When Batman: Arkham Asylum came out in 2009, it completely shattered my idea of what a licensed game could be. It was a joy to play, reverent to its source material while still willing to play around with some conceits and, most importantly of all, really made me feel like I was Batman. Its sequel, 2011’s Arkham City, was even better. The game was bigger—out of the confines Arkham Asylum and into a large, sectioned-off area of Gotham christened “Arkham City”—and bolder. I’m a Batman fan, so I’m inherently biased, but these titles are two of my favorite video games ever, brilliant not only as comic book games but also as fun as hell, meticulously-crafted video games.
Which brings us to 2013 and Batman: Arkham Origins, the first game in the series not to be developed by Rocksteady Studios. Instead, the game was developed in house by Warner Bros. Montreal. There is definitely reason to be concerned: Rocksteady have been consistently brilliant on the last two games, and this is WBM’s first game ever. Were they able to live up to the Rocksteady pedigree?
For the most part, yes, they were. At its core, Arkham Origins is a very fun game. It keeps nearly everything that made the other Arkham games good. You still beat up bad guys via the simple freeflow combat system, and you still can grapple and glide your way around the game’s setting—two full islands of Gotham City—without ever touching the ground. Riddler challenges are back in the form of Enigma challenges, and they’re just as fun and controller-smashingly difficult as before. Basically, the core game is exactly the same. This is a good thing; it made no sense to change what worked so well. Even so, I often wished they would have added a few more new things. What they add is very successful—the new remote grapple is a ton of fun to use in combat—but they added very little.
Arkham Origins takes place five years before Arkham Asylum, and two years into Batman’s career. Batman is interacting with pretty much all of the game’s characters (The Joker, James Gordon, etc). Criminals will often yell out something amounting to “The Bat is REAL?!” when they see you. It’s the sort of atmosphere that’s been explored a million times in various forms of media—Year One, Batman Begins, even Year Zero, which is currently ongoing—and it speaks to the strength of this conceit that I still haven’t gotten tired of Gordon starting to trust Batman. Even though he’s fairly inexperienced, the Batman in Arkham Origins is a damn good crime fighter and a brilliant detective. Vulnerable, nearly killed by gunfire Year One Batman this is not, which is actually kind of disappointing. I would have liked to see Warner play around with the idea more, but I can’t say the game suffers because they don’t.
The story itself is quite good. The central idea is that Black Mask really wants Batman dead, so he’s called together eight assassins, with a reward for the one who kills the Bat first. Of course, things don’t stick to just that. The Joker gets involved, as he is wont to do, and you get to beat up the Penguin a few times. As a huge nerd, I’ve got to applaud the villain choices here. They take some standards—Deadshot, Deathstroke (who appears in a brilliant boss fight), Bane—but the left field choices are great. Copperhead, Electrocutioner, Shiva, and Firefly all show up as assassins, and it goes to show the strength of the writing and the depth of Batman’s Rogues Gallery that they’re all pretty compelling. Even the anti-establishment radical Anarky gets a large appearance in a set of side quests.
The game is set in a large chunk of Gotham City, and I actually think that this may be my favorite part of the game. We’ve never gotten a game that truly let you be Batman in Gotham. Arkham City was close, but it was still essentially a prison. Here, we get Gotham itself, on a snowy Christmas Eve no less, which lends the game a nice Max Payne vibe. Not all of Gotham is here—Wayne Enterprises Tower and much of downtown Gotham sits tauntingly in the background—but what we do get is wonderfully realized, a combination of The Animated Series art-deco city-out-of-time feel and the gritty urban decay of the Nolan films. Nothing feels more Batman than flying around the city, responding to random crimes as they appear, and solving others. Batman isn’t always stopping whatever the Joker happens to be up to, and Arkham Origins remembers that.
Arkham Origins does forget some things, though. While the game is relatively bug-free, there are little things missing that definitely make it apparent that this is a new studio’s first effort. Some buildings don’t have grapple points where it feels like they should. The rich references to Batman lore that were so much fun to find in the first and second games (stuff like Huntress’s bike and Firefly’s flamethrower) don’t appear to be here at all. These aren’t glaring omissions, but they’re frustrating nonetheless.
Still, I can recommend Arkham Origins without much trouble. It doesn’t do much to shake up the series’ key mechanics, and it doesn’t reach the heights of either Asylum or City, but it still sets the gold standard of what a comic book game should be. If you want to don the cowl, look no further.
