Batman™: Arkham Origins

Asylum is the original City was a huge leap Knight is... a mixed back Origins is maybe the biggest, cleanest, straight-up Batman game. I think the two "islands" and bridge between make a great, game-sized Gotham. I love the interaction with cops -- especially the late mission where your new friend Gordon asks your help in finding some of the prison escapees. Even though the fights are just regular thugs, I found it very immersive and was excited about helping Gordon. It really capitalizes on the feeling that all of this is happening over one crazy night (Christmas Eve). There's something fresh about most of the villains being new. The Freeze DLC pack was also cool, and happens in a whole standalone half-Gotham with different weather and features. It even has Bruce's training in Asia (Korea?) as a Season Pass inclusion. There are regular homicide cases that Batman needs to solve. The atmosphere in places like the police station is great. All that to say, it's the most complete, cleanest game. It makes Knight feel bloated and messy by comparison, and City maybe too small. It perfectly balances budding relationships with super villains with down-to-earth cops and robbers stuff. Lastly I can't say enough how much I love the Christmas Eve setting. So cool.

Pros: - The story is the best in the entire Arkham series - Gameplay basics remain mostly as good as before - Detective mode is finally interesting - The challenge system for unlocks is quite deeper and more engaging than before Cons: - Combat suffers from lack of balance. Batman can't interrupt his own attacks now, which makes the first few hours of the game annoying. But then you get the electric gauntlets and they're so overpowered that combat loses all challenge. Silly. - Most boss fights are just all glorified QTEs with no agency. Just do what you're told when you're told to win. Boring. - There's an excess of collectibles. It feels like a Ubisoft game. At some point you lose all interest, but you need to get them all to complete the Enigma mission, and you don't even get a satisfying conclusion for it. Boo. - Practically no new gadgets. Yes, this is a prequel, but it would have been interesting to have to deal with old, interesting but cumbersome tools. The claw tool is the only good one. The glue grenades are just a reskin of the ice grenades from City. Lazy. - The art style is unbalanced. It wants to look more realistic, but in the process it makes it all look weirder. Doors look gigantic next to Batman, for instance. Odd. - A minor one, but rather than being able to choose a suit when you load a save you're forced to go to the batcave to do it, and the game always resets to the normal suit when restarting a game, so if you save in the middle of a mission you can't change suit until you finish it. This is just dumb. I know it looks like I have more negatives than positives, but the positives are much heavier. It's still a really good game. Not as good as City or as tight as Asylum, but far better than Knight and still a lot of fun to play.

I played Asylum and City extensively and the former especially was the most fun I'd had in a videogame in quite some time the first time I played it. Origins kept my interest long enough to finish the main story but little else beyond that. Let me get some positives out of the way first. I dig the Christmas setting and feel and the score is very good. Graphically the game looks superior to City and Asylum. The story kept me interested and enjoyed seeing a rough, inexperienced Batman being at odds with basically everyone, even Alfred at times. Unfortunately one of the core aspects of the game, the combat feels extremely rough after the incredibly smooth experience from City. Combo counters kept resetting for no apparent reason after doing some moves, Batman wouldn't counter when he was supposed to or hit an enemy before he was hit in turn. Other times, Batman wouldn't finish a foe on the ground causing me to lose my combo completely. WB Montreal kept Batman's moveset practically the same from City but decided to throw in a bunch of new enemy types to increase the challenge. Thing is, most of that challenge goes out the window once you unlock the shock gloves which bypass enemy defenses effortlessly but is clearly the way the devs meant for you to reach higher scores on the challenge maps. Crimes in progress are a neat idea in theory but lose their novelty when you have to keep doing the same things over and over again. And as for the Dark Knight System and Most Wanted, while I get the idea behind them, they unfortunately force you to complete all of them if you want to fully upgrade Batman's arsenal which makes zero logical sense to me. As for bugs I only faced one game breaking bug: when doing Anarky's mission, talking to one of his followers wouldn't trigger the next objective but instead cause Batman to fall through the map. Overall, a fun game to play for the story but Asylum and City did everything else better, in my opinion.

Arkham Origins is truly an amazing Batman game that has been unfortunately ignored by Warner Brothers and Rocksteady. The best part of this game is its story and boss battles. The story is a fantastic prequel with a unique Christmas atmosphere for the Arkham Games. The boss battles are varied, and are arguably the best in the franchise. This feels like a better rogues gallery than any of Rocksteady main line games, and actually have Batman be a true detective in side missions. The detail is amazing in this title and the passion in this is equal to rocksteady in my opinion. The numbers loading in the menue, and the references to characters in the world building. Connecting it perfectly to the other entries, but also teasing Suicide Squad (a game Rocksteady is now making). Overall Warner Brothers Games Montreal should be proud of teh great game they made, but this gem has a fatal flaw. This game is not only buggy, but has a progression stopping save corruption issue. Check the forums for potential solutions, but it can't really be saved or changed. I personally experienced over 4 fatal error hard crashes, and 2-3 pc freezing crashes. This only happened after I synced my save data to the cloud after a desync. This is besides the random bugs that you have to fenagle around. Collision erros preventing you from entering doors. Randomly getting stuck, having to look for a grapple point to get out, and even fighting an enemy who is invisible since his model is on the floor. That is ignoring the minor bugs and ragdolls (those are funny though so idc). As much as I want to give this game 4 stars it simply can not be in this state, and I would suggest buying this game at a steeper discount than $20.

So I'm going to make a quick review regarding the quality of the GOG version. I've played Arkham Origins on the PC before but the versions I played seemed to have major glitches and stuttering. This version does not have any issues and plays incredibly smoothly on my i7 with a GTX-1050 graphics card. This is the best version of the best Arkham game! :)