Top 10 Games of The Year 2009

Two – Batman: Arkham Asylum

Publisher: Eidos
UK Price: £24.99 (incl. VAT)
US Price: $48.99 (excl. Tax)
Bit-tech Score: 9 out of 10 – Excellence Award

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a game we’ve been playing a fair bit lately, going back through and snagging every single one of the collectibles and solving all the riddles in an effort to put the game to bed and allow us to move on to something else. Doing that has given us plenty of insight into the game and what exactly makes Batman: Arkham Asylum amazing – and we don’t think it’s any of the usual suspects.

It isn’t the level design. It isn’t the graphics. It isn’t the way the story sticks close to the comics and it certainly isn’t the boss fights. Instead, it’s something plainly obvious – the man, himself.

Long cape, gruff voice and a thousand yard stare that can pick up traces of evidence from miles away, it’s Batman that makes Arkham Asylum such a fun game to play. Rather, it’s the way that players are actually given a chance to feel like the caped crusader, which is itself achieved through a combat system that emphasises the role of timing rather than remembering button sequences and an environment that encourages exploration.


The Challenge Rooms which stand in for the disappointingly absent multiplayer mode carry this feeling on long after the singleplayer campaign has finished too, with players tasked with clearing rooms full of armed henchmen as fast as they can. Whether you choose to go charging in with fists a flinging or decide to sit back with batarangs and grapple gun is up to you, but either way you always feel the calm capability that is Bruce Wayne’s trademark.

Through a delicately controlled mood and allowing players to engage on their own terms, Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Asylum fully immerses players into the role and makes Arkham Asylum an almost intoxicating game to play. The fact that writers from the comics and voice actors from the cartoon series are attached to the game helps create an even stronger sense of identity too. Mark Hamill’s Joker is especially worth of praise.

At the same time Rocksteady has shown incredible restraint when dealing with the expansive DC Comics universe, veering away from the novelty villains and larger Batman family that have marred the series over the years. Nobody cares about Calendar Man or Nightwing, right? It’s far more interesting to be seduced by Poison Ivy or to see the world’s greatest detective pushed to his limits – which is what Rocksteady have delivered so brilliantly in Batman: Arkham Asylum.