The continuing adventures of the World's Grumpiest Dad.
Released October 26, 2013
Developed by Warner Bros. Games Montreal.
Published by Warner Bros. Interactive.
Available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii U (forthcoming).
Version played: PlayStation 3.
Oh, Batman. No matter how much mud I sling your way for your deeply tiresome obsession with things being 'dark', your horrible fanbase full of the absolute worst of the internet, and your irritating ubiquity that threatens to blot out all other DC heroes like the shadow of Unicron falling o'er that poor bunch of non-Autobot robot people at the start of Transformers: The Movie, I still can't quit you. You're like a really mangy cat. For every bit of roadkill you drag into my house and throw up on my shoes (see The Dark Knight Rises or the current 'Zero Year' comics that are dedicating 12 whole months to telling us that, yes, his parents are still in fact dead) you still do something that makes me reconsider putting you up for adoption/throwing you in a dumpster far away from here. In recent years, those 'somethings' have tended to be the Arkham Insert Noun games from Rocksteady, which were quite rightly praised for giving players the sensation of 'being' Batman to a tee and just being really good Metroid-y puzzle adventures with a great combat system everyone else has tried copying.
The combination of 'properly good game' and 'Batman is in it' propelled both Asylum and the bigger, more ambitious City to crazy sales numbers, which made it deeply unsurprising that Warners chose to outsource the engine and art assets to another developer so they could churn out a third game super-quick and franchise the hell out of the Arkham name. Whether or not this works is, at time of writing, up in the air; the transparency of this game as a cash-grab, I think, will likely hurt its numbers a bit. But that's not really what I'm here to talk about. What matters, after all, is whether or not they threw the weird cosplaying ninja orphan baby out with the bathwater...
Arkham Origins takes Batman back to his 2nd year on the mean streets of Gotham, which is a pretty convenient timeframe; early enough for Bats' rogues' gallery to still be developing but not so early that we have to show Batman looking weak or ill-equipped or, y'know, human. He's still thought of as an urban legend by many, and a nuisance by the police, but the criminals know him all too well, and now, on Christmas Eve, one Roman Sionis, a.k.a. Black Mask, is taking pest control to a whole new level - $50 million for anyone who can kill the Bat. A squad of the world's greatest assassins and most terrible maniacs hit the streets with blood on their minds, and Batman's going to have to run the gauntlet if he wants to track down Black Mask and cancel the bounty.
And then the Joker turns up and literally everything turns on its head.
Batman's greatest power is, as ever, his flair for
dramatic backlighting.
Unsurprisingly, Origins doesn't try to rock the boat with its gameplay; there've been 2 of these already and both worked, why change now? You have a large open world to move through at will, either on foot or through Bats' gliding and grapple-hooking skillz, but most of the interior areas and other points of interest are sealed off in such a way that only a certain combination of advanced gadgets can get you inside, thus forcing you to follow the narrative until you've unlocked the needed kit. Along the way you will punch lots and lots (and lots) of bad people, look at the world in X-ray vision 60% of the time, and sometimes muck around finding Riddler trophies - oh, sorry, I meant 'extortion data on green iPads hidden by a guy who is totally not the Riddler (yes he is)'.
What changes the game does make are typically only skin-deep. The new additions to Batman's arsenal are clearly replacements for City tools that aren't in this game, i.e. glue grenades instead of freeze grenades, Deathstroke's tightrope gun instead of the line launcher. Even the Shock Gauntlets that buff up your punching in the latter half of the game are a holdover from the WiiU 'Armoured Edition' of the previous title. In combat, the flow is a little different thanks to the addition of certain enemy types who can counter your strikes, which necessitate you counter them back in turn (and sometimes double-counter their moves to avoid a kicking). It's a minor thing but it breaks up the rhythm a little without jarring. Still, with both combat and Silent Predator (and boy do I wish there was a less-rapist-sounding name for THAT) gameplay unchanged, it's left to Detective mode to offer something new. When confronted by a proper crime scene, Batman will still go into first-person view to scan for clues in the environment, but now his HUD will also digitally reconstruct the crime, which you can then rewind and replay while walking around the scene, usually to follow the trajectory of some important chunk of evidence that got thrown astray. It's all very linear and sometimes the solution is apparent before the game lets you discover it, but it's another small step towards these games actually making Batman feel like a detective and not just a guy who punches people until they tell him what he wants to hear.
