum. Batman's job is to put things back in order, sometimes by stealth, sometimes through good detective work, but mostly by dishing out bone crushing UFC beat-downs.
Arkham Asylum is located on an island with several large buildings and the general strategy of the game is to enter each building, clear them of bad guys, and rescue hostages. Aside from the primary goals players can earn extra unlockable items by locating hidden objects scattered throughout the game. Some of these are very easy to find using Detective Mode which is a type of selective visual enhancer that highlights hidden objects. Others can be very challenging, requiring the player to interpret riddles posed by The Riddler in a type of Where's Waldo game. Don't expect to move from one building to the next in a completely linear fashion. As unlockable items are obtained one will be going back to previous locations multiple times to gather items that were previously inaccessible and this may be frustrating at times because one sometimes gets the feeling of having been there and done that over and over again.
The combat in this game is absolutely awesome. Players will usually be asked to fight multiple goons at once, delivering a front-kick to the chest here, a roundhouse right to the kidney there, all while blocking a third enemy and sending a fourth to the curb. Outside the single player campaign players can engage in extra combat challenge rounds for points and compare scores with the GFWL community. The only mild letdown here is that there isn't a lot of realism to the fighting in the sense that bodies hit the floor but never bleed or break, probably in order to maintain a T for Teen rating by the ESRB rather than the less marketable M for Mature.
Character animation and scenery are great and don't require a top end PC. I played this game on a Core i5-750 (2.66 GHz quad) and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU with 4 GB of RAM. I had no problems maintaining an average 60 fps with all graphics features turned on. The voices are supplied by many of the actors that portrayed characters from the WB afternoon television series, including Mark Hamill as the Joker. The textures and facial features are all well rendered, I especially liked the Joker and Scarecrow designs. As the game progresses, players will notice that Batman begins to take more and more damage and this adds to the realism.
The tragedy is that this game could have received a higher score from me if not for the fact that while Eidos did almost everything right in the game they made numerous mistakes out of the game. This is the same Eidos that brought us great titles from the 90s like Deus Ex and Hitman that managed to avoid all of the obstacles described below.
For starters, players without a gamepad will find that the key binding software is just awful. In previous Eidos titles (and almost any other game out there today), players can hit Esc at any time, go to the options menu, and remap the keys to configurations that are most desirable, then re-enter the game without missing a beat. In Arkham Asylum, players must completely exit the software in order to access the full range of options for customization. Moreover, there are many features that cannot be mapped until unlocked in game. For example, the ability to hang upside down from the rafters and grab opponents cannot be mapped until the ability is unlocked. If players don't like the default key mapped to this feature then one must exit the software, re-enter the settings menu, find the proper binding, then restart the software. This is all needlessly clunky and could all have been accomplished with some smarter interface design.
Secondly, despite the fact that this is a pure single-player game, user authorization must be accessed through Microsoft's Games For Windows Live Service at least once to register the game. While this is sure to be a money maker for Microsoft through the sale of DLC it adds nothing of value to the player buying and playing the original game except to add yet another layer of loading screens to what are already too many in this game. I understand the desire from publishers to protect their IP but for players like me that purchased the game through Steam, GFWL is absolutely redundant.
Thirdly, there does not appear to be any way to save game progress incrementally. The game cannot be saved at arbitrary points; instead, the game is automatically saved at specific times as the player progresses but these saves automatically overwrite the previous save. As a result, there does not appear to be any way to go back and replay a favorite section unless one has the foresight to once again leave the game and back up the saved game file to a new name or a new location.
In my opinion, the option to remap key bindings on the fly and the ability to save game progress incrementally are fundamental features that should be included with any title, especially one from a well-established software house that has done this flawlessly many times before. Combine these shortcomings with the middling annoyance of requiring GFWL for digital rights management and I have no choice but to downgrade the score for this game from Outstanding to merely Very Good. I am told that a sequel to this title is already in the works. I hope very much that Eidos takes these shortcomings into consideration and gets back to their roots in order to release a follow up that is truly worthy of a Game of the Year award.