Of all the Batman: Arkham games, I was most curious about revisiting Origins as I originally had rather poor experience with the game due to its numerous bugs on release, yet despite that remembered enjoying the game nonetheless. Developed by WB Games Montréal, the title was clearly designed to be a filler entry in the series to bring WB more cash before Arkham Knight can be released. And it has since been often ignored in the overall Batman: Arkham re-releases structure (along with the Arkham Origins Blackgate sidescrolling spin-off which wasn’t good). To the point where the upcoming Gotham Knights title from the same studio, despite clearly looking like a continuation of the side character stories from Batman: Arkham series, is marketed as a completely standalone title.
And it’s all a shame because Arkham Origins is almost a very good game. And I wish I could like it more than I do.
Just like the previous Arkham City, Arkham Origins is an open world stealth action adventure with beat ’em up style combat influenced by earlier Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia titles. You play as Batman in the mostly same locations as with Arkham City, except you get two additional districts to explore and since the events of the game are happening about a decade prior to Arkham Asylum, the parts of Gotham that you get to explore look more or less “normal”. During one particularly snowy night a sudden wave of crimes happens, including a prison breakout and an arrival of several famous assassins all competing to kill Batman first.
This leads to a game where you almost get to be the “normal” day-to-day Batman, the detective vigilante. A dude in a suit who solves crimes, busts criminals and sends anonymous tips to the police not for praise but for his own sense of justice. It’s not like the plot doesn’t get bigger, but unlike the main entries made by Rocksteady Studios, there’s no sense of endtimes or the extremely stylized gothic tone to the world or events. It can be a downside, especially given how cool the style of the other games is, but this “normality” is something that I really enjoy about Origins. This is the first entry in the series, where the detective part of the game is taken seriously, and, although mostly in optional scenes, you do get to solve simpler crimes and apprehend “normal” criminals.
The more “normal” take on villains, that gets less normal as the game progresses, is also charming, if flawed. Penguin is just a short dude who sells weapons. Riddler is a hacker planning to release incriminating data on several public figures. Black Mask is a mafioso with an absurd amount of money and power. Even the Killer Croc is somewhat less monstrous than in other entries.
It almost clicks. Almost, if not for the fact that the developers didn’t really know how to make it all work in the time they had to develop the game. So Riddler still hides stuff everywhere, but it’s not riddles this time around, but chunks of data. Just because he’s your collectible villain like in other games and his newer more interesting idea of disabling data relays to shut down the main server couldn’t be as much of a filler. And every villain you fight as a boss has some sort of gimmick, even though none of them actually feel fun. And the whole idea of slowly switching the more normal Batman world into the more stylized one you know from the other games doesn’t really happen, even though it feels as if it’s meant to at a certain point. But it never feels like it.
And that’s really the big problem with the game, or it’s wonderful Cold, Cold Heart DLC – it never feels like it really knows how to be what it wants to be and the delivery is often flawed. The technical issues with the game, for example, still persist. Events might not trigger correctly, fights might not end the way they’re supposed to, you can easily clip out of bounds in many places, the camera can go absolutely nuts during or post combat. The sound in the numerous pre-rendered cutscenes can glitch out to the point where the intro logos are distorted. Though, ironically, they do work just fine in the Online section of the game, because – oh yeah, WB wanted to cash in with the multiplayer too. And it was, surprising nobody, closed just a couple of years after game release. And if you launch it on PC, the only way to shut it down seems to be to Alt+F4, because otherwise you’re stuck in a loop before the game lets you into the main menu.
Oh and the way the upgrades system was redesigned is just horrible. It’s completely linear, instead of being more open like in the previous entries, locking you into upgrades you don’t really need before you can get something you actually wish to use. And even more horribly locking the “challenge” progression (that unlocks upgrades as well) into a linear structure as well. One that doesn’t count that you did something until you’re at the step that’s counting you doing something, so those 15 times you’ve done the required thing before don’t count. It’s so silly, in fact, that the stealth challenge tree is basically impossible to get if you make any mistake, as it often requires you to do very specific things that require the level to have very specific spots. In one case, it requires you to go through a stealth encounter doing 4 things, which is only possible in about 3 or 4 encounters during the whole story, side-content included – missed your chance at the start, now wait until the end of the game.
But I have to say that the PC version still looks great. Upon release it used a lot of fresh visual features that ran poorly on hardware available at the time, but today, at least if you have a more modern nVidia GPU, you can enjoy lots of really nice features and visuals with very little trouble. The soundtrack as well to me felt like a more interesting and memorable ambient in comparison with the rather uninteresting Arkham City and the “christmas-y” arrangements of Batman: Arkham tunes sound really nice.
I really really wish I could easily recommend Batman: Arkham Origins, as I personally enjoy it more than Arkham City. But that enjoyment has to fight through lots and lots of “I like it despite…”. Because the storytelling here is worse, the technical issues are still here, the upgrade system is worse, the menus are less comfortable to navigate through, the combat is often even more annoying than in City because of several new enemy types, the bosses are more often than not simply unfun… I like what it was going for more than what City was going for. I like how it’s actually trying to be open world, almost completely discarding the attempts to merge the Asylum and openness of the map that City often struggles with. I like how it’s more about Batman doing his thing with more “normal” criminals. But many people might not find these reasons good enough to go through all of the downsides. Maybe you will, but I still find it hard to wholeheartedly recommend this entry.