To put it politely, Batman has never had a good history of games. Putting it less politely every single game, with few exceptions, has been nothing more than popping into a game developer’s bathroom to look at his toilet every year or so. The only one worth mentioning is the original Batman NES, which was an alarmingly good albeit painfully difficult side-scroller beatemup, more in the vein of Castlevania than anything else. Appropriately, it also had fantastic music too.

Everything else has been a rubber-stamp formula hitting over and over again. Linear lukewarm side-scroller beatemups on the SNES turn into linear lukewarm 3d PSX and N64 beatemups, and repeat endlessly until everyone literally sits, points, and laughs at the hilarity of the Dark Knight’s godawful gaming spree.

This is my true problem with ‘franchises’ – more often than not good ones sink into obscurity and are forgotten despite all the right things working for them (As I hold up a copy of Planescape:Torment in one hand and Lufia II in the other) while the ‘stronger’ ones that are a hundred years old and inexplicably keep getting new leases on life over and over again. It’s the same kind of bullshit behind why everyone dives into public domain occasionally to come out with really old stories and mythology like Treasure Island or the Norse pantheon being ‘reimagined’ by putting it into the future and in space and calling it a day.

Batman, along with everything else being leaked out of Marvel and DC these days, is a decayed and rotting zombie of every facet of the industry simply because of his iconic status in everyone’s minds. Not the most awful comic books of all time (As I hold up Miller’s All Star Batman) nor the worst movies of all time (Batman and Robin) nor the worst games of all time (Batman Forever SNES) can kill him. True to his character everyone comes around for a stab and, despite all this, he never seems to just stay dead.

I hold more than a bit of affection for Batman, because fundamentally he’s a great character and a wonderful hero. Tragically orphaned at a young age, instead of moaning about it he decides that the only true reaction is to make everyone fear a powerful alter-ego. He works without a moment’s thought of himself, for the sheer purpose of fighting an unstoppable force of evil. He has just the right elements of tragedy, heroism, and humanity. Thank you, Christopher Nolan, for remembering these qualities while bringing his focus on stealth and fear rather than the Batmobile and deus ex machinae ‘Go go Bat Gadget’ answer to everything. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were fantastic movies, misstepping occasionally, but I still love them. And after Batman Begins I thought, hey, maybe we’ll get a good Batman game!

2005′s Batman Begins, which I played on the Xbox, felt extremely shallow and tedious. It was a step in the right direction above the walk-right-hit-thug-rinse-repeat formula shitted out ever since the NES, but it lacked polish, was railroaded to the plot of the movie, and the AI never really reacted like you would expect.

And, at long last, a relatively unknown developer team called Rocksteady Studios, best known for absolutely nothing other than a PS2 game nobody played, took a shot at Batman. And, at long last, everything everyone has ever loved about Bruce Wayne’s alter ego, rogue’s gallery, gadgets, writing, and the wonderful all-important hinge of atmosphere have folded together to make something absolutely masterful.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way – Batman: Arkham Asylum is a third-person action game based around stealth, detective skills, gadgets, and melee combat, Mark Hamil Kevin Conroy Arleen Sorkin do the voices of Joker Batman and Harley Quinn, Paul Dini wrote Batman the Animated Series and he’s in on this game, etc etc etc. Love and affection, delicate treatment, familiarity, derptey derptey do.

I’m not trying to dust those issues under the carpet, because they make up a good chunk of what makes this game so amazing, but everyone’s been touting them. You know Mark Hamil and Kevin Conroy do Joker and Batman (though the alarming lack of attention on Harley Quinn/Arleen Sorkin disappoints me), you know Paul Dini is writing this, I just want to acknowledge it and move on.

Batman’s just finished roping up the Joker for the billionth time, and as he takes him to Arkham Asylum the kind of atmosphere I hold so dear oozes out of every bit of the cutscenes. The world is dark and dreary, and Gotham looks appropriately like some kind of twisted Bizarro-New York. Arkham is holding lots of normal convicts as Blackgate Prison recently caught fire. Batman, sensing something isn’t quite right, insists upon escorting Joker back to his cell.

