Batman: Arkham Origins Review

Arkham Origins is a game that I bought a few weeks ago to keep boredom at bay one weekend. This is a prequel to the other games in the Arkham series and details how the dark knight meets some of his biggest adversaries which is quite literal in the case of Bane and Killer Croc. The player must fight the criminal element of Gotham city whilst dealing with numerous assassins and corrupt police all while solving the mystery of who is after him.

For a regular gamer this may be another edition in a series they may or may not like but to a batman fan it can be very enjoyable. For instance the story for this game is as good if not better as the stories of previous titles and it even shows the dark knight facing off against his enemies for the first time. Notable characters are Deadshot, Bane, Firefly, Shiva, Killer Croc, Deathstroke, The Joker and Black Mask. All have very good parts in the game and a boss battle of their own but I'll talk more about that later. This game even has a few good plot twists that will make the player want to push on until he completes the game and once enthralled the hours can fly by.

The tasks that are available for the user to perform a numerous and offer some rewards in the way of XP which in turn can be used for upgrades. Some of the side quests involve defusing bombs set by a young man calling himself anarchy to disabling radio towers controlled by the Riddler. Mad Hatter even makes an appearance during the game and gets his goons to sing a badly choreographed song to batman after he wakes up in the snow. These tasks however can become a bit boring in the later stages of the game because of the lack of any reward as the player would have earned a large sum of XP by doing story missions.

As a side note the batcave is a location that can be visited at any point in the game which I thought was a nice little touch. It has to be noted that I am a DC comics fan and any small edition like this is a nice touch to the game that isn't in previous titles.

Back to the villains though as they are one of the highlights of the game. There are numerous occasions where the player has to face an assassin and is forced to adapt. One of the strong points of the series are the numerous boss battles and how the player has to find their weaknesses and change their tactics. Origins is no different as the player will face eight assassins with differing strengths. An example would be the fight with deathstroke, in this fight the player needs to think quick to dodge attacks and mash the attack button to punch him into next week. Take this fight and compare it to Bane's fights where a straight up confrontation is out of the question and the contrast becomes clear.

The main disappointment of this game is the size of the map. I was expecting a bigger map as this game is not set in an asylum or a city prison but a city. My hope was that I could explore a big section of Gotham City and perform a number of actions like saving civilians and so on. This isn't to say that the map isn't a good one as it is very dense in terms of content and what the player can do. 

8/10