Very cool and surprisingly short experience. They truly do not make games like this anymore, for better or worse. Batman Arkham, both Asylum and City, are among the first games that come to my mind when I think of the seventh gen of consoles and the games that defined it. This is actually my first time playing this however, and it was good fun. This game's signature combat has been copied by a whole bunch of games, and with good reason. It is a joy to play around with batman as he caves in criminal skulls. When the combos are flowing like they ought to it almost feels like batman is dancing, just with a lot of broken spines. The animations are almost hypnotic, and I wanted to keep combos going just for how it looked at its best. The big enemies can be annoying though, their attacks are pretty much all unblockable and you have to dodge out of the way. They have a really quick punch that got me way too many times and was probably my main cause of death. Exploration is all right I suppose. the titular Arkham Asylum is quite pretty but fairly small. I don't mind personally, travel times are very low and it helps with the pacing. Fuck all the Riddler stuff though, I am never bothering to do that. I just picked the ones that felt natural and never touched anything else. Story was a standard comic book affair, but there's few villains as interesting as Joker. This game has produced what by now is probably one of his most iconic interpretations, and he steals the show every time he appears, and he appears a lot. There's a bunch of other Batman villains, but they weren't the most memorable. I think the boss fights sucking ass probably influenced this view for me. Really only Poison Ivy ans the Joker get like an actual boss fight, everyone else is just enemy gauntlets, probably with several of the most fuckin annoying enemy type thrown in. Overall, maybe if the game was longer I might've been aggravated, but at its length I found it very digestable and it kept my attention through most of it. I am curious to see how I'd feel about Arkham City or Knight, which seem to be Asylum but bigger.