I can say with absolutely no hesitation that this is the best introduction and credits sequence I’ve seen in years. The whole thing takes place with you, controlling Batman, walking along side the table-strapped Joker with guards nearby, and it takes you on a great ride through a few areas you will later explore. Joker quips and laughs and jokes, and the whole time you get this awful feeling of fear despite his being tied up. At one point, the lights go out, and when they come on…Batman’s got his hand clasped on Joker’s neck. Joker giggles and says, “What? Don’t you trust me?”

Just when you think the intro gets boring, something happens, and you are suddenly looking up at Killer Croc, and as he growls and spits threats at you there’s this queasy feeling in your gut which makes you go, Oh hell, I’m going to have to fight him, aren’t I? The whole thing is a masterful way of setting the stage, so much as that I didn’t even notice the credits rolling by.

I don’t want to spoil anything yet so you might want to turn away.

THE JOKER GETS FREED! OMG I just didn’t see it coming!

Anyway, Joker gets free, inmates break out, he taunts you with the traditional Joker-esque ‘come and get me!’ And go get him you will do. There’s lots of things in this game, so I’ll just break it down piece-by-piece since there’s no true ‘core gameplay.’

The exploration is top-notch. In any given room you can, with the press of a single button, grapnel yourself up to a nearby ledge with the utmost ease. Occasionally you need to rotate the mercifully understanding camera with the right thumbstick to get the correct spot, but it never detracts away since generally if you need to go somewhere and you’re standing in front of it, the game kind of assumes you’re heading there. There’s also broken air vents and collapsible walls and stuff like that, but none of them can be touched quite yet due to a lack of correct weaponry, in kind of a Metroidian move, and it works.

Later on some levels have corroded and broken ledges, meaning the grapnel gun is impossible to use, and misaimed jumps cause you to fall…where upon you are asked to press RB to shoot the grappling hook back to a safe spot. It felt a little bit like a properly-executed Prince of Persia 08, and it made failure less of a chore. Again, thumbs up.

Another thing that makes exploration and platform-hopping less awful is the positively Zelda-like use of the A button for everything movement related except jumping, which the game handles by itself. This means you will never bump into a wall but slip off, jumps can’t be mistimed, and holding A both controls running and gliding, so if you’re trying to get somewhere specific just hold onto the A button and don’t worry. It sounds odd and is tough to explain, but there were few climbing puzzles that caused frustration.

Many of these things are either hidden or blend together with the backgrounds, which fits because with the tap of the other bumper you can go into Detective Mode, where everything is rendered in a mute blue wash and anything worth seeing is turned bright orange, pointing out destroyable walls, breakable grates, enemies both armed and unarmed, or collectible Riddler trophies. This is also used to continue along the game’s progression line, showing trails you need to follow, be it alcohol, tobacco, handprints, or scent. There’s tons of collection and exploring if you search about, and it all rewards you with more experience.

The Riddler trophies are hidden all over the Arkham Island, and frequently the Riddler himself will pop in on your radio system applauding your (laughable) efforts in discovering them. Thankfully he doesn’t repeat himself too often, and towards the end starts to get frustrated as you begin to undo his efforts, adding some progression to the collection tag on. Also featured are the recording tapes, with interviews of the villains’ psychiatrists all trying to examine them, including a very awesome tape of one Dr. Harleen Quinzel interviewing The Joker. These are all fantastically written and delivered, and very reminiscent of Bioshock’s (as I hold up Doom 3) audio logs.

The one really fucking annoying thing is that throughout the game, common thugs and Joker on the PA system talk amongst themselves, giving the exploration an awesome bit of thematic voyeurism quality to it. However if the recording is going when this happens, the tape is cut short in favor of the nearby talker. Why it is they couldn’t have just muffled one or the other out is beyond me, and it’s aggravating.

Next on the list is the combat, or the free-flow brawling. Many people seemed to be divided on this subject – some call it great, some call it boring, but everyone pretty much agrees it isn’t bad, they just don’t know what to change. I recall Noobtoob saying it was like playing a strange game of DDR.

Combat is all about simple three-button attack options, which is Attack, Takedown, and Stun, and Acrobatics for evasion. Depending on different circumstances such as direction of attack, what the attacker is doing, and what you were doing beforehand, Batman can do any number of things with them. If you’re facing someone and you attack he elbows them in the nose. If you’re facing someone and they go for a punch and you hit Takedown, you grab their fist, belt them, and then toss them onto the ground. If someone’s attacking you and you hit Stun, you flip your cape out into their face causing them to stumble back.