Behold: ANARKY, a man who's so counter-culture he refuses
to even spell his own damn name properly.
(also your Hulk Hogan pose sucks bro)
Speaking of people getting punched, much of this game's PR hype was centred around the parade of new boss characters spearheaded by the 'eight assassins', several of which are not assassins by any stretch of the word, and while I can't help but laugh at the notion of anyone being super-hyped to buy this game because Firefly is in it or whatever, they are by and large utilized well and slot into the story effectively without the game devolving into Batman just chasing each one down one after another like he's in the DC Universe version of No More Heroes or something. Whereas the boss fights in the earlier games largely eschewed regular combat in favour of more elaborate setpieces, the devs this time had enough confidence in the core battle system to let some of these nutters take Batman on directly, which is a nice change, and each brings a few new tricks to the table that you'll have to adapt your reflexive routines around to survive.
That said, it often struck me that the WB Montreal team weren't so much creating something new here as they were mixing up elements we had seen before. Slinky contortionist Copperhead drugging Batman then fighting him in the form of a dozen hallucinated copycats? Ra's Al-Ghul pulled the same trick in City. Hammering the counter button to survive Deathstroke's crazy sword rush? Ra's again. Deadshot swaggering around a split-level hall with a squad of respawning henchmen while you pick your spots and try to Predator him into the ground? Just like the Two-Face battle during the Catwoman DLC missions, and only slightly less annoying. It's not so obvious as to be disappointing, though it can be a little distracting.
Enlarge this pic and stare at it for half an hour. Done that?
That's officially more screentime than Deathstroke gets in the main game.
Running on the same engine means Origins looks about as good as City did, which is to say it's still a very pretty game. To keep things fresh, the overworld has been given a festive makeover, and scarcely any of the buildings survived the transition without being draped in fairy lights or some other decorations (conveniently, this also means the devs don't have to clean off all the snow that was drawn on before). There's also a large new area to the south that wasn't present in the last game; it's a servicable addition but isn't quite as immediately recognizable as the varying boroughs of the previously-walled city and so only really exists to put Police HQ and Blackgate Prison on the map. In fact, even the carried-over areas don't seem quite as lively as before, which - and this is just my theory - might be down to the lack of immediately-apparent gang structure. There are multiple affiliations for Gotham thugs in this one too, but their uniforms aren't nearly as distinct and they're not quite as openly hostile to one another, so you never get the feeling you just entered 'Penguin's turf' or whatever. The new interior environments are very nicely built, however, with the assault on a Joker-trapped hotel being especially memorable.
It's also interesting to see the slight changes in character design. Obviously, this is a younger Batman with perhaps softer features beneath the mask, although his outfit retains the manboobs and chunky gauntlets of previous Arkhams. The Joker gets a less interesting costume but a much better face render than in the past, Bane actually sorta looks like Bane instead of the Hulk for a change (although I really wish they'd covered his eyes), Killer Croc is smaller yet actually a bit scarier, and Deadshot is...still a bit crap, but oh well. There are other nice touches, too - young Barbara Gordon having a Birds of Prey-referencing t-shirt emblem was a particular nerd highlight for me. Not so sure why Lady Shiva looks like Resident Evil 6 Ada Wong wearing a drum majorette's shirt though.
