Note: Due to multiplayer having a lot of issues this review will focus on the single player portion. We will update the review when the multiplayer gets fixed.

The Case

Following the success of Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, WB Games have decided to hand the responsibility of making a prequel to the inexperienced hands of Warner Bros Montreal instead of series curators Rocksteady Studios. Does this new team cock up the established formula or do they manage to honor its progenitors?

The Trial

The team at Warner Bros Montreal are in a terrible position. Not only have they been given the unenviable responsibility of following up Rocksteady's superb run with the Batman license in the Arkham series, but they also have to work around the established canon and justify making a prequel of all things! My heart goes out to the rag-tag group of newcomers and seasoned vets at the studio for being given such a monumental task. Taking that into consideration, Batman: Arkham Origins is a rousing triumph, however if we were to compare it to the legacy of its predecessors, the game falls short in more ways than one.

Batman: Arkham Origins is, as the name implies, an origin story. However the game deftly avoids being one about the Dark Knight himself and instead treats it as the origin of the Arkhamverse itself. The game’s story setup is a blatant excuse to cram in a smattering of undesirables from Batman’s rogues gallery, but it manages to find its footing pretty quickly. The game is set on Christmas Eve, with Black Mask having placed a sizeable bounty on the Dark Knight’s head, attracting eight of the deadliest killers and assassins to try and take him down. Like the best Batman stories told, it has its ebbs and tides and eventually it reveals a neat trick up its sleeve. It’s a great story, arguably the best in the series so far, with one exceptional sequence in particular that is bound to make any hardcore Batman fan stroke their chin.

The first thing you’ll notice in Arkham Origins is the high production value. For example, the cinematics in the game actually feel cinematic this time around, with plenty of dynamic camerawork and a lot more emphasis given to the characters’ faces when speaking or emoting; there’s definitely a more auteurist feel to them here than in the previous games. It’s appropriate then that the game’s cast of actors do an incredible job of completely owning their respective roles. As a child of the 90s, Batman: The Animated Series was an integral part of my life; to me, Kevin Conroy IS Batman and Mark Hamill IS the Joker. Learning that Conroy and Hamill would be replaced for Origins (Mark Hamill famously retired from the character shortly before Arkham City had released), especially after their excellent performances in the prior games, was a massive blow to fans like me. Why the praise for the new cast, then? As Batman, Roger Craig Smith brings in the calm, confident and understated nature of Conroy’s Batman and melds it with a more controlled rendition of actor Christian Bale’s angrier portrayal from Nolan’s films. On the flipside, Troy Baker IS the next Joker! Baker essentially plays a younger version of Mark Hamill’s Joker and manages to steal the show every time the character comes on screen, with the great chemistry between the two characters established by Kevin and Mark still intact.

Being a prequel, the game is set entirely in North Gotham, which is where Arkham City was also set, but the scale has been expanded to include an additional borough linked by the Pioneer’s Bridge. It’s almost enough to officially call Arkham Origins an open-world game but, as a world, Gotham City fares pretty badly even if we compare it to its predecessor Arkham City. There’s a distinct lack of “life” in the game world. The story prescribes that because of the severe weather conditions, Gotham City has been put under a state of perceived lockdown, with citizens staying indoors, giving rise to a wave of criminal activity throughout the city. You might think that this could explain the lack of any soul around the city that is not trying to whack you into submission, but this is poverty-stricken and economically struggling Gotham City we’re talking about! One can at least expect a few homeless people huddled around barrel fires trying to survive the night and the thugs just to make traversing the expertly-designed world a little less depressing.

Oh right, the gameplay! Warner Bros Montreal has adhered unflinchingly to the winning formula of traversal, exploration and combat that was first established by Arkham Asylum and later fully realized in Arkham City. On normal difficulty, the combat feels like it has been tweaked to make Batman feel a little more vulnerable and prone to making mistakes; enemies react quicker and more ferociously than in prior games, a sensible enough design choice given that this is Batman in his early years. I still blamed myself for missing a beat or two, mostly because of how ingrained the combat is in my muscle memory after two games. That said, Origins plays it much safer with traversal and exploration, but this also makes sense given how perfectly Batman moved around in the environments of Arkham City. One element that Origins has changed for the better is the way the game doles out upgrade points and how gadgets and moves in general are unlocked. I always felt that Arkham City was a bit too generous in showering players with XP, with every upgrade readily available to be unlocked. Origins wisely remedies this by having the upgrades branch into a system that resembles something like a skill-tree, with certain upgrades only becoming available after two or more linked upgrades are unlocked. Then there are the ‘Auxiliary Upgrades’ which can only be unlocked by completing certain challenges within the game. It’s a slap in the face of instant player-gratification for sure but it also makes players work that much harder for rewards.

Some other changes that Arkham Origins brings to the table is the way that Batman can now digitally reconstruct a crime scene using his suit’s link to the Batcomputer, finding out things such as the direction a bullet was fired or where an object important to the case might have fallen, based on variables such as speed and trajectory. Think of the memory-scrambling sequences from Remember Me with a slice of Detective Norman Jayden’s ARI investigation sequences and you’ve got a pretty good ballpark. It’s a good idea and it definitely goes an extra length into making the player feel involved in the investigation but it still feels rather undercooked. The lone area that Origins actually outshines either of its predecessors is in the way the game handles boss fights, which make use of Batman’s abilities in a more emergent manner. I can’t exactly pinpoint how they did it but the boss fights felt way more natural (with one sole exception) and up-close than anything in either Arkhams Asylum or City.

Arkham Origins is a great looking game. Its art style tones down the grim pomp and color of the previous games, opting instead for a style that resembles the Nolan trilogy more than anything else. It’s definitely worth mentioning that the game in its current state runs far worse than both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. There are frequent frame drops, stuttering cutscenes, crashes, and a general wonkiness to some of the animations in the game making it feel as if the game was shipped to make a deadline regardless of what state it was in. I’m quite confident that most, if not all, of these glitches can be swept clean by a patch or two in the near future.

The Verdict

Batman: Arkham Origins was doomed right from the beginning, but by sticking to what works and adding sensibly, if also conservatively, manages to rise above any of the pre-emptive criticisms hurled by fans, ending up a solid game that manages to slavishly stay true to Arkham City - almost to a fault.

Case Review