Batman: Arkham Asylum

Lauded on release, the passage of time reveals a curious lack of character

- Samuel Horti

The thing that defines our caped hero, he posits in 2005 film Batman Begins, is “not who I am underneath, but what I do”. If you judge 2009’s Batman: Arkham Asylum on those skin-deep terms, it was an unequivocal success. Its fluid fistfights kickstarted a new brand of thirdperson action, and you’ll still hear developers talking about “Arkham-style” combat today. It reversed the fortunes of Batman games, which up to that point were mostly forgettable tie-ins. And it transformed Rocksteady, then an unknown team with a single game under its belt – the obscure Urban Chaos: Riot Response – into one of the UK’s hottest studios.

Judging Arkham Asylum by what’s ‘underneath’, however, is trickier. It pits Batman against a host of his arch-enemies, including the Joker, Harley Quinn and the Scarecrow, but reveals nothing new about these characters. It toys with deeper themes of grief and trauma, but fails to explore them. In other words, Rocksteady doesn’t appear to say much about Batman other than: here’s how you make a good Batman game. That was fine at the time, but three other good Batman games later – Arkham City, Arkham Origins and Arkham Knight – Asylum looks less like a revolution. The deeper you dig, the more it looks like a missed opportunity.

Combat remains the highlight, and it’s not hard to see why so many games, from Shadow Of Mordor to Sleeping Dogs, took cues from it. Arkham Asylum wasn’t the first brawler to let you bounce from enemy to enemy (