Batman: Arkham Asylum was released at an extremely fortuitous moment. It released in 2009, a year after The Dark Knight blew expectations out of the water for superhero flicks and gave the Batman IP a new lease on life, and about a decade before the MCU released its umpteenth entry, furthering superhero fatigue (also, it was a year before the first Avengers film, which would change the direction of superhero films, and thus media, to come). It released in the middle of the seventh generation of consoles, where the likes of Assasin's Creed and Bioshock had already started trends that would soon take off (at times to the point of annoyance), but whose trends still felt fresh and interesting. It wasn't just that Arkham Asylum was a good superhero game, it was that it was a good superhero game at the right time.
Batman: Arkham Asylum's nearly universal praise at the time of its release is certainly something to take into account when talking about the game, because many of its elements have dated somewhat and an examination of the game can feel oddly dissonant if not properly considered with the time in which it was released. What I mean is that several of the things Arkham Asylum got praised for - its combat, its exploration, the way it feels like you are actually Batman - can be turned on its head from a modern perspective, but the seventh generation of consoles has an identity that is easy to forget since much of what comprised that identity has become vilified in the eight generation. In particular, heavily marked maps, sticky, almost one-button combat, and general gameplay decisions meant to invoke a feeling rather than mechanical depth. The seventh generation of consoles was obsessed with making games as approachable as possible, while trying to shrink the tutorial times of the previous generation. It was about streamlining, about making things have a nice smooth feel at the expense of depth, and Asylum isn't much different.
Arkham Asylum plays with a few types of genres that it lightly threads into one another, though without much depth that progenitors of these genres had. The asylum itself has metroidvania aspects, requiring backtracking with new gadgets in order to see everything, get to the next objective, or grab collectibles. The game also has a sincere lineage in collect-a-thons, with 240 collectibles in the game. When the game wants to be more action focused, it plays like a combo-brawler (like Double Dragon with a dash of Devil May Cry for flavor, but without any of the depth the latter could give) or like a stealth game, albeit one with extremely easy outs if you're ever caught. It toys with the genres for the excitement the idea brings, but does not give in to their more challenging aspects.
Largely, this is okay. The combat doesn't have much depth mostly because it can be exploited, even on the hardest difficulty. There is actually a nice myriad of combat options to enhance your combo, but rarely are any of them needed, and more often than not they can lead to your combo meter resetting rather than making it climb. Honestly, this is fine. The combat is enjoyable enough and has enough variety to remain fun to the very end. What the combat fails at is in enemy selection during combos. The game wants the combat to feel silky smooth so you can feel as badass as Batman, but what this does is it sticks you to an enemy and when they group around you, as they do when they are in greater numbers, it can be incredibly difficult to get Batman to stop focusing on one guy and refocus on another. A lock on feature could have helped this, but that would have inhibited the smooth play that the game is going for. The solution, as the game presents it, is either to do a counter or to jump over the back of whatever enemy is behind you. Each of these presents its own problem. Jumping over enemies can be exploited to get around enemies and has virtually no weakness except it won't increase your combo meter and it won't hurt the enemies. But it can still be exploited to maintain your combo meter, even if it is a boring way to play. The counter system is a bit more tricky. It's easy enough to pull off a counter, but when swamped with groups of enemies, you will find yourself having to chain counters together with no way out. Counters do very little damage, so it can exacerbate the combat time, which means you need to get out of the area in order to start walloping enemies again. There are tricks that can be used, such as a stun, throwing a batarang, or using the bat claw to displace enemies from attacking stances, which adds to the depth, but in higher numbers this will not get you out of the woods of a loop of counter attacks as there will be enough people needing to be countered that by the time you are done with them, those you stunned are back on their feet and swinging. The combat is nearly very good, but just misses the mark by making things feel too sticky for you to reliably use attacks, making counters far more required than they should be.
Stealth sections feel extremely simple. There are easy stealth objects to interact with such as gargoyles to hang from, or grates in the floor to hide in, making being caught less of a big deal. The game starts to exploit this reliance toward the end of the game, but only a little. Most of your stealth is essentially placing explosives or waiting for enemies to walk alone. You can send a batarang that emits a signal to lure someone to their lonesome end, but that's about as complicated as things get. Take the agency in The Last of Us Part II or the planning of Splinter Cell as examples for different, more complex styles of stealth play. Arkham Asylum wants to give the impression of stealth more than the mechanics. It does its job, but they are rarely a challenge in the main story. Challenge modes outside of the main story are better, requiring certain knockout conditions to get the highest score.
Exploration is probably the game's greatest strength. Checking every nook and cranny of the asylum is quite a bit of fun, even if the island's general design doesn't make much practical sense (those botanical gardens look extremely expensive for a place made for super villains). Most of the exploration is used to hide the Riddler collectibles. These collectibles are mostly good, but generally a mixed bag. Most of the trophies to collect are obvious, and are as simple as waiting for you to get the proper tool that allows you to reach them. Smashing Joker teeth as a part of the collectibles feels like XP padding (as though this game really needed XP in the first place - another seventh generation trend). Collecting tapes of the super villains in therapy is actually one of the best uses of this game cliche, so they get a pass for their inclusion. The best collectible in the game, then, is the riddles themselves and the Chronicles of Arkham. The Chronicles of Arkham are notes left by Amadeus Arkham, the asylum's founder, and his gradual loss of sanity. The story revolving around these collectibles is somewhat interesting, even though the payoff (which I won't spoil) is somewhat disappointing. The other riddles, which usually have you taking a picture of a particular location as the answer, are actually a lot of fun, usually playing on your knowledge of Batman villains. As a fan of the comics (though not all that dedicated), I can't tell if they are easy for the uninitiated, but several gave me the impression that they would be solvable by most anyone. It helps that because there are so many reused assets, seeing anything unique usually indicates it has something to do with a riddle. The riddles can be aped this way, but largely I'd have to give a win over to the riddles. They were fun, they rewarded my enjoyment of the subject matter, and they added fan service in a meaningful way by making them collectibles.
Arkham Asylum's biggest claim to fame, however, was in how it made you actually feel like Batman. It's hard to make this into any sort of objective statement, but the game feels immersive as a piece of Batman lore. Even though it is obvious the game acts as a parallel universe to the comic book Batmans, it feels believable as a Batman story. They want monsters, they use a Batman resource to make them. They want chaos, they use Batman lore to instigate it. They utilize the IP for just about everything they want to include, and it feels very snugly Batman with few if any outliers that give it a "game" feel over a Batman feel. Key to this is casting several voices from the Batman: The Animated Series show, one of the best non-comic representations of the character and his world to date. Some of the designs feel a bit overdone here and there, but largely they appeal to the aesthetic and presentation you'd expect to a faithful Batman production. Saying the game makes you feel like Batman feels pretty apt, because the game is concerned first and foremost with being a Batman property, and utilizing that property to make a game.
Despite my criticisms about how it has dated, Batman: Arkham Asylum holds up as an incredibly fun game, even if it isn't quite up to snuff on the game front. Asylum is about a feeling more than it is about mechanics, and that can be a success it takes with it. It feels distinctly a game of its generation, almost to the point of being a poster boy for certain design trends of the time, but that gives the game a certain nostalgic twist I wasn't expecting. It may not hold up as the classic many remember it to be, but it remains debatably the best Batman game to date, with only its direct sequel giving it contention.
8.0
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