Game Review: Batman Arkham Asylum
A review regarding combat animation, a rant on boss fights, and the legacy of a highly influential video game
Batman Arkham Asylum, a game of the year winner in 2009, is a monumental era-defining achievement in game design. I finally bought it a few months ago and beat it last night.
I had been hearing words and praise about Arkham Asylum for years and years upon more years. Why it took me so long to finally purchase a copy is a ‘me’ problem.
There’s no need to ask the obvious question, how does Arkham hold up today, because games that have been released in the wane of Batman have attempted to gather its balance of action, stealth, atmosphere, and story. The combat moreover made the biggest influence.
Similar to how video games have emulated Dark Souls dodge and attack style of fighting, Assassin’s Creed and Batman have influenced many games to use the counter system. Both styles are predicated on timing. The counter system is more forgiving than Souls combat where enemies punish you more for missteps.
Games where fighting is involved with a strike and counter system, most notably: Sleeping Dogs and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, have an Arkham Asylum feel to the combat and animation.
Combat animation. That is the defining victory of Batman Arkham Asylum.
Animation is the single hardest aspect to get 100%. Graphics can be picturesque, the storytelling can be memorable, the gameplay can be enthralling, but animation is never going to be perfect. Animation doesn’t have to be. Animation just has to sell the illusion what is happening on screen is close to reality.
Batman Arkham Asylum went through intense animation design. Ian Livingstone, president of Eidos, remarked that one developer spent 2 years working on over 700 animations for Batman’s cape. I cannot mentally comprehend how painstakingly boring that must be. But alas, if you desire to be the best, that’s what it takes to be the best.
I didn’t notice the cape in fighting sequences, mostly because I was kicking Joker’s cronies in the face. As much as I appreciate cape animation guy, the animators for Batman’s arms, legs, and torso were hard at work as well.
In order to sell the virtual reality, the animation has to be fluid. And how Batman catches punches, lead pipes, and throws punches and kicks are all executed with such rapid fluidity. The sound design is underappreciated, as sound design always is. The punches and kicks connect with crisp rewarding crunches and thuds. Every review on Arkham ever mentions how fun beating the life out of enemies is. The fluid animation and crisp sound design are why.
The fighting sequences are broken up between stealth, platforming, exploration, and boss fights, so it doesn’t get repetitive.
The one small deficiency games like Assassins Creed and Batman deal with is the logic of a large group of guys versus your one player character. The enemies only ever attack one at a time at most leaving the other enemies standing around idle. Point being, the way the common thugs fight Batman isn’t all that logical. If a video game has realistically figured that concept out, let me know, because that game is a work of pure genius.
The stealth sections are heavily reliant on patience. It’s certainly not stealth done at its best, but its functional. In order to force stealth upon the player, inmates are armed with machine guns, and their aim is deadly accurate. Further into the game, inmates have suicide collars that alert the other inmates when Batman has dispatched a patrol. Joker alerts the thugs via loudspeaker. Stealth can be tedious but rewarding.
Joker is the big winner of Arkham Asylum. Mark Hamill is on his vocal game to give voice and life to a Batman’s lively arch-nemesis. Harley Quinn is also bright, bubbly, and very twisted in the head despite a limited role. The villains are the thespians of Arkham Asylum, while Batman and the good guys speak with a strict word limit. To Arkham’s credit, the developers understood that they were making a video game and not a cinematic experience so cutscenes are minimal.
Arkham Asylum is considerate of adding challenge throughout the progression of the game at a steady clip. The game goes at a perfect speed for a player like myself who isn’t intensive on needing a challenging game where failure is expected. I don’t often play games on hard mode unless they’re sports titles.
-Rant-
This rant is not brought to you by fire, brimstone, or scathing vitriol. Rather, this is a problem in gaming that I’m more lukewarm about than heated.
Boss fights have been a staple of gaming since we all got to the end of a Super Mario Bros dungeon and faced off against Bowser’s long lineage of Koopa brethren until we finally reached the big pseudo-dinosaur himself.
