Batman: Arkham Origins - Review

The main interest in this prequel is seeing Gotham's villains and heroes before their prime, inexperienced and young as well as giving some of Batman's lesser known villains their time in the spotlight. The assassins premise i find genuinely interesting and the game seemed set on it's story with the eight master killers hunting down Batman for Black Mask's fifty million dollar reward. It's a shame then that after a linear but decent opening involving a breakout at Blackgate prison the game nosedives into what feels just like a remake of Arkham City and Asylum.

Some of the map from Arkham City is cloned here albeit with a Christmas makeover, whilst the game mechanics and controls are shamelessly exactly the same. Raft lassoing, steam dodging, pulling down walls and floors, gliding across the city, interrogating thugs, hostage saving, being poisoned, being mind controlled, following blood trails, all fun admittedly but the same fun most players have had in two games already.

Instead of exploring the assassins themselves and inducing an atmosphere of being hunted the game falls back on the same villains it has before. Often in incredibly cheap and familiar ways it spends most of it's time with Penguin, Joker and Bane which whilst we would expect to see them in some capacity starting their criminal careers, we were lead to believe the focus was on Black Mask and his assassins. Perhaps this is just the marketing of the game accidentally proving inconsistent with the actual plot or perhaps due to the game wanting it's own big twist, as Arkham City had, it deliberately mislead it's audience. Something Arkham City didn't have to do and yet still had a better story than the one portrayed here.

That's not to say Origin's story is bad, it's just nothing remarkable.There are some nice moments such as the first confirmed sighting of the Batman, the increased banter and conflict between Alfred and Bruce or some of the Joker's origin details, most of which are taken from The Killing Joke, so they're good albeit not original. It's just a waste that it spends so much time on these characters we've seen before and have been explored thoroughly already. Six of the eight assassins appear as boss battles, some of which are no more than glorified QTE's or regular thug fights and two of the assassins are completely omitted from the central story and reduced to side mission quests.  The only exceptional encounter is with Firefly and that's the penultimate stage of the game. You don't feel at all like Batman has a bounty on his head which makes me wonder why they gave so much attention to it in all the trailers.

Maybe this was only a disappointment to me but i wanted to see Black Mask and the assassins developed and explored. Batman has arguably the best rogues gallery of any superheroes and yet we remain fixed on the Joker who's been so overdone at this point it's just depressing. That said, some of the heroes do get more fleshed out origins like Jim Gordon and Alfred but overall the game feels indecisive, mixed and unsettled. It improves in the second half but it takes far too long to get to this point and by the time the game has picked up the pace it's essentially over.

Another Joker story was the safe option, there's no denying he's the most interesting character, it just would've been nice to explore someone else for a change.

The gameplay itself works well enough, though the sense that there's too much city and too few grapple points becomes apparent fairly quickly. Travelling through Gotham just isn't that fun and with a much bigger map it can easily feel like a chore. Then there are the multiple reasons why every ordinary citizen is at home which is a missed opportunity for a livelier Gotham and yet again gives a feeling like you're playing one of the previous games where the streets are only ever populated with criminals.

The game is also quite glitchy, there's some bad interaction detection on climbing and breaking walls, grappling more often bugs out whilst bodies sometimes unnaturally glide into or through surfaces. The gameplay that stands out has already been shown off extensively in all the advertising for this game and is the bare minimum you'd expect for a sequel.There's about two new gadgets and the crime scene reconstructions, whilst enjoyable, new and interesting, there's very few of them. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with Origins because it's based on far superior games, but there's lots of minor missteps that detract from the enjoyment. For example, the upgrade system is trying to follow an electronic bat-computerised theme, the downside is this makes all the menus cold and clinical. There's almost no indication of when you choose an upgrade so it's not satisfying to do and you lose the incentive to level up. Then there's the early levels hunting Penguin again who has this awfully voiced irritating English assistant acting as a make-shift Harley Quinn whilst you go through tedious industrial looking levels situated on a boat. It's not memorable and the only good ideas are ones we've already seen.

In the challenge mode you can play as the assassin Deathstroke who was overhyped in all the trailers and then given shockingly little time in the actual game. Oddly though he doesn't kill anyone when you play as him. Let me just restate that, DEATHstroke the ASSASSIN doesn't kill anyone in this game...or how about breaking into the GCPD and tightrope walking above a crowd of SWAT Officers. Officers who don't even flinch if you drop down amongst them and walk right up to their faces. It's little details like that which combine to produce an ultimately underwhelming experience.

I really wanted to like Arkham Origins but in truth it's one of the laziest sequels i've come across. If you're desperate for more Batman and already have the two previous games then Origins relieves a certain itch i suppose, but if you're expecting anything different from the previous games you'll be disappointed.