Batman: Arkham Origins Review
Well, I may have to eat my words: Arkham Knight may now be officially my least favorite Arkham game. I have just replayed Arkham Origins, and I appreciated it a lot more on my second playthrough. So what made me soften my harsh take on the black sheep of the Arkham franchise? Was it just a lack of playing Arkham games since 2015’s disappointing Arkham Knight or a telling revisiting of an underrated classic? Both? Neither? Let’s find out!
So it’s Christmas Eve, and all the through the streets, criminals are stirring, specifically mob boss Black Mask and his men. Black Mask is making power moves and he begins by assassinating the police commissioner and trying to break out a bunch of his guys from Blackgate. Batman intervenes and earns a spot on Black Mask’s shit list. Dude’s so ticked that he hires eight assassins and puts a $50 million bounty on Batman’s head that has until morning to be collected. The story takes some fun twists and turns, some of which have been spoiled by marketing, but I’ll let you experience those for yourself. Suffice to say, Batman has to survive the night while also dismantling a citywide criminal campaign, taking on the likes of Bane, the Penguin, some interesting C and D list villains (one of whom has a fantastic meta joke played on him), and of course, the Joker. Batman soon discovers there are bigger players at work here than he imagined, and he must lean on the concerted efforts of his butler and associate Alfred as well as Jim Gordon, the only cop in town that doesn’t try to shoot or arrest him on sight. In only his second year of crimefighting, Batman will be tested farther than he ever has and realize there is a new breed of criminal out there now, and he may not be ready for it.
Likely the first thing you’ll notice about Origins is that it’s not developed by Rocksteady but by WB Montreal, who previously had ported Arkham City to the WiiU. The second thing you’ll notice is that Batman is not voiced by Kevin Conroy but by Roger Craig-Smith, who’s most well-known as Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed. Troy Baker, voice acting’s town bicycle, stands in for Mark Hamill as the Joker. So why the changes? Well, Origins is, as the name might imply, a prequel to Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, and the functionality of the game’s plot is to explain how Batman met the Joker and establish their dynamic. Thus the voice actors are younger. The good news is that both guys absolutely nail their roles: Baker’s impression of Hamill’s Joker is almost indistinguishable and full of manic glee, and Craig-Smith’s Batman is a more hotheaded, brash version of the character. I greatly enjoyed the exchanges between these two and the added depth and humanity the writers imbued them with. Yes, it’s tedious as hell to see yet another Joker story but hey, at least it’s done respectfully. Also worth noting is Alfred’s value to the narrative. He’s normally presented as a nag in Batman lore but here his concern for Bruce is much more fiery than normally seen, while remaining paternal. He gets into real arguments with Bruce and they hurt each other and have to come to grips with what Bruce is becoming. It’s great stuff and a welcome refresher to their relationship.
We’ll revisit my impressions of the story proper a little bit later but for now, let’s get a feel for the layout of Gotham City and what it holds in store for our hero as you attempt to survive till morning. The snow and enhanced lighting effects are welcome additions to the cityscape in this entry. The pageantry of Christmas decorations everywhere is welcome but Origins is as much a Christmas game as Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Still, the snow flurries whip past you as you grapple around the skyline and you can almost feel how cold it is. The environmental assets are mostly copied from previous Arkham games and the city structure itself is identical save for an overly long bridge that connects the two halves of Gotham. To help offset the tediousness of traversing this bridge, you can fast travel between districts, which is a first for the series.
The side missions and activities are more numerous than the past two games but each consist of fairly samey objectives repeated over and again. Riddler challenges return but are called data packs, and are generally much easier to find and solve than the previous games. What’s unique about this version of the Riddler challenges is that he’s set up radio towers and relays you'll need to hack and or destroy with your Batarangs so that he can’t mass disperse private information for his own gain. The relative simplicity of the Riddler datapacks may be disappointing or seem merciful depending on how tired you are of completing all of these in each Arkham game.
In addition to the missions for each of the eight assassins, various members of Batman’s rogues gallery like the Mad Hatter and Killer Croc get their own unique missions where you must follow some clues from their crime sprees to find their location and stop them. These crafted side missions are generally pretty fun and especially so for a comics fan like me, but gameplay wise they are pretty straightforward and tend to repeat the surreal Scarecrow levels from Asylum and the Batman stumbling around to find a cure sequence from Arkham City. Bane specifically plays a major role in this game and while he spends much of the game being awesome and true to the comics with his cunning and South American accent, by the end he’s less of a warlord and more of a ravening Hulk monster again, which is shame that even WB Montreal fell into this trap.
What is truly new and refreshing to the Arkham series are the detective side missions in which you must scan a murder crime scene and attempt to solve how it was committed so it can lead you back to the culprit. Once you’ve scanned enough clues at the crime scene, your tech reconstructs a digital simulation of the crime you can scrub through back and forth to find out where a shooter's location, if they left behind any DNA evidence, and more. The concept is cool and the simulations look good in slow motion but the actual gameplay basically just amounts to holding the use key a bunch of times to scan stuff and not much else. If you’ve ever played the Condemned series, it’s comparable to that kind of forensic investigation, just better looking and more involved.
