by Tabara Dorin-Alexandru

Created on: July 12, 2011

          Everyone knows Batman. Everybody heard about Michael Keaton,  Van Kilmer,  George Clooney or Christian Bale fighting crime on the street, chasing bad doers from street thugs to malefic characters.

         Now on to the game.  In my opinion Batman is a very good action-game.  Perhaps one of the best action games of the decade.  Everything from storyline,  combat,  dialog,  atmosphere is carefully combined in Arkham Asylum.  The mechanics for all the abilities are easy to get into.  When fighting you only have 3 abilities:  Attack,  immobilize and counter-attack.  The trick is that you must press them at the right time or tie enough hits for a combo.

         Besides you will learn every ability you can take throughout the game easily.  One of the greatest feature of the game is that you can easily have fun without thousands of buttons or combos.

         The game has loads of puzzles.  You spend around 25% of the game solving them. The fact that puzzles make up for  a great part of the time spent in the game is amazing.  Most of them are not required to advance in the storyline and some of them come in the form of questions and riddles.  There are over 240 secondary puzzles made out of hidden objects,  elements leading to riddles,  disks with characters interviews or chronicles of the Arkham Spirit.

         The graphics are extremely atmospheric,  good shadows,  a dark pallet of shadows but at the same time  the amazing architecture of the Asylum lead me to think that Batman was a good candidate for Game of the Year.  The game is not linear and you will be amazed by the events unfolding before your eyes.  Joker and Harley Quinn and their funny dialogue give flavor to the game overall.

          You can have a lot of fun in this game just trying to solve the puzzles.  Every little thing gives you a small/big reward so the additional content is sure worth finishing unlike most of the action games nowadays.

          The game is full of secret areas that you can wander around from bat caves to creepy dungeons.  Although not all zones are accessible from the beginning you can use your gadgets,  bend jail bars or creep trough the sewers to enter them.

          Overall Batman:  The Dark Asylum has a great atmosphere,  exemplary soundtrack,  amazing game-play,  enough additional content and still manages to be non-linear.  The only minus this game has,  is that after you play it a lot the surroundings may give you a deja-vu feeling because the environment is sometimes repetitive.

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