This ends up being some sort of weirdass ballerina-style dance where you trade blows with multiple thugs and, due to the hilariously blatant telegraphing of the attack (big white lightning bolts over their head when they first wind up), stop once in a while to catch a fist without even looking, very much Batman style. The sound effects are bone-crunching and satisfying, the animation is very fluid and rarely ever looks jerky or awkward, and it really is enjoyable. When I played Fight Night Round 4 I was happy to note that the animations and collision detection were top notch, really amping up the immersion and flow. This is in the same path; realistic, flowy, and very Batman.

The problem is, after two fights, combat just isn’t that hard.

You get thugs, who are about as threatening as a piece of wet Kleenex, even when armed with lead pipes. Thugs with knives can’t be countered and don’t get hurt unless you Stun them first. Thugs with stunrods need to be flipped over with Acrobatics before you can hurt them. Without any of the game’s upgrades you can easily dismantle all of them, just by paying attention to the big white flashing lightning bolts over their heads. The point of the combat, however, is to string along endless attacks without stopping or missing a swing or getting hit, and seeing how far you can rack up the combo meter.

Devil May Cry 3, one of my favorite games of all time, did something similar to this, but since Dante wasn’t Batman, getting hit amounted to losing a third of your life and the game knocking your controller from your hands and yelling, “What the fuck?” DMC3 was brutally difficult, and while I’m not saying the game should be equally as balls-hammeringly tough, it is a bit of a letdown when a thug swinging his fist at you feels about as threatening as a lead pipe, something I feel is misleading. And while it certainly isn’t dangerous provided they don’t have guns (which will reduce you from the Dark Knight to the Headless Horseman before you can say “Holy Smith and Wesson, Batman!”), it flows beautifully and requires some skill to get the 20+ combos, but Tazer-waving pricks and psychotic knife thugs rarely get much more than annoying.

Batman: Arkham Asylum enemies don’t gang up on you, thus giving your counter ability at least some use, but when you step back and look few of them do anything other than sit and look at you while you tear his friend in two. Some variety, such as making the lead pipes do more damage and an increased likelihood to attack would have made the combat more difficult and therefore satisfying, but oh of course the developers need to cater to the ‘casual’ crowd, not some hard-bitten bile-spewing reviewer loser in California. Pfeh!

This is, of course, handling the Double Dragon problem (I don’t have a copy to hold up). You see, back in Double Dragon 1 and 2 for the NES, enemies wouldn’t attack you because their AI was programmed to be extraordinarily thick, thus giving you the ability to actually beat the game instead of getting brutally murdered. They would patiently wait off to the side if an enemy was engaged with you, which sounds stupid but for the NES it was being merciful. Double Dragon 3, if you would remember, was not nearly so kind, and was nearly fucking impossible.

Rocksteady – which makes me think of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – overshot. For example, up until the end, I only bought upgrades I felt were worth it. After I had bought everything else and had the looming Ivy fight coming up soon, I looked back at the only five remaining upgrades – all of them “Increase Health” and thought, well, why the hell not? Guns were mudersticks and combat was laughable, with rarely any in-betweeners. The fact that they think the upgrades such as Multi-Batarang actually stack up to the health bonuses is cute to me, like they thought the game was actually difficult.

In short, it’s just too easy to be Batman, something I believe should take some measure of skill.

Collecting, long combos in fights, and other such actions reward experience. Upgrades could be either the aforementioned Multi-Batarang or the Increase Health options, but you know how I feel about that. What’s really nice is the purchasable combo abilities, like throwing or Instant Takedown. I have to say that if the combat is repetitive people never stopped to use any of these. Nothing is quite as satisfying as bashing about some common thugs only to take that Stunrod someone was tempted to use on you and jam it into his stomach. And, might I add, all of the animations for the brawling are very fluid and brutal, and therefore extremely entertaining. The advanced techniques break up the monotony, if only slightly.

Predator segments are where the game really shines. The act of trying to beat eight thugs to death when they have lead pipes and fist cuffs is just adorable, but when they have guns simply looking at you funny reduces you to Bat Swiss-Cheese.

