Batman: Arkham Origins

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IamLEAM1983
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Batman: Arkham Origins

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When Batman : Arkham Asylum was released, a very palpable shock to the gaming scene's general system was felt. Here was a licensed game that did not suck, not even in the slightest. It paid reverent homage to its source material, innovated on tried-and-true mechanics and, more importantly, finally succeeded in letting you experience the thrill of stalking bad guys like the Goddamn Batman. After decades of so-so 3D adventure titles and mediocre 2D platformers, we finally had our decent Batman title. Not only that, but it was wrapped in the lovely, lovely sounds of Kevin Conroy's familiar turn as the Dark Knight, and Mark Hamill's infectious performance as the Clown Prince of Crime. Unsurprisingly, it sold like hot cakes.

Batman : Arkham City objectively felt like more of the same, but served up in a tantalizing open-world package. Diversified mechanics were introduced, a more expansive environment debuted, traversal mechanics were made even more reliable for the occasion... In every way, it was an expansion and a renewal of the first game's already flawless formula.

Arkham Origins tries its hardest to offer the same thrills as City, it honestly tries to tick off the same boxes of charm laced in with the signature Gotham City doom and gloom; all the mechanics are there – but something's missing. Is it the Rocksteady touch? Did the initial designers bring something to the table that Warner Brothers Montreal couldn't? In any case, where the first two games felt like love letters to the Caped Crusader's universe and approached themes, this one feels like it's merely returning form results, outputting the strict minimum to qualify for the Arkham family.

It's fun – don't misunderstand me on that, as it certainly has its interesting moments – but all through the game, you'll have the impression that there's a something that hasn't translated over from the second game to the third, a je-ne-sais-quoi that makes it hard to really stick to it, for all that Origins does well. Looking online, some have had less luck than I did and had an easier time expressing open disappointment. Jim Sterling didn't much care for it, while most of everyone else considers it to be merely adequate.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, however. First things first – the story.

Two years have passed since billionnaire playboy Bruce Wayne's return to prominence after several years spent MIA. It's his second Christmas alone, which leaves Gotham's TMZ alumni all aquiver. As you can expect, Christmas Eve isn't strictly observed by the city's miscreants, which means the Bat has work tonight. Roman Sionis, the Black Mask, has recently broken several amongst his former gang members out of Blackgate Prison, and is sure to have some sort of scheme sorted out. Little does Bruce know that Sionis apparently intends to have the Bat killed by one of six notorious assassins. With names ranging from obvious ones like Shiva or Deadshot to Arkham favorites like Bane and relative unknowns like Firefly, these fine fellas stand to make fifty million dollars if they manage to off the Dark Knight in the wee hours of Christmas morning.

Obviously, Batman wants and needs to figure out why Sionis is being so uncharacteristically aggressive, or it's his ass on the line. Alfred points out that Bruce could stay home and watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas and render the entire contract moot simply by not showing up – but this is underestimating Wayne's fairly pathological tendency towards self-endangerment. As a storm rages outside and the streets are packed with absolutely nothing but criminals on the prowl, Wayne still feels the need to throw himself into the fire in order to take hypothetical innocents out of the crossfires.

As the game follows City's open-world structure, however, other faces soon drop in and add their own muck to the night's scheduled entertainment. A new hacker only known as Enigma is determined to shut Gotham down, Wikileaks style, and challenges the Bat with the task of finding all of the blackmail data he hopes to leak to the press early the next day. Jervis Tetch shows up and abuses another girl named Alice because that's pretty much his schtick. Anarky figures Crimbo is the right occasion to make bombs go off over certain Gotham landmarks, spouting freshman collegiate assertions about power and corruption as a way to justify himself. Shiva has a few tests she wants Batman to go through before she tries killing him actively, and Bane has been planting Venom containers across town so that his juiced-up vatos can stay powered. Add to all that a ton of ancillary tasks and randomly generated police calls, and you've got enough on your plate for more than a few weeks' worth of playtime. As can be expected, the narration lends an urgent pace to the main storyline, but conveniently halts itself whenever you decide to take off and work on something else. It's essentially Grand Theft Batwing, even if getting to that general impression means momentarily feeling like you're playing an Urban Gothic version of FarCry 3.

This isn't exactly surprising, either. The core team at WB Montreal is packed with ex-Ubisoft employees, and the game's producer used to work at Eidos Montreal. There's several bits and pieces of designer culture cribbed from here and there, sometimes culminating into a cohesive whole and generally leaving you a little puzzled. Unjamming comms towers in order to fast travel around the city feels like a hassle more than a challenge, largely because you're better off completing about half of the main storyline before even attempting the first of them. All the while, of course, you're stuck gliding manually across Gotham. Even if you exploit the game's traversal mechanics to the fullest, Batman is amongst the slowest game characters out there, and is consistently bottlenecked along the Gotham Pioneers Bridge – an otherwise impassable landmark that gives the city an odd hourglass shape. You'll go back and forth across that bridge repeatedly, to the point of being sick and tired of hunting for the same old Grapnel Gun points over and over.

