Review: Batman: Arkham Origins (360)

Batman: Arkham Origins is a prequel, which focuses on the early years of Bruce Wayne being Batman and provides an initial point of contact with his future arch-nemesis Joker.

The story is centralized around a Christmas plot by Black Mask to kill Batman by offering a bounty of $50 million. Needless to say, the assassins start coming out of the woodwork: Deathstroke, Deadshot, Bane, Killer Croc, Firefly, Shiva, Copperhead, and Electrocutioner all make appearances to try and stop the Dark Knight. Your job is to remind everyone that you're the G**DAMMNED BATMAN!

The main story has you working your way through the Black Mask enemies acrossa larger area than the previous game; thankfully as you open up areas, you can use the Bat-Wing to quick-travel to those places rather than rappel and float there. Still playing like a sand-box, you can focus solely on the main-story or get drawn into the side-missions that pop-up. Instead of the Zsasz missions running around for phones to trace, you now get to run after bombs to defuse by Anarky… meh.

Sticking with the approach of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" Batman Arkham Origins is so similar in design to Arkham City that it is quicker to talk about the differences than the similarities.

The combat system is back as one of the best three dimensional combat systems ever implemented. (On revisiting it, we've seen so many developers try to re-create this system but just fail to recreate the brilliance of these fights.) As you get the majority of your upgrades, you'll become nigh-unstoppable against the typical rank-and-file enemies with only combinations of upgraded enemies giving you any real challenge. That being said, the difficulty curve veers violently into the frustration curve for the boss fights… even the early game boss fights are controller-throwing infuriating. The late game battles will inspire you to manufacture a Wii-style wrist-strap for your controller.

The big addition to the game is a more fleshed out Detective mode. In previous games you could do a bit of a post-mortem on a body or pull some interesting environmental data from the surroundings, but not much else. There are some more detailed investigations to complete this time which let you demonstrate that the "World's Greatest Detective" moniker wasn't just something Batman pulled off a mug.


Negatives? Well the Joker storyline was something that was publicized early and often by the developers and it takes near half of the game before he makes an appearance? Not impressed. The puzzle solving sections are just as tedious as they were in previous games… I refuse to believe that Batman would be stuck for 5 minutes trying to quick throw a series of batarangs at pressure switches. The developers were a little too environmentally conscious on some of the puzzle solutions – not everything needs to be recycled.

All in all, Arkham Origins is a good game. If you enjoyed what you got out of Arkham City and thought, I could go for more of this… you'll be happy. If you were looking forward to getting some more innovation to an already impressive franchise… sorry, that just isn't here.

- Tazman

The Good:
- No real deviation from the winning formula – just more of the same goodness from Arkham City

The Bad:
- Some of the boss-fights are friggin' HARD

Score: 8.0 / 10