Combat is much the same as before: attacking and countering are your basic moves, and you can jump over your enemies to get clear of mobs just like before. What’s new is that while the animations look just like the previous games, they’ve definitely had programming and balancing changes. Enemies can track you now and kind of zip to you in fights much like Batman does, and they often don’t attack nearly as conveniently, often throwing a punch midway through your first punch animations so you have to cancel immediately and block instead. It’s honestly not fun, and not because it’s more difficult. This stop and start rhythm means you’re constantly pausing your offensive, parrying, then trying to initiate the offensive again. Batman also auto targets his enemies worse than he ever has, flailing at open air sometimes and having this weird animation like he’s pulling his punches, making you lose your combo multiplier. I noticed too that the amount of time that it takes Batman to be able to parry attacks from behind while coming out of a ground takedown animation is much longer. This means you have even less ability to remove stunned opponents from the fight entirely because of the high probability you’ll take cheap damage from engaging in the ground takedown animation.
It seems that WB Montreal was aware of how stilted this makes combat feel as they implemented a new gadget called the shock gloves. These bad boys are charged up by striking your enemies and once the meter is full, you can activate the gloves for a limited amount of time to deal greatly increased melee damage through electrical energy that courses from your gloves to your foes and sends them reeling. The gloves are super fun and empowering, but they totally break the balance of combat, as they just ignore all the special enemy types’ defenses of shields and blocks. They also encouraged me to just parry and strike once or twice enough times to charge the gloves then go ham, which feels lame. I appreciate the power trip but the gloves seem like they’re there to fix what never should have been broken.
Fortunately, pretty much all of the gadgets from the first two games return in some form here, which makes no narrative sense, but you’ll still get access to your various batarangs, gas pellets, disruptor, glue grenades, remote grappling hook, Batclaw, explosive gel, and the rest. The use of these gadgets separates the men from the boys in combat, though I must admit I’m not very good at it.
Before we circle back to the story, which really keeps the game afloat, there are some other oddities to how this game functions, especially compared to previous entries. The grappling animation appears to be missing a couple frames and looks far choppier, though I can tell playing this game for the second time in 2021 it looks noticeably better than it did on release in 2013. The city layout is much harder to chain grapples together to keep up a fluid stream of motion, and you’ll often have to drop down to the street level to find a new grapple point before continuing. Technical oddities abound: framerate stutters (which are much better than they were in 2013) and black screens when transitioning to cutscenes or loading saves happened multiple times. I had a stage in a boss encounter where no enemies would attack me and I couldn’t attack them so I had to reload. Texture pop in happens quite a bit more than ever before in this series as well. The game’s pretty messy technically, which is too bad, because at the time, it was definitely the best looking Arkham game in many ways.
So with the combat hampered and the performance in question, you may be wondering what compelled me to keep playing. At the end of the day, even a mediocre Arkham game is still a pretty damn good one because the core is so strong. The combat still has its moments, you’ll have tons of challenge maps to complete as Batman and even Deathstroke, single player challenges for combat and traversal that reward you with XP to unlock gadgets and abilities, and the attention to detail in level design is incredibly immersive.
Most importantly, the story is noticeably grounded and plays out more like a crime procedural or noir thriller than the previous two games which tended towards Christopher Nolan city in crisis porn. What I liked most about Origins’ narrative is that Batman feels more like a real person than before, full of rage and a little easy to unhinge. The jaded, stoic Batman that’s constantly telling his sidekicks he’ll do this alone and vomiting moral platitudes at villains has been one of the weakest aspects of this series. The weak point in Batman’s mental armor is actually the crucial drama in this story, as Batman finds that the stakes in the criminal world are rising, that he will have to now face evil which doesn’t need a reason to be; some men just want to watch the world burn. Evil that can’t be reasoned with is a chilling real problem that our souls often can’t acknowledge without spinning into deep fear and depression, and that’s what Batman faces here.
I think the worst thing you could say about Origins’ story is that it doesn’t feel necessary. There’s one action in the whole game between Batman and the Joker that is very closely tied to Arkham City’s ending, which is definitely intentional and morally interesting because it establishes a dynamic between the two of them which confounds the Joker and drives him to abuse Batman’s code of honor. But there is just one really semi-important piece of the puzzle to introduce here that adds depth to the main conflict in Batman’s lore as well as the Arkham games, that of the Joker’s menace. The rest of the game is ultimately fan service.
The Arkham series are the best superhero simulators ever made in my opinion, though the competition beyond Spider-Man games and Marvel Ultimate Alliance is not that stiff (shout to the Punisher game as well, which will definitely show up on this site sometime). Even when Origins is trailing behind the pack, it’s still built on a solid foundation and there’s enough texture to the proceedings to enjoy going back to Gotham, so I would recommend you give this one a go!
