Batman: Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition

This game is not as big as its sequels, doesn't have all the improvements. However, it has the best atmosphere. The claustrophobic madhouse will get under your skin. The combat still feels great. And reasonable amount of Riddler's trophies and riddles doesn't make you want to pull your hair out, if you're trying to find them all.

If you grew up watching the Batman cartoon, you will love this game. The voice acting is so spot on and the story is just fun and exactly what you want from a game like this. You get to fight a good portion of Batman's enemies along the way. The game is a standard beat em up game with some pretty smooth mechanics and gadgets added. The game does take a twist in many situations. The 3 major are fighting a group of enemies in hand to hand. There is also stealth missions where you're taking down a room of enemies 1 by 1. The other main levels are the Scarecrow levels. These levels are trippy in a good way and some of the most fun levels visually in the game. Well worth the $5 for this. I've beaten the game 3 separate times and have 100 hours into it.

Aside from Batman's suit, this is one of the games with the freaking best ambientation I played in quite a while... Most superhero games are disappointing in so many ways, yet I found this one shocking! It's not just dark, it's alive in it's own way! Not mentioning the amazing art, the nicely implemented, progress-changing, small open world and the characters, oh god, hilarious. Not the best game ever, of course, but it deserves the commendations. (You'll need to install the PhysX so the game works...)

Incredible good game, the first in the saga that make you feel lile the Dark Knight!!

The gaming world was a different place before Arkham Asylum. Until Batman Arkham Asylum arrived, we didn’t know just how badly we had been missing a game that could make you feel like billy big bollocks and boy did it deliver. Indeed, this style of combat system has become the norm for 3rd person melee combat RPGs. In my eyes, the combat is what makes this game. Its freeflow design is so tactile, responsive and has fantastic, bone crunching feedback that it feels unbelievably satisfying. With such a simple set of inputs (at least initially), the game encourages you to perfect timings and combos rather than simple button mashing. The combat system is so well honed and refined that by the end of the game, a skilled player can launch feet first into a large group of henchmen and seamlessly take every last man down with well over 10 distinctly different moves, all tied together into a 50 move combo without ever taking a single hit. The end result is simply stunning to watch and pure joy incarnate to execute yourself. To top it off, the skill balance is just about perfect as to do something like this is neither unrewardingly simplistic nor frustratingly impossible. But Batman is so much more than the combat even though the game could probably stand up on its jaw crunching merits alone. The other set of mechanics that play so perfectly into the theme and gameplay of Arkham Asylum is the Batman’s ability for stealth and this really does enable you to approach situations in a variety of ways and is particularly great at enabling the Batman to take down enemies unawares or launch into combat with the element of surprise at hand. Combine these skills with the combat and here you have the perfect marriage of mechanics that makes you feel like the Batman. That feeling of swinging from gargoyle to gargoyle before gliding down, batcape unfurled, onto a completely unsuspecting group of goons and perfectly beating them up in a flawless combo is quite simply, unmatched.