Batman Arkham Asylum

Pull up a chair, stay a while, I’m going to tell you the story of Batman Arkham Asylum.

After spending many many minutes at gametrailers.com, I can tell you that my pants were soaked with all the drool I had. It just looked that good.

This is the sort of thing that I want to be able to create as a 3D game artist, but enough about me, back onto the world’s greatest detective.

The first thing that hooked me onto the game is the premise of the game sticking to the classical Batman.

Not the 1950’s Batman who takes a lighter approach to crime fighting and calls Robin “old chum”. Not Batman Returns, the grizzly old man who trashes anyone in his way within an inch of his life without remorse, who also likes his sidekicks with more feminie touch. Although getting better no. Not the Batman animated series, which had the right idea for batman, was watered down for the younger audience.

I’m talking about the Batman in comics such as The Long Halloween, where everything is black on black, clearly showing in the artwork aesthetics.

The game developers are setting out to make this game the love letter to all the Batz fans, with this being the climatic lead up of everything Batman.

But here is for the prediction:

This game is going to play just like a Devil May Cry, Prototype, Dynasty Warriors, Condemned mash-up. Can anyone say quick-time events? Lots and lots of them? From what I’ve seen, the fighting system is going to be a big quick time event, where you can string an endless combo of attacks if you “time it correctly” as well with counters. If that’s not enough quick time event for you, the goons emit a little symbol on top of their head when they are about to execute an attack, a more subtle quick time event.

There is even talk of a Prince of Persia mechanism that will prevent the Dark Knight from falling to his doom through a quick time event.

I try to be the least pessimistic about it, but when the developer says something like “in the end Batman is only human” I’m steeling myself for the inevitable frustrating death of frustration due to either crappy camera angles, mob rushes of goons, or both. Unavoidable in the beat ‘em up genre, but that doesn’t help make it any less frustrating.

Here’s hoping that the Dark Crusader can hold up game play wise, because at this stage, he is delivering in spades visually and in the audio department.