It’s been a long time since I’ve played such a well scripted and entertaining game as this. Batman: Arkham Asylum was originally released almost a year ago, but I just didn’t get round to playing it until recently. As it turned out Batman: Arkham Asylum is one of those games that I just couldn’t put down and had to play constantly until I finished it (rather like Assassin’s Creed II). After 3 fairly solid days play I had managed to complete pretty much everything the game had to offer, including all the tricky Riddler puzzles (more about these later). The fact that this game held my complete attention for so long indicates just how well crafted an experience it was.

More knifey shenanigans, this time set in within the renaissance.

In part 1 of this review I talked about the plot exposition and death. Here, I’m going to talk about controls and movement. Movement and Environment I have to admit, when I first saw the visual style of this game, I thought it looked absolutely bollocks. The characters appear to be 2D cartoon models against
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I love Ubisoft’s new Prince of Persia game. It’s not perfect, but it’s as damn near close as I’ve ever seen.

Objection!

This week I’ve mostly been playing World of Warcraft PC demos. Okay yes, one of them was a trial for World of Warcraft. Which I then bought 2 days later and have been playing ever since. But back to the point… this week I played the demos of PC games Mr Robot and Runaway 2:
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You wander around from room to room poking things until you trigger a 5-minute-long chunk of plot exposition-through-dialogue. And not even the kind you can leave playing while you walk away to do something interesting. You have to keep poking options. On the rare occasions that you actually get to do something, it’s trivial and not at all challenging. One memorable scene had me drawing circles on the screen to simulate cranking a wheel that opened a gate. Another had me scrubbing the stylus across the screen to rub rust off a plaque. Whoop-dee doo.

It’s not a game, it’s an interactive story. And by interactive, I mean that you get the exciting tasks of walking around large areas, carrying objects from one section of the level to another (and back) and, if you’re lucky, the chance to hack into locks through a simple mini-game.

The storyline is entertaining – it’s just not a decent game. There’s hardly any challenge and you get no sense of achievement by playing it. For the most part you’re sitting around watching cut-scenes. You get to choose from dialogue options but it still feels like you’re forced into one outcome.

Also, I finished it in two sittings. Rubbish.

It’s a chirpy light-hearted game where you help Raz (your psychic trainee hero) learn his new skills to earn his Psychonaut merit badges while wandering through bizarre mind-worlds to sort out entanglements in his and his teachers’ brains. These worlds are brilliantly diverse and psychedelic is the only appropriate word for the level designs.

Puzzles are mostly of the shooting or jump-about-platforms variety but with enough mad locations and twisted pathways to keep them interesting. The plotline and one-liners are intriguing enough to keep you going, although if you weren’t amused by the quotes above, this game definitely isn’t for you.

“Now why are you still talkin’ when you could be burnin’ stuff?”