Batman: Arkham Asylum — Forensic Aspects

Let me just say that for a non-shooter, this is the best Xbox 360 game I’ve ever played. Even com­par­ing it to some of the shoot­ers, it’s still in the top two or three 360 games.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is a 3^rd per­son game with intu­itive con­trols, and a com­bat sys­tem that is easy to learn, but dif­fi­cult to mas­ter. That being said, even though it is based on a comic book hero, it isn’t based on the campy Adam West Batman, but more like the darker Grant Morrison Batman found in the clas­sic graphic novel “Batman: Arkham Asylum”. Which basi­cally means it’s mature player ori­ented game, prob­a­bly not suited for younger children.

Batman: Arkham Asylum fea­tures the voice tal­ents found in the pop­u­lar Batman Animated shows, specif­i­cally Kevin Conroy as Batman,

Mark Hamill as the Joker.

Besides the plot, explo­ration, com­bat, and prob­lem solv­ing parts of Batman: Arkham Asylum that make it fun, there are some inter­est­ing foren­sic tools Batman employs. During game­play we see Batman fol­low spe­cific brands of tobacco, latent prints, DNA trails,

and pheromones left by Poison Ivy

Suspending dis­be­lief at the small portable tech­nol­ogy Batman has on hand, it’s great to see a video game design team go through the extra efforts to add the foren­sic analy­sis and track­ing “mini-games” to Batman: Arkham Asylum. It not only adds enjoy­able foren­sic game­play to the game, but it also adds a mea­sure of authen­tic­ity to a Batman title. Remember, Batman is a detec­tive who employs foren­sic skills to solve crimes.By switch­ing to “Detective Mode”, Batman is able to locate, iden­tify, and track a vari­ety of trace evi­dence dur­ing the course of the game.

For more exam­ples of Batman’s foren­sic skills, see this ear­lier blog post­ing on Batman: The Dark Knight.

Some vil­lains you will encounter in Batman: Arkham Asylum:

Bane

Killer Croc

Scarecrow

For a more detailed game review, please visit IGN.

For more infor­ma­tion on Batman: Arkham Asylum visit the offi­cial game website.