By Kevin Kauffmann on November 4, 2013 at 2:01pm
When "Arkham Origins" was announced, I was ecstatic. I’ve played its predecessors to completion three or four times and never got tired of it. So obviously, a sequel to one of my favorite series would get me jumping around the room.
Then I found out that Rocksteady wasn’t making the game.
It was with some reservation that I picked up my copy of "Arkham Origins," but I was grateful to see that so much of what I loved from the series remained intact. The combat is just as fluid, there were tons of side quests and little secrets to find, and grappling throughout the city was just as fun as I remembered.
Well, almost as fun.
Unfortunately, it seems like WB Montreal was content with just emulating the games that came before. It’s not an awful way to make a game, as so much of what made "Arkham City" great was transplanted almost entirely into "Arkham Origins," but it’s missing heart. The story feels loose, and the whole assassin plot line just seemed like an excuse to throw in as many villains as possible. A few of them don’t even show up in the main storyline. I missed one entirely, finding her only after I finished the game, because I didn’t walk down the right back alley.
I mean, why walk when I can grapple and glide through the air?
Before I go further, there are some diamonds in the rough when it comes to WB Montreal’s contributions. I really enjoyed the addition of the challenge trees, one focused on combat, another on exploration, and the last on the predator mechanics. While I’ve never been able to fully get a handle on the predator sequences, I filled up the other two challenge trees as fast as I could - well, except for the combat tree. There was a necessary upgrade, Critical Strikes, which is only discovered after you encounter that same assassin I didn’t find until after the end of the game.
However, as much as I can complain about the lackluster story and sidequests, Troy Baker did a fantastic job of bringing murder and malice back to the Joker. I never thought I would get over Mark Hamill’s departure, but from his first introduction until his last twisted laugh, Troy Baker did a fantastic job portraying our favorite psychotic jester. In fact, I feel like the high point of the game was when WB Montreal let us see just where the character came from, telling one of the best villain origin stories in comics. I had been losing faith in the game at that point, and that sequence brought me right back.
Sadly, it wasn’t much longer before I started to lose interest again. One can only collect so many identical Riddler data packages and stop so many crimes in progress before the game play starts to become stale. This could have been an issue with the way I played the game; I get distracted and start doing side quests as soon as they’re available, but I found that I was just not enjoying "Origins" as much as I had the other games.
Take the Mad Hatter for example. In "Arkham City," his contribution was amazing and provided some much needed variation. In "Arkham Origins," on the other hand, it merely felt like they were including him because it was expected and they already had the character models. As pretty as the sequence was, it came with a host of issues when they decided to make it more of a 2.5D sidescrolling sequence. The game was not built to handle it, and so it felt clumsy. It seemed like whatever new ideas WB Montreal had to break up the action were bungled at best and crippling at worst.
A similar 2D sequence happened later on in the core story and made me furious once I encountered a glitch which forced me to restart the game. At other times, I fell through the ground after trying to glide kick into an enemy, framerate stuttered midflight, which caused me to glide into walls, and at one point, could no longer interrogate enemies. Considering that interrogation was the only way I could progress any of the quests, this was especially irritating. I also had my system freeze mid-save toward the end of the game, and I wasn’t sure I would even start over if my save file had been corrupted.
From what I’ve read, many of these glitches and framerate drops are specific to the PS3 version, and so I can’t entirely blame the "Arkham Origins" team for my experience, but it felt very sloppy while I was playing. Nothing is more irritating in a combat system relying on perfect timing than when the game itself fights against you. At the beginning of the game, I was a combat master, but by the end of the game, I encountered so many problems that the final level in the combat challenge tree seemed unattainable. I’m sure others have done it, but looking at the requirements, I’m not sure I even care enough to try.
Coincidentally, that is also how I feel about the multiplayer, which was developed by Splash Damage, the same team who made "Brink." I actually didn’t even know the multiplayer existed until I picked up the game and saw that there was an online option. While I love the idea of three teams going back and forth, Joker’s faction, Bane’s forces, and the dynamic duo of Batman and Robin, it felt like a merely acceptable third-person shooter. Seeing Joker and Bane enter the field from time to time was nice, and the slightly dumbed down versions of Batman and Robin were still exciting, but I only spent a couple hours on it before realizing that I had better things to do.
I guess that’s just how I feel about "Arkham Origins" in general. I’ve already played this game and enjoyed it more when it was called "Arkham City." However, I really loved "Arkham City," and that love got me to tear through this game in just three days. Looking back at it, sure, I was disappointed, but I also got my money’s worth. Beating up legions of thugs is still fantastic, gliding through the air is still empowering, and I will always enjoy the time I spend with Batman’s rogue gallery.
It’s just that the next time I feel nostalgic and want to play the "Arkham" series again, I’ll probably skip over this one.
