Batman: Arkham Origins

Bluh... Either I'm becoming an overly demanding, complaining pile of disappointment, or the games I've been playing are not delivering. Batman: Arkham Origins is my latest casualty of shattered expectations. Asylum and City were both excellent if I'm remembering them correctly. Origins was just kind of dull and uninteresting in comparison right from the start.

The beginning of the game starts very much like its predecessor, walking through a prison while shit goes to hell. It was so similar feeling that my interest took an immediate dive. Then you're introduced to the main storyline. Black Mask has put a bounty on your head. One night only. Prize goes to whoever kills The Bat. Wait, who the hell is Black Mask, you ask? Yeah, I didn't know either... Anyway, this brings a variety of villains out of the woodwork. Are they any more notable than Black Mask? No, not really. Your "star-studded" cast includes Bane, Copperhead, Deadshot, Deathstroke, Electrocutioner, Firefly, Killer Croc, and Shiva. I wasn't thrilled about any of those mofos. Most of them, I don't know who they are, and with Bane, I was kind of annoyed by him being in there because it was clearly just because he was in the latest Batman movie. Not a great start, Origins.

This is supposed to be a prequel, hence being called Origins, but it doesn't really feel very prequel-y. At this stage, Batman has only been around for 2 years, supposedly. He's a new kid on the block, but he is as bad ass and capable as he was in the other games. He also has pretty much all his gadgets immediately, which you had to slowly earn in the other games. The only way you know it's supposed to be earlier is that Alfred is concerned about Bruce and keeps mentioning that he's not a "hardened vigilante". Umm...you keep saying that, but the trail of battered goons I've left strewn about the city tell a different story.

Later in the game, Joker makes his presence known, and he seems new to Batman. PREQUEL! Also, we see Harley Quinn while she was an employee at the prison, rather than the raving psychopath we all know and love. Yeah, yeah, I get it now. It's supposed to be in the before time in the long long ago. I would have preferred an origin story to be about someone's origin. Why is Joker the way he is, why is Batman the way he is? This isn't anybody's origin. It's like Batman's sophomore year at Bat College. That's not an origin, brah.

At least with the addition of Joker, we get an A-List villain instead of mucking about with all these D-Listers. I am sad though that he's not voiced by Mark Hamill. He is and will always be the best Joker. The replacement Joker gets the laugh right and some of the dialogue is pretty on the mark, but I think Mark Hamill behind the mic would have improved things. I also miss Kevin Conroy as Batman. His voice immediately makes all things legitimate in the Batverse.

On a positive note, the things I enjoyed most about the last game are still present. The flow of combat is still enjoyable to perform and watch, and stringing bad guys up with an inverted takedown is still extremely enjoyable to me.

On the not so positive side, while I enjoyed the group stealth takedown sections the most, the areas in which this happened were all set up very similarly. When everything's set up kind of the same, you end up doing the same things over and over, and as soon as you walk into a room, you instantly know this is going to be a stealth takedown area, this is going to be a group fistfight area, etc. Level design overall was kind of lacking and not very interesting for me. I also hated when I would enter one of these obvious battleground areas and my Batclaw would be disabled, not because there was nothing to climb on, but because they wanted to trap me and force me to stay on the ground. Design the environment that way then... Put in objects that I obviously shouldn't be able to climb on. Another level design problem I had was that there would be times I'd be stuck in a room because I just didn't know where to go after the battle was over.

One time when I was lost in this way, I heard a guy yelling to get him "out of here" and to cut him down. There was a large silo looking thing in the middle of the room (It was either a bomb or a vat of poison or something #memoryfailsme), and every time I'd walk close to it, his voice would get louder. So, I thought he must be in there. I looked all around it for a way to get in to no avail. Turns out, that was just a bug. He was over in this side room where I shouldn't have been able to hear him that loudly. The sound was just centralized on the wrong spot. Also, while he was yelling, he'd say "Yeah, that's it!" or something to that effect when I just happened to move closer to this silo looking thing. That only strengthened my resolve that I needed to find a door into this thing. It would have helped if he's gonna yell things, one of those things should be telling me that he's in the office.

It was the sound bug that made that more difficult than it should have been, and this game's no stranger to bugs. I didn't encounter the crashing I've heard other people tell of, but I did have a lot of problems with the game lagging out before, during, and after cutscenes. It would also stall when switching locations, and there was one point, during the Mad Hatter section, where my directional joystick just stopped working. I had to reload, and then I could move again.

Despite that hiccup, I will say that I did enjoy the Mad Hatter part quite a bit. I'm a sucker for Alice in Wonderland, and I enjoyed all the imagery they included. There was one section where you had to follow the white rabbit. Throughout, there were mushrooms in the background, a raven, you ran across a pyramid of cards, which a metronome sliced through and destroyed. There was also a section where goons would come out through a Looking Glass reflection. I thought the imagery in that whole section was really enjoyable, but I collect Alice in Wonderland books, so that's right down my alley.

At times while in the Mad Hatter section, they used a fixed camera angle where the game felt more like a platformer during some parts, and while I found that perfectly acceptable during this little episode because Batman was not in his right state of mind at the time, I really disliked when this functionality was used during boss fights. Toward the end, where you're fighting Firefly, you have to run away at times in this fixed angle platformer view, and it switches between the fixed camera and normal view and back again multiple times. The camera swinging around made where I was actually heading to confusing at times, and the different vantage point made me slow down, which is not what I needed to be doing against a flame-throwing madman. The boss fights also had a tendency to make you use button combinations that you never use anywhere else which was annoying. To shoot Firefly with my Batclaw, I had to press L2 and the triangle button, which is the Quickfire version of my Batclaw, which I never used throughout the entire game and was never told could be used until that moment.

All in all, Batman: Arkham Origins just seemed a little less polished overall compared to its predecessors. All the locations seemed a little too similar, the world map seemed kind of small as I would go to the same few locations over and over, and finding where I needed to go was oftentimes a chore. Also, while I approve of trying to highlight some faces we may not know from the villain yearbook, there should not be so many D-List enemies that take centerstage.