You feel like you are the Batman when you play this game.
Batman Arkham Asylum or BAA is a game basically about Batman vs. Joker. The entire game is more like Bioshock meets Prince Of Persia Warrior Within which makes it more badass.
The best thing about the game is the simplicity. Combat System is slick and one of the more enjoyable combat systems you will encounter. Countering is outright the best in any action adventure i have ever played.
Story is fine and typical batman story. Don't expect a Begins or a Dark Knight story.
The only issue with this game that i had was the difficulty and the length. It was too easy on normal and easy on hard. Also the length is not very satisfying. Its like the game ends from out of no where. Don't worry, its not Modern Warfare short but it is still not long.
Batman has weapons he can use like Batclaw, Baterang etc. Environment puzzles are really good second only to warrior within. Few games these days have environment puzzles making you scratch your head where to go. Mostly its left to mediocre platformers which no one played. Puzzles these days are focused more on silly boxes or some common "move the mirror" puzzles. Good thing is that Batman is different.
Voice acting is good. Nothing much to say on that. Graphics is great but it sucks that physics is supported only on Nvidia cards and not on ATI cards. Even if you manually enable physix on an ATI card the game lags then.
Lastly one more very interesting aspects. Many games these days involve you in collecting something or the other ranging from needless intels to stupid flags. But BAA felt different. You really feel like collecting those Riddle trophies and breaking the joker teeth. Oh! I forgot that riddles in this game can be somewhat challenging depending on your IQ as well as your familiarity with batman. While some riddles for me were really preposterous, some were really good.
Overall Best superhero game. I say this because this is the first superhero game that i even bothered playing. Batman ends in a cliffhanger. So i can't wait for BAA 2. But few things that prevented me from giving this a perfect score is that they can work on the length and the difficulty of the game. Also the game can be improved a lot on some areas like for eg: The tapes give us a nice history of some Massive Creatures that batman has encountered. You can easily add those as bosses as this game had very few Bosses. Few improvements and Batman Arkham Asylum 2 can easily be a contender for game of the year.