After years of letdowns and poorly made licensed movie spin-off games, Batman finally gets the game he deserves. It is wonderful, gloomy, bone-crunching, puzzle-solving, sneaky, gadget-using fun. Recently it was awarded the Guinness World Record for the “Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever”, defeating the nearly ten-year reign of Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
However, there is a fairly small list of serious contenders for this title, which really speaks to how bad superhero games usually are. It was breath of fresh air in a genre where games are pumped out to release with movies. Gamers everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when we realized that it was more than just Batman: The Movie You Loved Turned Into a Below-Average Game.
Why can’t this happen more often? Why are huge successful franchises unable to translate into games? Why did Arkham Asylum work where so many Spiderman, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings spin-offs fell into mediocrity?
Arkham Asylum accomplishes something we rarely get in gaming–the feeling that we really have taken on the persona of the character we are playing. We get to see it all: Every punishing blow dished out by nameless brutish henchmen, every clever plan collaborated on with Barbra Gordon, and every stealthy move where we bash in a henchman’s head. If you think about Batman strictly in the context of comics or movies, there is a lot of time where he is off-screen doing something sneaky, or maneuvering into the perfect position. In Arkham Asylum, it’s your turn to plot.
It is not long, though, before we realize that Batman is just a human being (as Joker puts it, “Dressed like a maniac and armed to the teeth”). He stumbles into henchmen, falls when blasted with a shotgun, and after taking a few hits (despite his amazing martial arts skills) falls with a sickening thud, screaming in pain. We are delivered the whole package–even the traumatic flashbacks of the night Bruce’s parents were murdered in front of him (including the obligatory shot of Bruce kneeling in the street light next to their corpses.)
Perhaps this is because Batman is a fantastic character with well-defined strengths and weaknesses. After you clear a room of fifteen steroid-using thugs you feel extremely powerful, but it is quickly stripped away when those same thugs arm themselves with machine guns. It is to the credit of the developers that they were able to establish this fundamental separation of the action: Brawl-y, then stealthy, repeat, and then toss in a boss fight.
Superhero games live and die based on expectations granted to the player by the original medium; more specifically, can the hero in this game live up to their portrayal from the movie/comic? By this metric, Arkham Asylum is absolutely the greatest success in superhero gaming.
Those moments where you think “Spiderman could totally crawl over that barrier,” or “Why is all of Metropolis covered in kryptonite-laced metal?” are completely gone. What Batman: Arkham Asylum delivers is neither watered down nor simplified. It is the full-bodied, straight-from-the-tap Batman you grew up with. You watched him on TV, you loved his movies, and finally after years of trying, you can play his game.
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