Before going too much into this review (my first ever review), I must make a confession. I only rented Arkham Asylum and I only played it once.

Everyone I had spoken to said it was beyond awesome, building up on the hype of the great reviews it had received from many major critics. Still, I was not convinced. I was hugely disappointed by the hype of Halo 3 and the not so awesome game it turned out to be, that I have problems jumping onto a hype machine bandwagon.

Graphics
Graphically speaking, the game is awesome. I have put in about six hours at this point and I have yet to see a glitch. The environments are beautifully rendered with very little left unattended by detail. This is a sad flaw of many open-world games, the developer starts slacking on the details in order to make the environment large rather that artfully designed.

Game Play
For the most part, the controls are simple to get the hang of and the difficulty setting allows the player the opportunity to tone it down or step it up to either learn or challenge their abilities. My only problem here, and with the game at all, is that explanations for newcomers like me are lacking. Yes, the game prompts you for moves as you are learning early on, but they tend to flash on the screen quickly while I am in the midst of combat. I would like to have seen something along the lines of Assassin's Creed's fight pits where you can learn and practice a single technique and master it rather than try to learn while you are in the middle of taking on 20 guys at once.

Story
Thus far, the story has not been boring. Although I want to spend time on side quests, I feel myself drawn back into the main plot line to see what will happen next. The voice acting is great and Mark Hamill has his Joker mastered. I was sucked right in.

Overall
In my opinion, this game is very nearly perfect with just the one tiny flaw of proper training, but that fixed with some more time in the game, which will not be difficult to do as i feel myself drawn back to it already. Happy hunting!

"The Clown Has Escaped."

9 Excellent