Took me almost 3 hours to download that thing. But it was worth every second of it. Already played through the thing twice and I'm gonna play it once more in a few minutes. God, this game is amazing, even just from this short demo. For once, a really [tornado fang]ing awesome superhero video game. The Batman Begins one was pretty decent and way above most other games of that genre I played, but Arkham Asylum seems to beat all of those. The combat system is pretty cool, even though you only have basically one button for attacking (is there even a blocking move?), one for stunning with the cape and one for countering if the situation allows it, the fights are really quite impressive looking and dynamic, it's always a different motion and different moves, unlike most other senseless beat 'em up games of this kind. Definately, striking from the shadows will take up a major part of the combat in the game, because in pretty much all other games of this kind, you can get gunned down pretty easily. I died during my first run through the demo in the final room with the four armed thugs.
The demo so far only shows a small fraction of what's possible in the game, but it definately leaves desire for more. It's nice how enemies start freaking out when Batman does some stuff unseen. I really liked that feature in the Batman Begins game, though that one was pretty fixed with the situations you could do it in. There also is a little Splinter Cell feel to it, like Batman Begins, due to the sneaking, hiding etc. I hope the game is not so linear like Batman Begins and that there'll be several paths to achieving an objective than the most obvious one.
So far, I just have two gripes with the game. Perhaps it fits because Batman is a big, heavy, muscular man, but I personally think he's moving a bit slow when just walking. And I also don't like it when he's getting in touch with Oracle and can't do anything besides walking. The other thing I didn't like is the localization of the demo over here. They used Christian Bale's German voice actor for Batman, and I don't really like that one. I really hope that the full version of the German game will have switchable language tracks, because I want to play Batman with Kevin Conroy's voice and fight the Joker with Mark Hamill's.
Ended up changing the language of my console from German to English. That was enough to do the trick. Already worked back on the GameCube with Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time.
Really looking forward to the game.