Batman™: Arkham Origins

First time writing a review, but then again no game I've bought from here short of the Tomb Raider series has been this broken and unplayable. This is entirely the fault of WB Games Montreal, and not GOG. Fresh off of Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, I was really looking forward to the next installment. Unfortunately, the bugs and glitches I've encountered have stopped me from even reaching the end of the game. The small glitches were annoying, like the enemy's AI suddenly breaking and leaving them all standing stone still until taken down. Having to exit out and re-enter the game because the game suddenly stopped recognizing grapple points got old fast. Having enemies glitch into walls was funny, up until it was an enemy I NEEDED to interrogate, then it wasn't funny at all. Having Deadshot roll into a wall and softlock the game wasn't funny either. But what has ruined the game for me, is the unfixed(and never will be fixed since WB Games Montreal already declared the game bug-free and not getting anymore patches) glitch with the My Alibi club. For those that don't know, going into the back room of the club to get the Data Pack back there makes textures disappear, and your save file will be locked in an endless fall in darkness once you try to re-load your save to fix the issue. 80-90% of the way through the game, and you get stuck in an unwinnable state, and your save file is useless after that. There is no fix, the only way to deal with it is to NEVER go there and do that side mission, or complete the Data Pack. Nice work WB Games Montreal. Don't buy this entry in the series, and I can't recommend buying anything developed by WB Games Montreal if this is the level of quality they offer. I regret buying this game, don't make the same mistake. Incompetent devs should not be rewarded.

I went in to the game with high hopes that it was going to be the "underrated" but great Batman Arkham game, but in reality I think people say that because the game was traight up poorly receeived as straight up trash. I see now that the game isn't trash, but it really doesn't hold a candle to any of the other Arkham games, even though gameplay wise it's better than Asylum, at least Asylum knew not to go full on crazy with the extremely frustrating elements that plagues Origins. Let's start with how that as of now I only just finished the first boss fight with Bane and I am struggling with whether or not I should continue playing. The traversal is really boring as there's no landmarks to differentiate any part of the map, and about 2/5 times you can't grapple on to most buildings, so you're stuck with sometimes being forced on the ground until you find a building that allows you to grapple it. The enemies are way too fast to attack when you do any sort of combo, so just doing the boring spam X and Y to win is the only fun way to win, and to me it's not that fun to do. It might be my fault for setting the game to hard, but I recently finished City, and hard mode was very fun in that game, but here doing simple things like batclaw slam, directed arial attack and beatdown are so boring to perform when 4 other enemies with mega fast attacks rush you, they also lock on to you regardless of what you do besides evading. It doesn't help that the game has this sort of cool gray-ish look coupled with muted blue attack indicators that makes it hard to tell if an enemy is even about to attack. All the time I was playing I kept thinking: "Can't wait until I'm done so I can play Arkham Knight..." The game has too many boring and frustrating parts to make it consistently fun. Game breaking glitches that forces you to restart. Boring map with no character or soul. And DON'T get me started the the Dark Knight challenges, the most anti-fun system you can put in the game.

It's an overhyped game that gets overhyped because people percieve it as being "unloved" and therefore they overcompensate and make it out to be the best in the series, which it's not. It's the worst of the Arkham games by far an no amount of dancing around it will change this fact.' It's ultimately just a rehash of City's gameplay but done worse. Which could be fine for any other series, but Rocksteady upped the ante and pushed the series forward with every entry, which makes Origins a sore thumb. The map is too big for the game which results in long stretches of slowly gliding around an empty Gotham city. If there is anything that will make you appreciate Knight's Batmobile, it's the near minutes long stretch over the long bridge, dear lord travel it's tedious in this game. Combine this with the timing being off in combat, shock gauntlets that nullify any challenge, a story twist that completely disappoints and you have a perfectly average game that spins it's wheels and does nothing new. I will give a nod to the DLC though, it is the best DLC in the series.

This is not a bad game in any shape or form. Merely ok, which is not good enough for me to finish it. The competition is to strong for that. Major problems are, firstly that the gameplay from AA seems to not work well for an open world, and secondly the criminal lack of an atmosphere. This is not Gotham, just some random city. The activities are not very interesting inside the world, most of them are collecting something. Bad already for any OW game, but worse for Batman, since this is simply not what he would do: flying around and pick up something ? Imagine a Bond game, where you walk around an area and collect items. Batman works best, when you are inside buildings and are driven by the story from start to finish like in AA. And that one had interesting collectables uncovering lore. The fighting is good, but has some issues, which annoyed me with time. Attacking the wrong guy or not reacting to buttons sometimes. Those stumblers can kick you out of the rhythm and then you are not in sync anymore with what is happening on the screen. But still, good enough to have some fun for 10 hours. Also, fuck snipers. Who asked for them to be included ?

As a huge Batman fan, I own all four Arkham games for both Playstation and Windows (so I bought them 8 times in total). And I actually go back to this one more times than the others. Half the reason is that it's one of the very few AAA titles set on Christmas and it's a good distraction during the season. The other half is that it's quick paced and more focused than the others. While you can explore as you like, the storyline seems the tightest of them all. It's a little rougher than the ones developed by Rocksteady but that makes sense as it's a prequel of sorts. The main voice actors do a passable job emulating the originals. City and Knight took a long time to complete and Asylum was perfect but the world was limited to just the one island. This one is somewhere in the middle with an excuse to keep Gotham free of civilians (on Christmas!) so that Batman can beat on almost everybody without prejudice. It's fun to experience a younger, more brutal (year two) Batman who is just raging on the criminals. And in this case, he's very much like Scott Pilgrim against seven evil exes. Each boss has a unique, but straightforward way to defeat them if you pay attention. A lot of players aren't a fan of this one, but I like it. The cutscenes are just as good as the other Arkham's especially the Batcave. If you've played the other three, you might as well play this one too. I didn't really experience anything game breaking although Batman seems to get stuck in the environment occasionally and you have to restart from checkpoint. Also, some missions will lock you in until you complete them and can be frustrating to retry over and over unless you're really good at being Batman.