Batman's counters allow him to remain the stoic calm at the eye of a storm of increasingly brutal body damage. When you're about to be attacked, a blue lightning flash will appear over the offending hood's head. Tap the counter button in time and Bats will transition smoothly from whatever he's doing into a powerful counter move, without breaking the flow of the fight for a second.
If an enemy tries to kick him in the back, he'll calmly grab their leg and snap it at the knee without even turning around. Incoming fists will be grabbed and crushed. Swinging pipes will be caught, turned on their owners and then discarded. And then he'll be straight back to the important business of making facial pate without a single moment's pause.
At first, Batman's weighty animations feel a little slow. Sluggish even. But after spending a grand total of around two minutes getting a feel for the rhythm of the combat model, you'll be on fire. Remember that bit from The Karate Kid when Daniel finally realises what "Wax on, wax off" was really all about and accelerates his movements to become a lethal block and parry machine? When you develop an instinct for reacting to incoming attacks, Arkham Asylum's combat feels exactly like that. It won't take long before you can even predict incoming violence based on enemy movements, and parry almost precognitively.
The transition from one animation to another really is so boggling to watch that it makes the whole process feel almost like viewing a pre-rendered martial arts scene. With grabs, throws, brutal takedowns and grunt-confounding overhead flips all available to drop into the mix at the simple touch of a button or two, you've got a fast and powerfully versatile set of options that could set a visceral new standard for group combat.
It's exciting, it's exhilarating, and what it lacks in gravity-defying acrobatics it more than makes up for in pure blunt force trauma. From what we've played so far, Batman's hand-to-hand could be satisfying enough to carry a whole game in itself. The single combat arena we were demoed was addictive enough that we developed an almost medical need to replay it over and over to perfect our combo ratings, resetting at the first error as if we were trying to ace an SSX stunt run. We've had terrible thumb-twitching withdrawal for it ever since.
From stealth section:
Starting in a shower block off to the side, a quick scan with the Detective Mode visor tells us that a lone grunt is patrolling nearby. Easy pickings to warm up with. Stepping into the cover of a shower cubicle, we throw a sonic batarang into a nearby pillar and wait. Sure enough, the goon shuffles in to investigate the sound, like a big ugly moth to massively painful flame.
As he unwittingly turns his back on us to check out the source of the noise, we silently step out behind him, and one crunching sleeper hold later he's out of the game. One down, four to go. The rest don't even know he's missing yet. We carefully step out into the main room and use the fast and intuitive target lock to grapple soundlessly up to a gargoyle close to the ceiling.
There's an oblivious henchman guarding a nearby gantry below. As he gets closer, we're offered the context-sensitive option of a gliding kick and we take it, swooping down to clobber him in the back of the head and disappearing back into the ceiling a second later. He's down but not out, and everyone now knows that we're here. But this a good thing. They're noticeably scared, and scared people make mistakes. They begin grouping together, but we have ways of breaking up the party. Time to really start spinning the web.
The visor tells us that one of the small treatment rooms below has a structurally weak ceiling, so we swing over to set a trap (Not just walls apparently - DrBo42), silently dropping onto the roof to lay some explosive gel. It's a good trap, but it needs bait, so we grapple further away to get a shallow throwing angle and put another sonic batarang in through the doorway. Sure enough, an unlucky goon takes the bait and breaks away from the pack to investigate. Click. Boom. He's down. But this is just layer number one of a great big cake o' pain.
Spotting a convenient gargoyle directly over the new hole in the ceiling, we get over to it and tap B to dangle upside down underneath, ready to drop on the next thug as he investigates the wreckage. Having dragged him back up into the shadows, knocked him out and strung him up under the gargoyle, we swing away for a better vantage point of our new pinata. Noticing that the increasingly shaky penultimate hood is walking over to check out where his buddy went, we're struck with an idea. Just to see if it will work, we wait for the new guy to walk underneath his stricken comrade, and throw a batarang at the rope suspending our previous victim, hoping that the game will allow us to cut him loose. Brilliantly, it does and the weighty slab of thug plummets to flatten his would-be helper. (This is where I came. - DrBo42)
With only one enemy left, we can afford to take our time. A visor scan tells us that his heart is racing, compounding the obvious visual clues that the poor guy is terrified out of his mind. Naturally, we decided to f*ck with him for a while, and spend the next couple of minutes dropping in and out of the room and throwing batarangs out of the shadows to freak him out. In his panic, he repeatedly blind-fires into dark corners of the ceiling we are no longer in. With a chuckle, we swoop in for the final takedown. Job done.
