Reviews// Batman: Arkham Asylum

But, as I said, there's a stealth component. Batman's many things, but not one of those things is bulletproof. Despite some armouring on his outfit, a couple of gunshots will put him down. This makes sneaking around and taking out enemies one by one a necessity where guns are involved. Your first step in doing this is switching into Detective Mode. Detective Mode makes everything look a bit funny, highlighting handy features of your environment such as baddies, things like air vents and high-up gargoyles you can use to get around and weak structural points you can 'splode. If you've played any number of games like MGS4 and Mirror's Edge, you have an idea of what to expect.

To make best use of this, you'll more often than not want to get up on one of the aforementioned gargoyles and have a look around. From there, you'll work out how best to pick off the henches that are in your way.

I was massively pleased by how enjoyable this is. I tend to steer clear of stealth games – I favour piling in guns (metaphorical or otherwise) blazing to sneaking around and trying not to be seen. I also suspected that the stealth elements of Arkham Asylum would be tacked on in an effort to break up combat. Turns out, the stealth elements are well realised and great fun.

The fact that you do much of your shadowy operating from a height helps. Rather than spending all your time just trying to not be spotted (my usual tactic) you're afforded the breathing space to think about your next move and plot how best to take out each goon.

You've got a number of options at your disposal, many of which provide the game's 'Blimey, that's cool!' moments. Among others there's the inverted takedown (you hang from a vantage point, snatch someone up like something from a B-movie horror film, then leave them dangling), the blow-up-a-wall-onto-an-unsuspecting-schmuck move, and my favourite – the glide kick. The whole lot adds up to a pleasingly surprising level of strategising to be had.

Aiding you through all this are numerous gadgets, because it wouldn't be a Batman game without gadgets. Your grapple gun is probably the most important – it gets you to the necessary high places, which gets you out of trouble as well as giving you a reasonable vantage point – but you also get goodies like batarangs, explosive gel and a line launcher. These are dispensed to you at reasonable intervals, changing the nature of the action a little as you go.

Also altering the playing field is the ability to use XP you've generated to lay your hands on upgrades. These include improved performance of gadgets, better armour and new moves. There's no plausible explanation as to how you can do this – no shop or anything – you just pop into a menu and do it. In its favour, this menu is uncomplicated. You're not worrying about banking XP or spending it on upgrading stats. You get enough XP for an upgrade, the game tells you about it, then you pop into the menu and choose your upgrade. This is not the kind of stat-building that prompts me to randomly wake up in a cold, twitchy sweat then be told to go sleep on the sofa. From me, that gets a thumbs up. Maybe you'll see it differently, but I don't think a game like Arkham Asylum needs complicating with an unwieldy stats system.

Breaking up the more action-focused elements of the game is a spot of 'detection' and some light puzzling. The 'detection' pretty much consists of hidden object-type scanning of rooms to pick up trails to follow. It's not vastly compelling, but it doesn't last too long and it does its job of breaking the rest of the game into manageable chunks.