The thing I have always felt Metal Gear Solid is hindered by is the controls, in the later games offering more freedom but lacking any kind of simplicity. I only recall this during playing Metal Gear Solid 3 again. At one point I had to push both R2 and L2 to look over the grass, bring up first person mode with R1, lightly push Square to look down the sights, and adjust my aim with the control stick. The slightest muscle twitch would result in missing, possibly alerting him, and a good five minutes of evasion and waiting. Batman, thank God, manages to restrain itself and makes the stealth extremely intuitive and varied.

The developers specifically stated at one point that they called it ‘predator’ and not ‘stealth’ because stealth sounded like trying to evade whereas predator was, of course, more Batman. Through the act of the extremely varied ways to take down enemies, either through bat grapnel, midair suspension, throwing thugs over railings, or good old fashioned suffocate-to-unconscious-from-behind, you have to pick off the guards one by one. If they do see you, thankfully it takes a few frantic taps of the RB button to fling yourself gargoyle to gargoyle and lose their sight. It sounds overpowered, but it truly isn’t.

When I said that Batman Begins did it right but had a complete lack of proper AI, I am happy to report that Arkham Asylum completely gets this part right. One of the most outstanding moments you will experience is slowly picking off enemies one by one and getting it to the point where the remaining thug is pointing around the room, hands shaking uncontrollably, shouting at you to reveal yourself and firing at whatever nearby item looks like it might have pointed ears and a cape while you hang from a gargoyle no more than five feet over his head with the immensely satisfying feeling that a tap of the Y button is all that separates him from unconsciousness. It was the defining point that it turned from an action-stealth game to a true and fantastic Batman game.

What’s better is that, at a later level, just when I thought the gargoyles were getting a bit too good, they were wired with explosives for one area, and if I so much as touched them it’d explode like a New Year firework and shave off half my health. It forced me to use my environments and rely on the gargoyles only on occasion, which I have to say was a masterstroke even if it only happened once. That room killed me many times, but never in an unenjoyable way.

The controls are solid. Everything feels appropriate, with the D-pad switching between all of the bat-gadgets, a map button, RB covering the grapnel-gun, left trigger pulls out the appropriate weapon including the grapnel gun, batarang, or other such gadgets, and then RT throws. RT enters you into crouch-stealth mode, and the D-pad is the weapon-switch function.

The one problem the controls lent themselves to was the fact that, with the triggers, you can tap them once ‘quickthrow’ a Batarang with the right side or the ‘pull towards’ grapnel with the left side. I’m glad the option to quick-toss a grapnel is there, as it lent itself to some amusing segments in combat, but either my controller is fucked up or it’s being a pain, because this occasionally got me in trouble while trying to stealth about.

(As always in my reviews, spoilers ahead.)

What I was honestly not expecting from this game was extremely delicate treatment of the entire Batman mythos. Scarecrow shows up three times, and each time consecutively freaked the shit out of me in an extremely trippy cutscene that leads you into an alternate universe with Scarecrow glaring around at you, five hundred feet tall, and you have to evade in some kind of platform-hopping alternate dimension, hiding from his gaze. And there was no boss fight with him, which was, somehow, incredibly appropriate. The gameplay mechanic in that segment isn’t amazing, but the levels are mercifully short and they’re a nice break of play.

A highlight I remember is in one of the Scarecrow nightmares rolling over the Batman origin story, warping the level around you until you’re listening to the murder of the Wayne family, only to walk up – as Batman – to their corpses, where he falls to his knees and shakes his head, morphing into a little boy in a suit.

I honestly was pleased. Far too many game developers for extremely old franchises assume you know the whole story. If you say Batman, everyone thinks ‘murdered parents, became a bat, “I’m Batman,” crime fighter.’ The fact that they included this artistically without it feeling like a pointless rehash was fantastic.

But, of course, there are several nitpicks that really annoyed me, and as much as I hate to sit and point them out I feel I’d be doing a disservice by letting them slide. One of the mentionable ones is the mashing-A minigame whenever you’re pulling down grates with the Batclaw or kicking them out/pulling them off. It’s just needless, and could have been handled by just holding A. Or maybe pulling back on the thumbstick. Or better yet nothing at all.

There’s also how, even though there are many options at your disposal, predator segments just end up falling to the bread and butter of from-behind takedown and inverted takedowns from gargoyles. Corner cover takedowns are too risky, grappling from a ledge is too tough, etc. Few options get explored unless you actively seek them out (Which are medals you work towards in Challenges). So Being Batman is far from perfect. At the peak, but not quite at the top.

