Introduction

During a reckless assault on the Mayor’s office, Batman has again captured the Joker and hand-delivered him to Arkham Asylum, Gotham City’s premiere facility for incarceration of the criminally insane.

Knowing all too well what the clown is capable of, Batman insists on providing an escort deep into the facility, keeping the Joker at arm’s length the whole time. As expected, he escapes custody with the aid of Harley Quinn and assumes control of the building. Everything quickly goes to hell in a hand basket as inmates run wild, while the task of pursuing Joker and restoring order is left to the Dark Knight. It soon becomes apparent that the Joker intended to be caught all along, but what exactly is he planning?

Aside from last year’s Lego Batman, the PC hasn’t seen a game featuring the Caped Crusader since 2001, and that was a shoddy console port at best. It has always been rare to see one that isn’t based on whatever Hollywood film or animated series was out at the time, and we all know how tie-in games usually turn out... Luckily, that is not the case with Arkham Asylum; an original, well-written story was penned for Rocksteady Studio’s second mainstream release, based on the Batman universe as a whole.

As is standard with PC versions of games, you get it for $10 less than consoles, along with higher resolution graphics and, if you have an NVIDIA 8-series GPU or better, fancy schmancy PhysX effects! How does this new Batman game stack up? Read on!