Batman: Arkham Origins review

The Dark Knight’s third visit to the Gotham City’s murky underbelly this generation is actually a prequel. Set five years before the events of Arkham Asylum, Origins sets a young Batman loose in Gotham on Christmas Eve, after a price has been put on his head by sadistic mobster Black Mask. Eight deadly assassins, GCPD’s corrupt SWAT teams and Gotham’s opportunistic supervillains all want to stop you from seeing Christmas morning.

Gotham is a sprawling metropolis that not only incorporates areas first seen in Arkham City, but expands on them with different neighbourhoods, a river and a suspension bridge. Getting between them doesn’t require lots of tedious grappling and gliding, either – you can use the Batplane to quickly get one from neighbourhood to another, once you disable the Riddler’s broadcast towers which jam the Batplane’s systems.

The total gameplay area may be almost twice the size of Arkham City’s, but a blizzard has cleared the streets of almost everyone, leaving Gotham feeling barren compared to the lively metropolis that is GTA 5’s Los Santos. There are a few attempted robberies, gang fights and brutal police beatings to stop, but the largely empty municipal map feels like a missed opportunity.

Even as it stands, this illusion of GTA-style open world gameplay is largely that – an illusion. The main campaign is still a linear affair that sees you progressing from one building occupied by a supervillain and his henchman to another. This worked well on the claustrophobic island setting of Arkham Asylum, but it felt limiting and out of place in Arkham City and even more so here.

The third-person gameplay remains largely unchanged from previous Arkham games, with brutal melee brawls taking up a major part of the action. Hand to hand moves can be combined with various bat-gadgets, with experience points earned for chaining attacks together and avoiding enemy hits. These unlock more sophisticated moves and a wider arsenal of weapons.

Stealth is still an option, although the series’ signature ‘predator’ encounters are also largely unchanged. It’s still satisfying to pick off more dangerous gun-toting mobsters with stealthy cloak and dagger tactics, tormenting terrified troublemakers by hanging them upside down from gargoyles or bursting through walls and grabbing them from behind.

Black Mask’s grunt army gradually grows in number and starts using deadlier weapons, but they rarely pose a lethal challenge, especially if you play on the lesser difficulty levels where on-screen prompts help you defeat your foes. The eclectic rogues gallery of supervillains and Black Masks eight hired assassins form the game’s ‘boss’ battles, requiring a combination of precise timing and gadget-based attacks to defeat. The more surreal boss fights from the first two games, which included tedious and badly-conceived platform-style gameplay, are thankfully fewer and farther between this time around.

Oddly, you can play your way through the game without facing all eight assassins – some are completely superfluous to the main story. Although this helps prevent the plot from becoming the sprawling mess that was Arkham City’s story, it’s bizarre nonetheless.

Detective challenges make for a refreshing change of pace, using Batman’s augmented reality ‘detective vision’ to spot clues and visualize crime scenes with CSI-style wireframe graphics. They are rarely challenging and often guide you directly towards the perpetrators, stretching plausibility as Batman reconstructs events that would be impossible to discern based on the evidence at hand.

It might use the aging Unreal Engine 3, but Arkham Origins is still gorgeous in motion. Shadows and lighting are especially atmospheric, while Gotham’s various Art Deco, industrial and neo-gothic buildings look sumptuous. You’re in for a treat if you have a PhysX-compatible Nvidia card too, with Batman leaving footprints in the snow and criminals exhaling condensation as they shiver. Vents billow steam, sending litter and debris flying around you, while smoke and ash waft convincingly upwards from burning cars and fires. The particle and physics effects aren’t entirely for show either – take cover in the steam and some villains won’t be able to use their more deadly attacks against you.

You’ll benefit from having the most powerful Nvidia card you can afford though – even on a 2GB GeForce GTX 770, the steam, litter, lens flare and motion blur can make the otherwise smooth frame rate stutter and judder.

There is one totally new component to Arkham Origins – a multiplayer mode. The team-based deathmatch gameplay sees you play as Batman and Robin, or as convicts led by The Joker and Bane. We liked how earning enough experience points would unlock the Joker and Bane as playable characters, each with their own set of moves and gadgets, but without the campaign’s narrative it failed to hold our attention for long. More fleshed out, this could have helped set Origins apart from its predecessors, but as it is it’s merely a taste of what could have been.

There’s hours of bone-crunching battles, plenty of outlandish, cackling supervillains to beat and loads of comics references for diehard DC fans to spot, but Arkham veterans will have seen and done it all before. This makes Origins a fun, but ultimately inessential purchase unless you’re taking to Gotham’s streets for the first time.