Audio-wise, the music feels like the work of a different composer (haven't checked yet) and has thrown out the signature theme of the previous games for something simpler and moodier, but isn't afraid to experiment and bring in a few lighter touches - in particular some Christmas tunes - for added tonally-jarring chills. I dig it. What I don't dig is Roger Craig Smith as Batman. Look, I'm not some snob who can only accept Kevin Conroy's voice in this role - Bruce Greenwood was pretty great in the Under The Red Hood animated film - but Smith has a very recognizable accent that I've come to associate pretty directly with Chris Redfield, and he's not doing enough to change it up here. Troy Baker as the Joker is basically a Mark Hamill copycat, but he's a good Mark Hamill copycat, and he's supported by the script giving the best Joker material these games have had to date. Elsewhere, there's a slew of returning voices, including Peter MacNicol's wonderfully deranged Mad Hatter, and also a few new players, including Penguin's random Mockney tart assistant who can't string together three words without one of them being some sort of London slang. Uhm. Let's move on.
This is a picture of a boat.
Look at that. It is a BOAT.
I have nothing funny to say here, keep reading.
I wish I could put my hand on my heart and say that the sense of unoriginality was Origins' worst crime, but, sadly, there's a bigger problem, and it's a technical one so it's a bugger to describe. Basically, the engine has lag issues, which causes the framerate to drop at certain moments. Sometimes it just...happens, without warning, but in my experiences, it seems to invariably be triggered after any use of the new 'fast travel' system (that lets Batman move instantly from the map screen to a drop zone in any secured district); perhaps being forced to load that whole new section of city in one swoop is too taxing for the engine, I don't know, but the degree to which the framerate decreases renders the game unplayable, and I was forced to quit to the main menu and restart from my last save to fix it. The simple fix is to just not use fast travel, but, that option was put in the game for a reason - namely so you wouldn't be forced to manually zip-and-glide across the long, long bridge joining the two main regions of Gotham over and over, which can get very tiresome. Maybe there'll be a patch for this issue at some point; hell, there was a patch available on day 1 but that didn't help much. It got to the point where I almost wanted to abandon the game altogether...
...but, I'm glad I didn't, because sandwiched inside the familiar world and copy-&-pasted gameplay, Origins has the best story of the Arkham series thus far. Some would say that's not much of a compliment compared to the harebrained 'Joker makes supersoldiers' plot of Asylum or whatever the hell was actually happening in City, and that's a fair point, but Origins is legitimately great, starting with what looks like a very bare-bones plot then throwing a pretty major curveball 1/3rd of the way in that shakes everything up, before going off in a very different direction. And you know what I said about the best Joker material in the series to date? Now...bear in mind, I am not generally a fan of Joker. Two-Face is my favourite, and I find the clown overexposed and often sadly predictable. So I wasn't especially looking forward to him being in Origins, but the developers have worked some magic here to make him worthwhile again, including handing player control over to him for a while during a stand-out sequence that takes the style of Asylum's earlier Scarecrow stuff but puts it through a very different mind, and references 'The Killing Joke' very neatly, and ties in with events of the actual game. Props also to the handling of Bane, which gives us both the cruel, ruthless, tactically-minded guerrilla warrior us dorks always wanted him to be, as well as an organic reason for him to 'devolve' into the dumb monster version from the earlier titles. Also, Batman punches people back to life on two separate occasions. HE PUNCHES THEM SO HARD THEY COME BACK TO LIFE. That's basically perfect.
In the end, Arkham Origins is about as good as could reasonably be expected. It's not trying to expand or improve on its predecessors, just give fans another fix to stave off their expensive addiction, and it succeeds at that without really accidentally becoming something more. The genuinely great narrative might be enough to even make Batman smile (not really, he never does that ever) but the technical issues kind of dent the buzz you get from the high points. But, glorified expansion pack or no, it does its job well, to the tune of a 8.5 out of 10 according to my loosely-defined scale of things.
Now excuse me while I go wait for a post-credits scene to recruit me into a clandestine spy organisation or something...
This was one Secret Santa exchange the SWAT boys
would never forget.
No comments:
Post a Comment