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This has genuine potential to be the best Batman game ever produced.
This has genuine potential to be the best Batman game ever produced.This has genuine potential to be the best Batman game ever produced.

The sonic batarang embeds itself into a wall on the far side of the room, softly emitting a strange noise. From your vantage point high in the rafters, you watch as one of the remaining guards cautiously heads over to investigate. You equip your grappling launcher and fire a hook into a faded stone gargoyle, high above your bleeping toy. You fly across the gap in seconds, barely making a sound as you pass right over the head of the hapless goon below.

You hang upside-down under the gargoyle. As the witless thug reaches the batarang, you drop down on an elasticised cord and grab hold of him before bouncing back up to your perch. "W-w-what are you doing?" he splutters, but you give no answer. Instead you drop him, listening as he screams on the way down before the cord pulls him short leaving him to dangle like a trussed-up chicken. Another guard runs over, fearfully aiming his gun at the ceiling, but you're already on the other side of the room with a batarang in your hand. The bat-shaped blade cuts through the air and slices the cord, dropping the yob onto his mate. Two for the price of one.

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There's just one man left now. The Joker berates him over Arkham Asylum's PA system, teasing his own henchman for being a failure. At the touch of a button you enter Detective Mode, your vision taking on a blue tint as sophisticated sensors make an X-ray scan of the room. The remaining guard now resembles a red skeleton. Your scanners tell you that his heart-rate is through the roof. He's terrified. And then he slowly backs into the centre of the room, demanding that you show yourself. Silently you glide through the darkness, hitting your victim square in the back and forcing him to the floor. With a swift blow from your knee, you knock him out cold.

"Jumping Jehosaphat!" you cry, with a mixture of joy of disbelief. "I am Batman. I AM BATMAN!" And you're absolutely right - you are indeed Batman. Because in Arkham Asylum, Rocksteady Studios has finally achieved something that developers have tried to do for years: they've made a videogame where it actually feels like you're playing as The Dark Knight himself.

Hand-to-hand combat is unusual in its use of slow-motion.Hand-to-hand combat is unusual in its use of slow-motion.

Personally, I'm delighted. If you read the previous preview I wrote on Arkham Asylum, you'll know that I had fairly high hopes for this game. Now, having actually played the thing for a bit, I'm feeling more and more confident that those expectations will be met. A recent hands-on with some preview code allowed me a chance to test out two of the game's challenge modes - one based on combat, the other focused on what the developer calls Invisible Predator gameplay - and the good news is that both demos felt extremely Batmanesque, for want of a better word. These two challenge modes are part of a set of 16 mini-game-like levels that the player will unlock during Arkham Asylum's main campaign. While neither offered much in the way of the game's plot, they worked as a perfect example of many of the techniques you'll end up using throughout the central adventure.

The Invisible Predator level found Bats working to defeat six armed guards in as quick a time as possible, using a variety of clever tricks and toys. Since gunfire will kill you relatively quickly, the player's first priority is to get to grips with the art of moving around stealthily. While on foot, Batman can choose to walk, sprint or sneak - the latter being achieved by holding down the right trigger. Sneaking behind a guard allows you to pull off a silent takedown at the touch of a button. So far, so Solid Snake - but the real fun begins when you get up to a high vantage point to spy on your prey from afar. Scattered around the level are lots of places that you climb to with your grappling hook, and getting atop one of these spots is a simple matter of looking at them and then pressing RB (R1 on the PS3 pad) when the relevant icon appears. Once you're up high, you can swiftly move back and forth between perches by hitting the same button.

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