Batman: Arkham Assylum Demo

The world and its dog has been getting very excited about this game of late.

I haven't. Partly because it's being produced by Eidos and they haven't brought out anything good since Thief: Deadly Shadows but mostly because it's a Batman game and many successive movie Tie-ins have proved it's extremely hard to do a Batman game.

But what the hell, there's a demo out for the PC version prior to release and so I thought I'd check it out for rarity value if nothing else.

It didn't start well, I have to say. You lead the Joker into Arkham and he escapes in the most predictable and preventable manner imaginable. You are then presented with several goons to fend off. The controls feel... okay. They're quite consoley but a Batman game is one of the few circumstances where this might be appropriate.

The fist fighting is... okay. It's rather like Assassins Creed in that it's based around striking, counters and take downs. This isn't a bad thing, by any means. It's not original but it's much better than most other games that have hand to hand combat in them.


Things got much better when the game opened up a bit... I was presented with three guards with guns. Obviously I couldn't take them head on so I snuck round the back and took them all down silently one by one. This felt briliant, but very linear.

Things improved again when I got to the climax of the demo - a huge room with four armed men in it. I had to take them all down.

Armed with my night vision goggles (which register weaponry, targets' state of mind from information such as their heart rate etc.) batarangs and my bat rope thing, I swung around on gargoyles, dropped down behind one guard and Ju Jitsu'd him until he was unconcious. I then hung from a gargoyle until a goon passed below me, I strung him up by his feet.

His cries brought his mates, though. I glided into one of them, classic Batman style but the other ones shot me a few times. I was close to death but I managed to escape.

I dropped down to the lower level. The guard didn't know where I was so I followed him all sneaky like, watching his heart rate sky rocket.

Here's where I first really noticed the AI and fantastic animations. The guard walked heasitantly, looked around and, at one point, spotted the movement of the chap I'd strung up from the gargoyle and opened fire at it.

That, my friends, is fucking cool.

I used this distraction to climb up behind him and remove him from the land of the concious.

I am now completely sold. It's probably not going to be a briliant game but it will be extremely fun and diverting if the demo is anything to go by. Check it out :)