Much more well made than expected and probably the best super hero video game out there.
GRAPHICS: 10
From start to finish you will not stop admiring the great graphics throughout the game. In many games certain things will look great from far away and then bad close up (and visa versa) to help the computer or console run the game more easily. But not in this game, everything always seems to look smooth and very well designed. This game certainly looks great enough on the consoles without the improved Physx engine but if your PC is good enough to run with it on then it makes it even better. I recommend you look up comparison videos to see the difference.
The only real downside that I didn't remove points for is that it is fairly hardware heavy, I have 3.5gb of Ram and a 512mb Geforce 8800 GFX card and when I did the ingame benchmark (which I LOVE because games never have this) I only got an average of about 40-45ish FPS (ideally you want 60ish). But I was running this game maxed out on everything if I would have turned some settings down a bit it still would look great and I would have gotten the 60FPS.
CONTROLS: 8.3
At first glance this seems like a game that would only be good for a controller over a keyboard and mouse, and if you like your controller well enough than that is probably true for you. For the most part the game is great having the K&M combo since a lot of what you do is run around the beautiful looking world, and when it comes to combat it still works fine. But since this game is a brawler during the battles I found myself wishing I had buttons to mash over keys. Another thing that brought down the score a little bit is the countering ability in the game, that when it works it fantastic, but there were several times throughout the game where I just had no idea why it didn't counter my enemies move since I was not currently attacking another enemy or doing some other action.
GAMEPLAY:9.0
This game was done in an open world and was fairly linear, but only to keep you out of places that were meant to open later in the story. You can however revisit where you have been and may very well find yourself doing so to find many of The Riddlers' secrets which are scattered all over the map. While finding more and more of The Riddlers' trophies and secrets, character bios will open up to you and you will learn a lot about some of the many villians throughout the Batman universe which made me want to begin reading the comic books so I could see these characters in action.
The only negative I would say is the lack of different enemies and the repetitive combat because of it. Throughout the game almost all of the combat takes place in a large open area where you fight about 5-10 thugs at a time. And if that is not the case then you are in a large open room with lots of different cover and you need to take down enemies with guns a bit more stealthily. And even though there isn't much of a combination of things they can do with the few types of enemies they have, the battles are still a blast from start to finish.
SOUND:9.5
Very good sound FX to it and great music when it counted but there were many times throughout the game you sorta wish you had more to listen to then just the Jokers taunting which came on every so often. I can't remember if The Joker repeated himself much (if at all) though, and didn't really get boring to listen to, but when running around the island you still wish you had a bit more to keep your ears interested in the game as much as your eyes.
The voice acting was a nice plus for the game, with so many games out there with bad voice acting I would have to say that Batman: Arkham Asylum certainly did a good job with it.
STORY:10
It's so much fun to unfold the story from start to finish and was a good combo from the more realist Batman that Christopher Nolans films portray and a bit of unrealism from the comics (which I honestly never read). You always have definite direction and goal you are working towards which all are straightforward and make perfect sense. It is also rather nice to go into detective mode to follow fingerprints and other identifiers to follow and track people in the game to your next destination (despite being a bit to easy). You can even learn about a bit of the story on the island itself if you care to through The Riddlers challanges.
MULTIPLAYER:N/A
Final: 9.4