On Superhero Games: Lay off the Weak Sauce, Will Ya?

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best game of the year so far, and will no doubt be a strong contender for the official title when the time comes.  Of course, judging by the “Game of the Year Edition” re-releases on the shelf, there were approximately 9,956 titles earning such accolade last year, so I’m going ahead and giving the win to Batman right now.

That doesn’t erase the fact, however, that as good as this game is (“unrelenting in its quality” says Tycho from Penny Arcade), as flawlessly designed and executed as it is, as much as it keeps calling you back even long after you have finished it and found every single hidden gem it has to offer, it glances over one very important fact, something I thank my friend mysticalforest for bringing to my attention.

That point is: you are playing a superhero, not a superhero-in-training.  So, why don’t we get to be a superhero for the length of the game, instead of having to slog away and earn the really cool skills and gadgets?

By the end of this game, you will have an assortment of high-powered technological gadgets that assist you in traversing the environment, opening up secret passages, and disabling multiple enemies.  You will be able to remove foes from fights instantly with bone-breaking takedowns and withstand a substantial (thought still not excessive) amount of gunfire.  By game’s end, you will feel like Batman, doing everything he can do in the comics and films and cartoons, all with minimal effort.

However, at the game’s start, you know a few basic moves, have only a single batarang, and are easily felled by a few swings of an iron bar.

Does this ruin the game?  Not for me.  Watching a character grow stronger as you play a game is immensely satisfying, and considering that a little re-working to the script would make this title easily work as a Splinter Cell or Metal Gear Solid game, the progression of strength doesn’t feel entirely out-of-place.

This typical element of game design, however, is twisted a bit when you’re dealing with an iconic of a character as Batman.  There are other things to consider besides giving the player a growing sense of confidence and strength: chiefly that this character comes with pre-conceived notions of how they should handle themselves during combat and exploration.  Rocksteady nailed this right from the start, making Batman a perceptive individual with a sharp, logical mind as well as a big, strong man with incredible agility and strength (seriously, Batman breaks his vow to never use guns in the first five minutes of game play, if you catch my drift).  However, part of those pre-conceived notions people have of Batman concerns not just his physical prowess and razor-sharp intellect–it’s also his gadgets and training.

So why do I not have access to said gadgets and training right from the start?  Sure, a simple punch is as strong as it should be, coming from Batman, and I can track objects at the molecular level, but why do I have to earn a takedown move, or improved armor?  Why do I have to dig up a zipline?  Why am I half-way through the game before I can hack security gates?

If the developers had made this a “year one” story, then it would have made sense for Batman to grow in strength as the game progressed.  But this is not a year one story–this is Batman in his prime, with an established history with his allies and enemies.  Batman should be a walking weapon capable of handling himself in any situation at the start of the game.

There are still plenty of ways to make this game challenging, even with a fully-armed Batman.  More confrontations with armed enemies, the danger of an innocent person mixed in with the bad guys you have to take out, more puzzles to solve, and more intricate boss battles would have satisfied the need for challenge all throughout the game, while still presenting a fully-realized Batman.

Arkham Asylum is a wonderful game that serves as a love letter to the source material, and it’s refreshing to see Batman operate in an environment this varied and to have his skills tested so fully.  But please, Rocksteady, for the inevitable sequel, don’t make me have to earn the right to play the character that I am supposed to be playing.

Batman: Arkham Asylum–My God, It’s Beautiful

There are some games that, when you play them, they instill in you a feeling of awe and wonder.  You know that you are playing a classic when you play them, and to experience them is to be  in the presence of something incredible, beautiful, maybe even sacred.

These kinds of games are few and far between.  Yes, there are many games that are incredibly well designed, are engaging in both mechanics and narrative, but only a few games accomplish what all of them attempt: fully immerse you in another world.  They do not make you forget reality so much as they, even when you are not playing them, replace reality with the game world, pulling you into a realm of imagination and discovery and giving you the tools to explore this place not as if you were visiting there, but as if you lived there and was only exploring an as-of-yet undiscovered niche of a greater expanse.

BioShock.  The original God of War.  Half-Life.  The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.  Final Fantasy VII.  Goldeneye.  The true gaming classics that will never outlive their prime, that will never age, that will always seem fresh and new and exciting.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the most recent of these kind of mythical, mystical classics.

I can’t say enough good things about the game.  Griffin McElroy from Joystiq said it best when he stopped just short of saying “it will birth you anew in its magnificence.” Every review from all the major outlets has been overwhelmingly positive, and deservedly so.  Put simply, Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best game this year thus far and will long be remembered as one of the best games of this console generation, perhaps ever.  It excels at taking an already existing fictional canon and making it the developers’ own while giving us a game that would be amazing even without the framing of said canon.  This is the game that Batman fans have been waiting for, and the game that people who couldn’t care less about Batman have been waiting for, without even knowing it.

