You can duck under grates and behind corners, carefully timing your button presses to neutralize targets without alerting the rest of them. You can grapple up to gargoyles on the walls, swooping down on enemies from on high. Charging even a couple of enemies with guns and will get you cut down before you can take them out, so you need to use Detective Mode, which allows you to see enemies through walls and identify objects with which Batman can interact. Where the game really shines is in its stealth elements, which are essential to your survival. If the game would let me punch one of the Joker’s henchmen without being so melodramatic, I might have had a better time. Straight ahead combat is competent, but a little over the top – if you start a combo, which happens often, the camera goes into Super Dramatic Slow Mo Action Mode, which is occasionally cool but mostly immersion-breaking. For the layperson, this means you’re looking at Batman’s back most of the time, and charging the enemy head-on will almost certainly get you killed. I’ve never read the comics – it’s a facet of nerd-dom to which I’ve historically not been privy – but the game’s creators were thoughtful enough to include detailed character biographies for the unwashed masses, we who are only familiar with The Bat because of Christian Bale or Adam West. Eager to separate fact from marketing, I dove into the demo and was pleasantly surprised.įirst thing’s first, Square Eidos and Rocksteady studios will automatically win points with comic buffs by eschewing the continuity of the movies and cartoons, using the comic books as their canonical backdrop. Square Enix (née Eidos), the game’s publisher, seems desperate not to see the game fail, at least based upon the endless salvos of screenshots fired into the blogosphere every day and the late-August release date – no fighting over Christmas money for this game.Ĭan it beat the hype? Any game this exposed risks failing simply because expectations were ratcheted too high, but I generally try not to get my hopes up for comic book-related video games. Over the last few months, I’ve spent more time reading promotional material for Batman: Arkham Asylum than I have spent actually playing games, and that’s no exaggeration.

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