Tom SĪndy: Yeah, the Arkham Knight himself is an incredibly lame villain. Knight has some of the best individual moments of the whole series-including the spectacular Robin co-op level. The titular villain isn't particularly good, and they recast the Scarecrow in a way that made him sound way too similar to Hugo Strange in Arkham City, meaning the main narrative lacked a bit of City's menace and direction. In the post-game, with the city cleared of robot tanks, just bombing around and taking out clumps of criminals feels like the beginning of a Batman comic in motion. It completes the Batman fantasy, in my opinion. It's a gorgeously animated, hefty piece of machinery. Samuel: I didn't like the tank combat sections, particularly the stealth parts-but driving that thing around the city feels great. But then you're back in the Batmobile, side-dodging away from predictable fire patterns, or circling round a tiny bit of the city, trying to endure the incredibly dumb stealth sections. Best of all is the dual combat encounters, which turn the fluid dance of Batman's combat into a brutal duet. That stuff is great, as are about half of the sidequests, the main mission design and so much of the writing.
There are some cool ideas here, like the military outposts-the best of which are mini-puzzles, challenging you to work out which of Batman's ever-growing toolset is key to clearing away the specific configuration of guards. Phil: The Batmobile churn really hurts Knight. But when you’re doing what Batman does best, namely skulking around in the shadows and terrifying goons, Knight is a really, really good Arkham game, if a little too familiar at times.
Those sections where you’re forced to fight dozens of identical drones with overly-telegraphed attacks is utterly mind-numbing. Samuel: It shows you can take the basic elements of a great game and make a comparably weaker product out of it, which is largely how I felt about what I played of Wolfenstein: The New Order's Old Blood expansion.Īndy: The batmobile really is a piece of shit. Phil: I haven't played Origins yet, but, based on your recommendation there, Tom, I'm… well, still not sure if I'll bother. If you’ve completed every sidequest in Arkham Knight, crave more Bats, and don’t mind putting up with slightly-wrong combat then play this I guess? The glue grenades and the non-lethal lightning fists feel like the sort of upgrades you might see on a cheap Batman toy rather than anything the Dark Knight would actually use. They expanded Gotham city and added… a warehouse district. However there is a sense that Origins is scraping around for new ideas. Tom S: There are some decent isolated bits of Origins, probably enough to make it worth playing for Batman fans-the tower converted into the Joker’s theme park, for example. But in this game he’s shouty and short-tempered, frequently arguing with Alfred, which is a nice way of making a familiar character feel different. A mature, level-headed veteran of the crime-fightin’ business. Kevin Conroy’s version of the character always sounds totally in control of his emotions. They were probably the best bits of detective work in the series, and I did enjoy the one in Black Mask's penthouse.Īndy: I do like the younger, angrier Batman we get to play as in Origins. Having said that, I loved the crime scene investigations they added to Origins, which I (think) Arkham Knight ended up borrowing when you had to track down Oracle after she'd been kidnapped. It may be my imagination, too, but I swear there was something off about the timing of counters compared to Rocksteady's Batman games-the same muscle memory felt like it didn't serve me well in Origins' combat. Samuel: The city suffered from feeling anonymous. I constantly find myself with nothing to grapple or land on, halting my momentum, which never happens in the other games. And there’s no feeling of flow as you navigate the world either. The new sections of the city are pretty uninspiring, particularly the industrial district and that tediously long bridge you have to travel back and forth across. Andy: Origins isn’t a terrible game, but it’s clear throughout that it wasn’t developed by Rocksteady.
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