Thankfully, the voice cast does an admirable job of paying homage to Conroy and Hamill. Roger Craig Smith plays a younger and ballsier Batman that fits somewhere between Conroy and Christian Bale's versions of the character, while Troy Baker absolutely steals the show as a young and, in some ways, embryonic Joker. If I hadn't paid attention to the credits, I never would have guessed our old nemesis wasn't voiced by Hamill. There's a satisfyingly lengthy segment where the origins that were hinted at in Arkham City are fleshed out, coming complete with a super-brief combat arena bit where you control the Joker. The Red Hood angle still strikes me as being an odd choice, but I can respect Rocksteady's initial choice of giving their Joker a definitive genesis. As with everything else in the wild and wooly world of comics, that approach was subject to contention. Some fans couldn't digest the idea of one of Pop culture's most influential antagonists being given a concrete starting point – but I couldn't care less. The Arkhamverse doesn't reflect in the comics, so Rocksteady and their torchbearers at WB Montreal are entirely free to expand on Joker's foggy mythos as they'd please. Basically, after managing to give Mister J an impactful send-off for the second game, the series does, at least, manage to give him a convincing thematic infancy. All the beats are there, including his first meeting with the ill-fated Harleen Quinzel.

Another high note is the revised use of Detective Mode's functions. Previous to Origins, you'd occasionally set up crime scenes and trust the Batcomputer to handle all of the actual sleuthing. All you did was look for individual elements or clues in the highlighted area and wait for Bruce to spout internal expository dialog. Now, once you've scanned in enough items to have a vague idea of what happened in your immediate surroundings, you can more or less borrow a page from Remember Me and CSI to “replay” the crime's constituting events. Scrubbing the timeline for additional clues hidden in the recent past, you'll see exploded walls reassemble themselves and bodies fling themselves back into life and away from receding bullets that return to their guns. Playing back and forth, you'll then spend some time looking for little details that aren't immediately apparent, based on the as-is observation of the crime scene. Things like bullet trajectories or ejected casings become important, even right down to fairly implausible evidence markers such as text messages received on a phone that's nowhere to be found, but of which the Batcomputer can restore some sort of electronic shade. More complex crime scenes can cover several rooftops or levels, gradually pushing you to pay attention to where things ended up, how they ended up in their last known location and position – and what you can infer from all that data. As before, unfortunately, you aren't allowed to mull things over as in adventure games; Batman's going to immediately grasp the required information even if you haven't personally managed to follow his logic. This creates as many “Yeah, Batman! I was right!” moments as it will others where you'll go “Zuh? Where'd you get that, Bruce?”

Past that, however, things start to look formulaic. The Freeflow combat system makes a welcome return, but has seemingly been tweaked by the Montreal team – breaking some of that well-tuned flow. Where the Bat used to be able to break three-pronged attacks, Origins now frequently presents you with enemy pile-ups where far too many goons all choose to attack at once. You'll counter one, maybe two of them, but there's always a third bastard that's going to be able to squeeze a hit in. Repeat this often enough and the AI's going to wear you out by sheer attrition, managing to turn an otherwise serviceable run into a complete shame. If you don't have lightning-quick reflexes in some cases, you'll have a hard time slipping out of each and every incoming punch or baseball bat swing. On the flipside, the main story eventually gifts you with the Shock Gloves upgrade, a system by which your kinetic force is used to progressively charge Taser-like gauntlets. Some puzzles require the gloves and some stored energy to let you juice up generators lying in wait, but the game is generally far more content with the prospect of throwing more mooks at you. The problem is that the Shock Gloves immediately put you into Freeflow Combo mode, frequently giving you one-hit kills. Using them robs the combat system of its layers of intricate timing, counters and dodges and lets you spam the Attack button without much effort. The armored enemies necessitating the use of the Beatdown combo are back, but a few fist-derived jolts and they're goners – even if they block you. The game does try to mitigate that with a few new baddie classes like martial artists and Venom users, but the changes they bring are minimal at best. The first one forces you to counter their attacks two or three times before being able to press on, while the second requires a back attack before any sort of forward-facing damage can be inflicted. With the combat engine being more than a little buggy and the boss encounters not easily giving you readouts of your foes' status, some fights just aren't fair.

Early on in the main storyline, you'll be called to duel against Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke. Deadpool's super-serious inspiration initially came with a gimmicky angle wherein you needed to watch his animations as carefully as possible in order to spot openings in his defense, but not all of us are martial arts-minded. Moving arms and legs are just moving arms and legs, and figuring out the existence of a supposeded sweet spot was aggravating – especially when you consider that he got free hits in, during that time.

