Batman Arkham Asylum remastered review time — and honestly, it’s a reminder that some games age better than you’d expect.
I’ve just played it through to the end of the story on the Xbox Series X, and what surprised me most wasn’t some dramatic “it still holds up” revelation. It was how tight it feels. How little wasted time or effort there is. How it knows exactly what it’s doing and never gets distracted trying to be bigger than it needs to be.
This is the 2009 game at its core, just running cleaner and feeling more polished in your hands. And that’s kind of the point. It doesn’t need reinvention. It just needed a light touch-up. And to be honest, even the original holds up today — it was such an outstanding game even on first release.
A remaster that mostly stays out of the way
Return to Arkham’s remaster isn’t something I’d overthink — playing it now on modern hardware, the headline for me is simple: it felt smooth. The game just felt that little bit more polished overall, and even back at launch, it was clearly doing something special — with a 91 score on Metacritic and plenty of 9/10-style reviews across the big outlets.
Resolution and frame rate were the obvious improvements I noticed in day-to-day play. Nothing flashy. Just that feeling of the game responding cleanly and consistently, without the little distractions that can creep in when older titles are pushed onto newer setups.
The best compliment I can give it is that I stopped thinking about the “remastered” part fairly quickly. I was just playing Arkham Asylum again — and enjoying it.
The moment the combat clicks (and why it still matters)
The combat is still the centre of gravity here, and it’s still immensely fun. At the time of release of the first iteration, the mechanics were actually fairly impactful as a new style of combat mechanics establishing a recipe to be imitated by several contemporaries over the years that followed. You’re rarely confused about what the game wants from you. It builds a rhythm, then it asks you to keep that rhythm under pressure, and pulling off large, smooth combos provides that sweet satisfaction when everything clicks. The excellent combat alternates nicely with the stealth elements of the game providing opportunities for a chnage of pace, fighting either head on or picking them off like a real Batman!
There’s a specific point in this story run — moving through the goons and into that later stretch where things ramp up — where it all properly locked in for me. That flow of countering, repositioning, using your gadgets at the right time, and feeling like you’re controlling the room rather than surviving it. The mechanics never felt too complex for me, which some ultra-modern games have crept into for me. Batman Arkham Asylum seemed to get the balance right between basic and fairly achievable advanced mechanics which never felt like you needed a PhD to understand and remember!
It’s easy to forget how many games borrowed from this structure because we’ve lived with it for so long. But coming back now, it still feels “right”. Not perfect. Just smart, clean, intentional and confident.
Pacing: no bloat, no admin
This is the big one, and it’s why I’d still recommend the game so readily in 2026.
Arkham Asylum doesn’t try to become a lifestyle. It isn’t obsessed with being a 90-hour project. It just wants to take you through its world at the right pace, with the right escalation, and it does that without wandering off into side content that feels bolted on. The game really opened up at a nice pace, developing the story and access to the world felt logical and intentional, keeping you hooked into the game without any moments of having to push through the bore of modern triple AAA bloated mammoths.
Bosses land well too. They’ve got enough puzzle thinking to break up the rhythm, but not so much that they feel like a different game. The difficulty is pitched in a way that makes progress feel earned without turning every encounter into a stop-start grind. I played on Normal, and it felt like the intended experience. Sometimes I’d get beaten down, but it didn’t take long to figure out the patterns and solutions and then flow my way through. I never felt like I was continually hitting a brick wall of deaths and restarts. I also really liked the mechanics where if you fell down a hole or off the map, instead of an instant death, you simply had a chance to grapple back out to safety. It massively helped keep the game flowing.
And the ending — without saying anything spoilery — does that lovely thing where it brings the mechanics together. It doesn’t suddenly become something else. It just asks you to use what you’ve learned.
The fussy bits: environmental scanning and “collectable tolerance”
I only really had two sticking points, and neither of them wrecks the experience. They’re more like small frictions you notice because everything else is moving so smoothly.
The first is the environmental scan side of things. I actually like the idea in principle — it suits the setting and it fits Batman — but it can be a bit fussy about what it wants you to tag. Sometimes it feels picky in a way that slows you down for no good reason. When you’re in a groove, a mechanic like that can feel like a little speed bump. And the mechanic is heavily linked to several collectables.
The second is the collectables. And to be clear, this isn’t me complaining — I enjoyed doing them. I genuinely like that “one more thing before I switch it off” loop, and for me Arkham gets the balance just about right.
But I can absolutely see why some people bounce off it.
If you’re not a fan of collectable mechanics, even a “reasonable” amount can feel like a chore, especially when you’ve played more modern games that drown you in icons and points of interest. Arkham isn’t anywhere near as overstuffed as some open-world monsters, such as modern Assassin’s Creed games, but the principle is the same: either you enjoy the hunt, or you don’t.
The important point is that the story doesn’t hold you hostage. You can ignore the lot and still have a complete experience. That’s why it works. It respects your time and your preferences. For me, on this occasion, I enjoyed hunting around for all collectables as a completionist. A couple have evaded me, but I think I’ll catch them all eventually.
Cutscenes done right
One last thing that stood out: I actually wanted to sit and watch the cutscenes.
That sounds like a minor point, but it isn’t for me. I’m often the person who starts getting itchy when a game leans too hard on narrative breaks. Here, I was happy to let it play out. The tone is strong, the delivery is sharp, and it fits the “contained thriller” vibe of the asylum. You really feel like you’re immersed in the DC world. It’s a polished, immersive comic book story in motion.
It’s not trying to be prestige TV. It’s just doing its job properly and true to the legacy of the genre and comic book history.
Final take-home message
Replaying Arkham Asylum in 2026 reminded me that “ageing well” isn’t about being modern. It’s about being focused. This game still knows what it is, it still moves at the right pace, and it still feels great once the combat rhythm clicks.
The remaster helps by getting out of the way and letting the design speak for itself. A couple of mechanics can be a bit fussy, and collectables will always be taste-dependent, but none of that changes the bigger truth:
This is still one of the cleanest examples of a game doing one thing brilliantly, then having the good sense to stop.
If you fancy delving more into some honest opinion check out tehse posts:
External links:
Batman: Return to Arkham (Xbox Store, UK)