Is arkham asylum open world
Batman: Every Open-World Gotham City, Ranked
While the
Batman: Arkham
series of video games are best known for their immaculately detailed visions of Gotham City, a handful of other games have attempted the same feat over the past two decades, with wildly varying degrees of success. The
Batman: Arkham
series, beginning with
Batman: Arkham Asylum
,faithfully constructs environments, characters, and narratives that honor Batman stories while delivering an enjoyable, modern gameplay experience. Open-world video games live and die by the playground they present for players to interact with, and Batman adventures are only as good as the Gotham being saved. Marrying both concepts, seven Batman games have stepped up to the challenge over the years, and only one can be the best.
The most recent open-world Batman game,
Gotham Knights,
has presented a daunting, new vision of Gotham while continuing the visual legacy of Gotham City in the
Batman: Arkham
series. Upon release,
Gotham Knights
was compared with
Batman: Arkham Knight
, due to the former's lack of visual polish and graphical performance next to a game released seven years earlier. While the comparisons are valid,
Batman: Arkham Asylum – Still Worth It After 15 Years?
Batman: Arkham Asylum was a game released by RockSteady Studio in August 2009. It was very well received by both critics and gamers, but the question now is, Is it still good compared to new generation games?
I will be rating this game from 1 to 10 in multiple categories, based both on the standards of its time and the standards of overall gaming. (I will review the PC version of the game. However, I have experienced both PC and console versions and have not noticed that what device it is played on has a significant effect on the experience.)
Gameplay
The overall game was actually unique for its time and had multiple elements that were still considered new. Open-world games such as this were just starting to come into popularity due to the amount of time it would take to create a full map that could run stably. Often, games were made into levels to reduce the amount of rendering that needed to be done. This open-world design enables a game to be explored as the player wants. However, Arkham Asylum can still be considered very linear despite this open-world design.
While exploring the map, there is a heavy emphasis pla
Batman: Arkham City - because there isn't a thread about it
That I can find, anyway.
I think this game is absolutely amazing - although open-world games are becoming increasingly common, I feel like this one makes use of a lot of unique gameplay elements that set it apart. Specifically, it's as if someone crossed the open-world-ness of something like Grand Theft Auto and combined it with the combat system of something like God of War. In addition, although it's open world, the buildings are worlds unto themselves and I'm reminded of how it feels in Zelda to go from the overworld into a dungeon. A couple of them even have multiple entrances (like a few of the dungeons in ALttP) and they all have Zelda-like puzzles - especially when you manage to locate one of the Riddler's hidden deathtraps.
The combat is perfectly pitched - it never felt too complicated. A lot of God of War clones include a bunch of moves that are utterly useless and never get used, but this one gives you moves that are richly varied AND all useful once you get the hang of them. The difficulty is such that there's no such thing as a harmless enemy; get enough of them together, even the low
15 Years Later, Batman: Arkham Asylum’s Worldbuilding is Ongoing
Summary
Arkham Batman games are some of the best superhero video game franchise works, with Arkham Asylum being a classic revitalizing Batman's mythology.
Arkham Asylum's gameplay may not be as advanced as later games, but its immersive atmosphere and worldbuilding are arguably unparalleled.
While the Arkhamverse has evolved into open-world sequels and a live-service shooter, Arkham Asylum's elegance as a tighter Metroidvania entry remains satisfying and influential.
Few superhero games have attained the same upper-echelon rank as the
Arkham
Batman installments. Not every
Arkham
game has been fully beloved, particularly its spin-off companion pieces
Lockdown
and
Blackgate
for
Batman: Arkham City
and
Batman: Arkham Origins
respectively, but the series as a whole is undoubtedly some of the best work in a superhero-related video game franchise, let alone superhero-related media overall.
None of that would have been possible if
Batman: Arkham Asylum
wasn’t a classic revitalizing the World’s Greatest Detective’s mythology once more for a new audience, and everything that makes it a bril