Everything is top-notch.  The combat is brutal and quick, complex yet easy to control.  It keeps you on your toes without overwhelming you and empowers you without pandering to you.  The stealth game play is deep and satisfying, and somewhere along the way you find yourself thinking “I’m actually thinking like Batman,” and it’s exhilirating.  Boss battles are neither overly complex or dumbed down, with strategies befitting the situation and the opponent.  Level design has a logical flow and backtracking is kept interesting with a steady stream of new items with which you access previously unreachable secret areas.

The aesthetics of the game are everything that a game set in an old-style insane asylum should be, whether it is a Batman game set in Arkham Asylum or not.  At times beautiful, at times eerie, at times cold and unfeeling, at times downright terrifying: the asylum itself is a character, silently observing the events within it, completely neutral in the conflict this game represents.  The artistic staff on this game deserve delicious cake from every Batman fanboy in the world, because they brought Arkham Asylum to life the way Christopher Nolan brought Gotham City itself to life in his superb films.

The musical score and voice-acting have the integrity of a major motion picture, with Mark Hamill giving us a Joker that stands toe-to-toe with Heath Ledger and makes us forget entirely about Jack Nicholson.  Kevin Conroy has been the voice of Batman since the animated series from the ’90s, and he brings the same dignity and authority to the character that he always has.  The music is matched flawlessly with the on-screen game play; swelling crescendos highlight stealthy takedowns, pitched riffs frame cat-and-mouse sequences as Batman strikes from the dark, and shrilling string instruments underline moments of dread.

The story feels like a comic book story, with sensible turns and true-to-form dialogue.  Paul Dini really should look into adapting this into a graphic novel; it would be awesome, I’m sure.  Every cliffhanger, every moment of tension, every unnerving confrontation and race against the clock before the Joker or Harley Quinn do something really, really bad to innocent people feels like a love letter to the comics that inspired this game.

I usually don’t examine a game this fully.  I’m a stickler when it comes to game play and mechanics, but I consider narrative and environmental aesthetics icing on the cake.  I sometimes feel that designers spend too much time making their game look pretty or giving their game a solid story and not enough time making their game a solid play experience.

Batman: Arkhams Asylum, however, does everything right.  Rocksteady made an incredible game, and fleshed it out with artistic integrity rivaling what one would see in a movie theater, or a museum for that matter.  And it’s because they approached everything with equal zeal, because they refused to compromise on anything, because they didn’t sacrifice game play for fan service but managed to pump this game full of goodness all the way around, that Batman: Arkham Asylum is such a brilliant piece of work.

Batman: Arkham Asylum–Best Comic Book Game EVER

The demo for what may be the most anticipated game this year that isn’t called Modern Warfare 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, has finally hit both PSN and Xbox Live.  Download now–right now–and play it, because it is incredibly awesome. 

Much like The Dark Knight really felt like a Jeph Loeb Batman story sublimated to film, this game really feels like the developers went for the comic book feel first, and then fleshed out the game play elements around it.  Of course, their “fleshing out” amounted to a fluid, intuitive combat system that (even in the short demo) evolves into almost puzzle-based encounters once the enemies get ahold of guns.  Unfortunately, experiencing Batman-as-detective–something that Eidos and Warner Bros. have been quite enthusiastic about in their attempts to point out that this game is not a brawler by any means–is not something in the demo, but Batman is a fighter; a smart, tactical, precise fighter.  That element of his character comes across without a hitch.  His combos are not the big, loopy, “RAWR ME AWESOME!!!” viking-on-crack ‘roid rages of God of War and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  He fights with quick punches, going for big moves only when the opponent is dazed.  Counters are bone-crushing without being theatrical, and takedown moves look like they really hurt–but also look like I, with enough training, could totally pull them off.  Those of you who were fearful of another God of War or Devil May Cry rip-off need not worry.  Combat in Arkham Asylum has more in common with Metal Gear Solid 3 than Ninja Gaiden 2.

Purists may gripe with some of the character design, but much like Batman wears black in the movies because it looks better than navy-and-gray tights, the newly-imagined characters work.  Bane and Killer Croc are more terrifying than ever, all ripping muscles and grotesques posture, and Harley Quinn will make those sad and lonely goth boys drool even more heavily, all dressed up in her nurse’s uniform.  I’m more of a Poison Ivy man myself, and yes–she looks equally seductive (if the character whom I think is Poison Ivy from the attached trailer is indeed, Poison Ivy).

I’ve never been more excited for a game after playing a demo than for Batman: Arkham Asylum.  August 25th cannot come soon enough, and as long as the game keeps delivering moments like the fight with Dr. Zsaz it will be a real thrill ride for Batman fans. 

And how did the fight with Dr. Zsaz go?  Simple: move in the shadows around the ceiling, sneak behind him, glide from a post above his head, kick in the back of the skull, and then pounce on him with a single hard punch to the jaw.  Quick, clean, brutal: just like Batman.  I have a feeling we’ll be hearing those words a good number of times as people talk about this game.