Reviews// Batman: Arkham Origins

The stealth sections feel much the same. You enter a high-ceilinged room with lots of strange interior walls and vents and whatnot, then scooch about trying to take out gun-toting baddies without attracting the attention of their mates. There are still a number of strategies available to you involving things distraction, keeping low, staying high and using things like smoke pellets and fire extinguishers to keep yourself out of sight. When Arkham Asylum first came out these sequences were a revelation that elevated the game, preventing it from becoming just another brawler. They made you feel like Batman.

Now, they still make you feel like Batman. They do it in basically the same way that Rocksteady's two games did. While that's still fun, it's far from being a revelation at this point.

The voice acting is reasonable, if not startling. We don't get Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill back for Batman and ****VAGUE SPOILER ALERT**** The Joker. ****VAGUE SPOILER ALERT ENDS****. We get Roger Craig Smith and Troy Baker taking over those roles. They both do decent enough jobs of aping their predecessors, with neither putting much of a stamp on their role.

The game introduces 'Invisible Predator Online', a prison-based multiplayer mode that pits a team of Joker henches against a team of Bane henches with Batman and Robin in the middle, representing for the good guys. For the time being, though, this review's all about the single-player.

Looks-wise, everything's still solid as a rock. WB Montreal has stuck to Rocksteady's design and style, to the point where an untrained onlooker probably wouldn't be able to tell Origins apart from City, barring some tweaks to Batman's suit. This is, of course, no terrible thing. One of the strengths of the first two games was the way they blended elements of the larger-than-life Batman of the comics with the realistic grit of the Nolan films. That trick's been pulled off again, but there's little interesting new stuff to look at.

The story is deftly woven into the structure of the game and stops you noticing that you're actually playing a smart dungeon crawler. It doesn't, however, take the overarching story of the games forward and the dialogue can at times feel a little cartoonish.

However, for all this muttering about Origins not progressing the series, there's a good game here! It might not move things far, but it's a bloody excellent game that Origins hasn't moved far from. It's certainly a more conservative sequel than City was, but it's building from a rock-solid base and fans of the previous games will certainly enjoy it, if not be knocked off their chairs.

Pros:
+ Same great gameplay as previous games
+ Improvements to boss fights
+ Greater depth to Detective Mode

Cons:
- Doesn't progress the series very far
- Not as strong a set-up as earlier games

SPOnG Score: 4/5