Review by: Mitch Dyer

Because of Batman’s unique abilities and physical limitations, he makes an ideal videogame hero – and with Batman: Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady brilliantly blends everything that makes the Dark Knight such a fantastic hero. He doesn’t have any special powers or unique abilities: he’s a damn fine detective with oodles of ass-whoopin’ know-how and a barrel of gadgets to play with.

The idea of investigation within an action game sounds like a great way to kill the enjoyment, but I really came to love tracking missing people and digging for clues through the detective vision mode. On top of tracing blood or alcohol, this perspective gives you a glimpse of enemy locations by letting you see their skeletal structures through walls. It starts to feel a bit like a puzzle game when you’re perched in the rafters, looking down on six criminals patrolling an area, and it would be extremely difficult to just guess where the danger was without this vision.

The catch is that I ended up using it so much that I missed a lot of detail in a spectacularly beautiful game. I constantly felt like I was missing out on some gorgeous aspect of the setting because I relied on the blue-tinted comfort of knowing what waited ahead.

Rather than throw a wrench in the gears of Arkham’s action sequences, the slower-paced detective and stealth segments balance out the pace of the game, giving it a tone that is very in line with the comics. The combat is easy to get a grip on and satisfying to watch, so you’ll get your fill of Bruce Wayne laying down the law on some two-bit thug in the army of seemingly cloned clowns that patrol Arkham.