You fight Bane in this game, which sounds very cool, and to be fair his fight actually takes a few tries to get right. But it requires you to wait until he charges, quicktoss a Batarang, and then dodgeroll. When he hits the wall, he’ll be stunned and you can kick his ass a bit, climb up, and knock a Venom tube from his back. Three times (Sigh) and he’s out. All the while thugs are coming after you too, giving it a bit of challenge.

I have many problems with this. For one thing, isn’t Bane supposed to be smart and a ruthless tactician? The idea of just tossing a batarang after him so he clumsily stumbles into a wall seems silly. Ignoring momentarily that this sort of video game trope was used back in the NES/SNES days, ‘Bane’ afterwards becomes the staple of the game, throwing the ‘Titan’ brute monsters at you, requiring the same fight pattern to take them down. Isn’t it kind of backwards to reduce the head-hancho of super-muscled men into the tutorial for fighting them through the rest of the game? And furthermore, why repeat three times? That’s like the oldest trope in the book; I’m surprised he doesn’t have a Wesker-style Glowing Weak Point on his chest like in RE5.

Now remember all the true dread you felt watching Killer Croc glare at you, knowing you were getting into a Batman game and inevitably you were going to have to fight him? Well, you don’t. Not really anyway. Here’s how you fight Croc; whenever the music bombastically surges you just need to glance around for him charging at you, click the left trigger, and knock him into the water. For all the setup, Killer Croc was a true disappointment, and I never really felt afraid of him. I did die once, but it was due to not looking where I was going and I fell in the water. Ugh.

After being let down by Croc, I went to go take on Poison Ivy, only to find her equally as much of a letdown. Yet again following the traditional pattern, you circle around her until she opens her core, hit it a few times with a batarang, and then spray some explosive foam on her shell. Do twice. She dies. Ugggghhhhh.

But the worst is the Joker. He infuses himself with Titan and grows to be a hojillion stories tall, and comes down to attempt to rip you in half with his overlong talons…and after dodging his attacks for two seconds goes up to the railing and struts about for the helicopter camera while you rough up more thugs. When they’re all taken down, you grapnel him from behind and yank him down, where his claws get stuck and you can punch him in the face. Do this – all together now! – three times to win.

At that point I was honestly almost ready to toss the controller down. What the bloody fuck were they thinking? Fighting the Joker feels like a chore. The rest of the game is like a delightful amusement park of evasion and play-combat and then at the end Rocksteady kind of just gave up, not able to think of anything to do with Titan Joker, so instead of actually fighting him you just wait for him to present the opportunity. The whole game plays by your rules; the boss fights make you play by theirs.

If the free-flow combat system doesn’t work for boss fights, who says you have to make it work for boss fights? The Glidekick maneuver works great for that, why not have Batman lose the Joker’s sight, dart up into the top of a building, then leap down and flying-kick him in the head, stunning him long enough to be beaten around? Using the Ultra Batclaw against the Joker in a “Mash A” minigame before knuckle-sandwiching him once turns it into a brainless, stale God of War quicktime event, and lord almighty we do not need any more of those. God of War at least knew better than to make you repeat the same one over and over, and it was rarely a video-game button-mashy version of a Fortitude save, and dear Kord I hope people reading this get that joke.

The problem with boss fights in this game is that they miss the point. They couldn’t have been even looking at the target, in fact; Boss fights are supposed to be incredibly satisfying to accomplish. They symbolize the stakes being raised and the segment coming to a head with a surging climax. When playing Metal Gear Solid, there’s a team of bad guys you need to kill. Eliminating each one progressively puts the thought in your mind that you’re working towards a goal, and they were all mixed up and unique enough it never felt unchallenging. And, above all else, it never took control away from the player, which is kind of ironic if you think about the cutscenes.

In MGS3 when fighting The Fear, you kept moving, shooting him as fast as you dared while shutting off his food supplies and trying to notice his cloaked, blurry form. He was incredibly unpredictable, and learning to anticipate him and cut him off was a true challenge of itself. And you could, at any time, shoot him provided you were fast and accurate enough.

During the Ivy fight you walk about with a Batarang ready, stepping away from her vines every moment or so, waiting until she exposes her metaphorical core to intergalactic fire. I am brimming with excitement!

