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I just finished playing Batman: Arkham Asylum for the Xbox 360.
This is one of the best reviewed games in history for a reason. There's little to fault in this fighting/puzzle adventure that keeps the material true to the comics.
The original story is probably the most solid scripts written for a video game, and it doesn't collapse under the large cast of characters. (If you try and tell me that Halo 3 has a better story, I’ll punch you in your pricky fanboy face.) It follows Batman over the course of one night after capturing the Joker. As he escorts him to his incarceration at Arkham Asylum, the Joker stages a prison riot chock-full of Batman’s worst super villains. Mayhem ensues. Instead of escaping, the Joker turns Arkham into ground zero for his master plan involving a derivative of the Bane serum and an army of hyper-muscular mutants.
Batman has to fight Bane, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Zsasz, Killer Croc the Scarecrow and the Joker, with nods to other villains who don’t make personal appearances. The Riddler is in the game as a voice coming through his com-link, daring him to solve his riddles. Virtual unknowns like Humpty Dumpty are mentioned in the context of these riddles. Other characters have their back-story expanded upon by audio tapes.
Combat is wide and varied. A big-boss fight like the one with Zsasz can be ended as simply as throwing a Batarang, while a fight with the Scarecrow goes through a fear venom-infused nightmare sequence that hearkens back to his parent’s death. Once of these hallucination has the effect of psyching out the player by making it seem like their game is crashing in ol’school NES cartridge style. The screen fritzes out and then the game seemingly restarts, showing the opening CGI sequence again. Only this time: Batman is Joker’s prisoner. That’s gold.
Character costumes have been tweaked slightly, in good ways. It’s almost impossible to tell if Poison Ivy is wearing panties. She’s certainly not wearing any pants. Or a bra even. Bane and Croc are swollen to massive proportions. Batman’s costume is detailed enough to show every seam. As you play and take damage, the rips and tears and cuts last the rest of the game.
Most of the voice acting is borrowed from the award winning animated series, with Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamil proving he’s a better Joker’s Joker than Heath Ledger.
The game’s probably definitive of it’s yet-unnamed genre, similar to other hits like Assassin’s Creed where you spend most of the game sulking around corners, hiding from guards, and then getting into massive brawls with 10+ guys. The rest of the time is spent looking for hidden items.
Only problem I can find with the game is that it took me one weekend to beat, with 76% completion. It’s a renter, not a buyer, unless you’re buying the special edition that comes with IT’S OWN FREAKIN’ BATARANG.
Another thing (not necessarily a problem), but Batman never kills. He doesn’t kill in the game either, but logically, you have to assume that some of the goons he’s kicking off the side of a platform into a unfathomable pit. Here’s one of the things I did in the game: I shot a man in the gut with a grappling hook, then dragged him forward off the platform he was on into a bottomless pit that would kill Batman if he falls in. Also: quite frequently, you can explode an entire wall behind a group of thugs, burying them in hundred of pounds of rubble. Plus you can hang an unconscious thug upside down dozens of feet off the ground, then cut them down, so they have no means of protecting the heads they’re falling on. Logically, their necks would break. 
I’m going to give it a 10/10, only because you have to give out a 10/10 to sometimes. If you didn’t, then what’s the point of having a scale that goes up to 10? Have it start and end at 1, you pricks, for all the scale matters. So what if the game didn’t literally suck me off? It’s probably one of the most memorable game I’ve played for the right reasons.