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HawkEye is a Sunday feature from Chris Hawke, who analyses his favourite news topic of the week.

If you have yet to read Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth, then I suggest you order it right this second, and do nothing but wait in front of the front door until it arrives. The story is incoherent, and it's a very short experience, but it'll stay with you for life. As beautiful as it is haunting, A Serious House is one of the most gruesome Batmans around, complete with decapitation, a very un-PC Joker, and this. It's goddamn terrifying.

But that's what makes it so attractive. After the camp of the 1960s Batman, and all that Superman + Batman tripe that followed, audiences wanted something a little darker. Batman: Year One is a great example, with Batman being ill-prepared and impatient, while Gordon is a psychotic, kung-fu clean cop in a dirty city. No tights, no weird younger boy/old creepy man combo, and not a in sight. The gritty Gotham was a breath of fresh air.

Arkham Asylum certainly rode that wave well. It was slightly cartoonish in places, and the dialogue sometimes wandered into PG-friendly dribble (Some of Batman's one-liners are cringe-worthy, and Poison Ivy drops an innuendo bomb every few seconds), but for a game that lets you unzip that body bags and talk to your dead parents, as well as epic Scarecrow scenes and , Batman, with ripped suit and tattered cape, was a refreshingly grown-up approach to a series that had only recently been immortalised in LEGO.

Swooping in this week was the first gameplay trailer for Arkham City. And luckily, not much has changed. From those incredible artworks (Batman with a nosebleed? Awesome!) you know this was going to be a darker affair, but with a disfigured Joker, haunting Hugo Strange, and cracks of gunshots in the distance like a Geiger counter, you're in for a delightfully disgusting treat. It is strange that every single games trailer has to have 1970s music complete with slow-mo helicopters, and the dialogue seems to be yet another mixed bag (Strange and Joker have the good lines lines nailed, but Two-Face seems forced and unintentionally comic).

I doubt Rocksteady will go the whole hog; Batman won't kill anyone, there'll be no blood, and the whole thing will be kept just about safe for work, but this is still a great step forward in this post-Dark Knight era. With any luck, other superheroes will follow on - expect a drug-addicted Superman or an overweight, balding Flash coming to a console near you.

 

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