Batman Arkham Asylum

We’ve been struggling to find any videogame RPG releases to preview over the last few weeks. There are some good RPGs out there but they haven’t run up and grabbed us by the throat. It looked like we’d be waiting for Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed 2 to arrive, until we saw Batman Arkham Asylum.

This is the hard-edged Batman of the comic book Arkham Asylum – home to the Joker, Harley Quinn and Killer Croc during play. The gameplay is combat and gadget orientated with a control system capable of dropping Batman into large gangs of the Joker’s underlings.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

There’s also some roleplaying and plot to be found in the interactive ‘investigation’ side of the game. X-ray and fingerprint scanning are just part of a selection of forensic gadgets. Whether by accident or design, the investigative gameplay appears to offer a way of persuading even the most reluctant learner to learn and apply research skills and scientific methods. You won’t see Batman Arkham Asylum in many schools or libraries, because of the violence. Nevertheless, the questions the setting asks, and the skills players learn, make it more worthwhile or useful than your standard shooter.

The game’s graphics are excellent and confirm the need to keep to the recommended age rating. After all, play is taking play in an asylum packed full of criminally insane comic book characters. Unsurprisingly, a fast Dual Core or Quad Core processor, a $100 – $200 graphics card and 3GB of RAM are going to make the best of the game on a PC.