Hasta La Gadget!

(Credit: WB Games)

One of the most buzzed-about games of the year isn’t a big-name sequel or movie tie-in, although it does have the kind of pop culture bona fides other games can only dream of. Instead, Batman: Arkham Asylum (published by Warner Brothers and Eidos) is a standalone story about everyone’s favorite caped crusader — although the vibe is more Christian Bale’s moody Dark Knight than ’60s Adam West Technicolor antics.

Video games based on comic book characters have almost uniformly disappointed in the past because the games bore little resemblance to the source material. Typically, they’re generic brain-dead beat-em-ups that a game developer awkwardly inserted a 3D version of a licensed comic book character into.

Perhaps because it started life as a lower-profile project, this game was able to develop without a movie release deadline to hit or a hard holiday season shipping date. What we’ve ended up with is one of the best games we’ve played this year, with appeal that goes far beyond comic book fans.

Set on an isolated island that houses an asylum for the criminally insane, Batman must recapture several of his old arch-enemies (who are conveniently all locked up in the same facility). The game smartly mixes several different types of action, and never leaves you doing the same thing for too long.

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