You don’t even really need a boss fight; Halo proved quite nicely that a sufficient chase sequence where you are the prey and the thing chasing you is an imminent explosion feels appropriately conclusive, but Killer Croc never had that feel, either in atmosphere or climactic rise. Repeating a single predictable pattern three times wears thin very quickly, and in boss fights doubly so. Playing Whack-A-Croc on a rickety bridge is mind-bogglingly boring. The entire Joker sequence of Hookshotting his back, yanking him down, and giving him a good Shoryuken would have worked fine if you didn’t repeat it ad nauseam until the “Beat The Game” achievement pops up.

Just to kick the game in the balls one last time, the back of the box has a great window with Batman staring down Killer Croc, and the caption reads, “Confront Gotham City’s most notorious lunatics, including The Joker, Harley Quinn, Bane, Poison Ivy, and Killer Croc.” Aww, isn’t that cute? Harley Quinn’s fight involves her throwing a switch thirty feet up that creates electricity in the floor where you’re fighting thugs, but technically it’s still a fight!

However inaccurate this statement is, I must again point out that the rest of the touted points – the brutal combos of the innovative free flow combat, moving in shadows and striking fear in your enemies, and detective skills and forensic technology to uncover clues are all a part of the game, and they are good.

But the absolute biggest problem in this game is with the Detective Mode. The graphics in this game, powered by the more-ridden-than-the-village-hooker Unreal 3 Engine, are absolutely gorgeous. It somehow managed to find a way to be dark and moody without being Space Marine Gritty, but you never can really see that since the entire game ends up being stuck in that blue-and-orange filter. Put simply, the Detective Mode is just overpowered.

“But Mirai!” You might cry, “How can a singleplayer function that isn’t even a weapon be overpowered?”

Simple; by the very definition, overpowered is just the act of being far-and-away the best out of other available options. If you give a first person shooter a gun that’s insanely strong, plentiful in ammunition, and barely even needs to be aimed what’s preventing me from playing with only that gun? As I hold up Fable II and recollect my short-lived time with the game, I recall randomly choosing to use magic over all other forms of combat, and as thus the game was hilariously easy. It was pitiful to get to high enough rank to get super-fireballs and Haste, and combat became a snooze fest after that.

The problem with anything overpowered is offering an alternative, but given no reason to use it. While activated you see any trophies as green standing out among a sea of blue. Thugs’ skeletons are brightly detailed in the correct shape depending on how far away they are, and gun-armed ones appear as bright red skeletons instead, like some kind of gun-toting Blood Skeleton from Castlevania. Both are shown at nearly any distance through walls. Any walls that are destroyable show up semitransparent with orange burst markers. Grates that can be pulled off show up in an orange haze.

In normal vision, you can see depth perception a bit better as aforementioned NPCs’ skeletons clip through walls. That’s about it.

Most predator sections demand the Detective Mode, resulting in many close-combat grappling and bludgeoning takedowns, all of which is rendered in blue with red skeletons holding M4 assault rifles. After a while of playing one mission I realized I hadn’t turned off the mode once, leaving me with the odd feeling that I had gotten a night of Batman curiously mixed up with my last DND session involving my monk fighting skeletons in pitch-blackness with his darkvision.

Predator mode demands it, it makes collection far easier, and really the only time you don’t need it is during combat. But far too often you’re getting into combat after Bataranging a clown with a machine gun from behind a corner, eliminating him as a threat and using Detective mode to target his big red skull. Only after roughing up two or three thugs thereafter do you go, oh shit! That’s right, I need to turn this off!

All nitpickery aside, the game is good, just unchallenging in combat and utterly uninteresting in boss fights. Which is a shame too, because it had absolutely everything going for it, and though I want to tack on that additional Batarang to give it a full score it doesn’t feel like it deserves it, as though a kid worked so hard throughout high school but then when the final exam came about he blew it off in favor of smoking outside in front of all the cool kids. It certainly is closer to the all-star magic than most games (As I hold up a copy of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time), and Shadow Complex managed to nab that fifth point just for being merely fifteen bucks, but all in all the flaws are just too prominent and too aggravating for me to give it a full score. It is, however, really really good, and I can heartily recommend it.

4/5 Bat Nipples