I’ve never liked boss fights. They’re typically the most frustrating part of a game. I sympathize for game developers because boss fights have a long-rooted tradition of structure in gaming. When developers go outside the box, you have a chance of ending up with quicktime events being a central part of the boss fight gameplay.
I’m no history of gaming savant, but I’ve played quite a lot of games on a lot of different systems in my short lifetime. I hardly ever look forward to fighting bosses. Boss fights are an arduous process.
In shooting games, the boss eats more bullets than the common enemy. In fighting games, the boss takes a generous amount of attacks.
But more frustrating than the long health bars, are the reciprocal patterns. Even my favorite games like Mass Effect to Star Fox 64 to Deus Ex, boss fights are predicated on learning a pattern.
That being said, some patterns can be more variable or rewarding to figure out. Deus Ex being a prime example. But even if a boss fight is more innovative in style, it can take a couple deaths to figure out the necessary pattern. Some may find that fun, for me, it depends on the game.
The traditional boss fight formula is a variation of: dodge, dodge, find an opening, attack, dodge, dodge, find opening for attack. I find it to be monotonous.
It’s not that boss fights completely lack gratification for me, but designing a really good engaging boss battle has been rare in my gaming experience. Even if the story sets up a truly magnificent evil villain like, say, the Joker, a run of the mill boss fight doesn’t carry significant weight for me. This rant is not exclusive to Batman Arkham Asylum. I can’t recall many video games in general where I enjoyed fighting bosses.
I’ll also throw this bone to Arkham Asylum’s boss fights. I thought they offered and brought some fun to the table. Batman dispatches of his foes in short cutscenes that allow Batman to effortlessly throw Harley Quinn into a wall.
The final Joker fight is anti-climactic for Joker standards. Not his best-animated performance.
But as this rant was intended to do, this is a call to gaming as a whole. Great boss fight design is hard to come by, and it requires a lot of rethinking of what a player wants out of the experience. Now I can accept the fact I might be in the vocal minority in this situation, but I can’t help but be a human with my own independent thoughts. I digress.
-End Rant-
I would be remiss to not give props to the original story. While Arkham Asylum doesn’t involve complex character dialogues, the story is so efficiently and effectively told that extra dialogue would be unnecessary fluff. Watch how easy this story is to sum up:
Batman captures Joker who unleashes a trap inside Arkham Asylum locking Batman in with many of his most fearsome foes. Batman must stop Joker from unleashing a deadly army of monster soldiers with a toxin called, Titan, that could destroy Gotham City.
That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. Simplicity is refreshing when done right.
I do have a hot take to finish off my Arkham Asylum thoughts. I did not appreciate the Scarecrow segments. I recall a portion of the game early on when you first encounter Scarecrow legitimately had me frightened. Be aware that it’s well documented that I’m afraid of my own shadow.
The three Scarecrow platforming sections were mostly a snore to me. It was innovative, and I appreciated the storytelling aspect of Scarecrow trying to get in Batman’s head, but nonetheless, I wasn’t entertained by the alternate dimension where I run and hide from Scarecrow’s gaze. It wasn’t done in a scary way which is good for my blood pressure, but I’d go for a better form of stealth platforming.
Before I conclude with the obvious words about how Batman Arkham Asylum is a great generational game of our time, I’d like to assess replayability. Do I see myself playing Arkham Asylum again? I guess that’s why Arkham City exists. Arkham Asylum does have challenges where you can just beat the shit out of baddies or do a stealth section, so that offers some extra value. I probably won’t be playing the main game again though, which is fine. I believe the challenges were added for that reason, a sign that the game devs understand how to fully satisfy a gamer’s palate.
Batman Arkham Asylum is a great generational game of our time. A game with a smooth balance of gameplay and excellent fighting animation, I do applaud Arkham Asylum for its successes. Will it be one of my personal all-timers? No. High on the consideration list? Yes.