Thankfully, WB Monty has since patched that out, settling with the addition of a Counter prompt and a tiny bit of Bullet Time. Even then, as the game spends its time asking you to counter attacks whenever it's realistically possible, ending up in a fight that asks you to wait for specific openings was fairly jarring. Pre-patch, I mostly just Batclawed his ass to death. Post-patch, I spam Attack lazily and just lift my thumb off the controller when one of the canned long animations starts, switching to Counter when the game tells me to. They've more or less sucked the tension out of the encounter by patching it, even if said encounter was absolutely unfair.

The chosen time period also brings with it a few design problems. Batman is still an unknown at this time, and the future Comissioner is still nothing but a Lieutenant. Gordon still believes himself to be at odds with Wayne's alter ego, and most of the force is conveniently in Sionis' pockets, thanks to the actual commish's underhanded deals. Gillian Loeb earns one of the least dignified endings this now fairly archetypal Crooked Cop character has ever suffered, switching seats with Julian Gregory Day on the Calendar Man's scheduled ride in the gas chamber. This supposedly means that all the cops in town are crooked, which in turn justifies the use of cops as a sort of fourth or fifth gang in Gotham, another group of toughs that will do whatever they can to bring you down.

Alfred does raise a brow at the prospect of the Dark Knight putting the boot to the po-pos, but this young and determined Batman won't hear it. Twice, actually, Alfred tries to remind Bruce of the fact that his vigilante actions make him just as reprehensible as those he's attempting to stop, and twice Batman uses angry, selfish and poorly constructed morals in order to justify what he does. Not only that, but his usually WayneTech obtained doodads are actually stolen from the GCPD this time around, or adapted from someone else's blueprints.

So... Assault, battery, B&E, reckless endangerment, personal reckless endangerment, copyright theft, corporate espionage and theft of police property. Nice job, mister vigilante! Where's Lucius Fox when you need him? Where the fuck is WayneTech, actually?

There's some disturbing breaks in the Dark Knight's character that are in play, here, including a few that have been endemic to the Arkham series. This isn't a bug or a design oversight, however – it's bad writing.

As for the rest of the game's niggles, the plot-appropriate snow storm and the reuse of several of City's assets – with less soul and few interesting callbacks – more or less strips the Arkhamverse of much of its charm. The first two games contained spoilers for escaped inmates, references to the Animated Series' writer Paul Dini, bits and pieces referring to various chapters that are considered to be deeply ingrained in Batman's lore or to the culture that surrounds the character. As it stands, however, pre-Arkham City Gotham feels like a featureless expansion of the previous game's criminal enclave, one of the future penal colony's walls being retconned into one of Blackgate Penitentiary's outer security gates. Pioneers' Bridge connects to a freeway that essentially goes nowhere, both riversides are functionally mirror images of one another. You're looking at a procedurally packaged Gotham made up of similar buildings that's occasionally punctured by lore-specific landmarks like the Bowery, Crime Alley, the Stacked Deck bar or the Ace Chemicals building. All of these were in City, they're still in roughly the same spots, a few additional ones were added and some of the last game's derelicts are now still in full usage – see Sionis Industries – and everything justifiably feels Christmassy.

All the same, something about this attention to the reuse of details feels formulaic. Word of God says that Origins is meant to tide us over until Rocksteady releases a current-gen Batman title, and this is more or less what it feels like. It's not disingenuous, it's not without its flashes of brilliance – like Alfred playing the conscientious objector to Bruce's fabled pigheadedness or Troy Baker's Joker – and you very well could find your lot with this game.

Maybe we were spoiled with City. Maybe I shouldn't criticize a smaller studio that's asked to pick up where a tried-and-true behemoth left off. Be that as it may, for every bit of Origins that feels like a fun return to proven mechanics, there's more that feels empty, if not soulless. The gadgets are borderline identical, a few of them having been renamed and reskinned to avoid confusion. The Ice Grenade is now called the Glue Grenade, and you won't so much create ice platforms for yourself as you will chunks of packing or riot foam. That really isn't the most environmentally conscious choice, hm? The sidequests have fairly little in terms of payoff, except maybe convenient XP to be used in the main campaign.

The weird thing is I'm still having fun despite all I've said. The mechanics work, they're as solid as ever – but it feels like a DLC for Arkham City to me.

Speaking of DLC, the Initiation pack caused a bit of a stir as it initially promised to address Bruce's formative years amidst the members of the League of Shadows. A lot of people were expecting ninja-themed missions and small storylines – but what we got was a set of Challenge maps and some new Challenge models for Batman. They're all fairly solid, but the only way you'll be able to play as Vigilante Bruce Wayne is by completing the main storyline as your standard flying rodent.

Considering all of the above, I'd wait for a serious rebate on this title, if I were you. For a fraction of Arkham Origins' cost, you can snag the Game of the Year Edition for Arkham City and experience largely similar – and notably better – content. If you've already pounded Hugo Strange's face into the pavement enough times to get bored, though, Origins might offer a fun return to entertaining mechanics.
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