 |
| Now with 30% more brooding... |
This
review isn't as timely as a proper review should be; for that I
apologize. And yet I do NOT apologize, for the lion's share of the
reason I've been taking my damn sweet time is two-fold, one in
service to myself, the other to my readers, for which I am not
actually sorry in either case. As to the latter I was endeavoring to
strike a balance between talking about this game and talking about
this game without spoiling the surprise for anyone stupid enough to
have built a life for himself instead of playing a video game from
shrinkwrap to end credits in the span of a week. As to the former, I
was taking my time because I wanted to.
Some games deserve to be chugged. Others, no matter what your final
verdict, demand slow sips and appropriate decompression.
Anyway...
There's
a moment near the beginning of 'Arkham Origins' that has become the
de rigueur of most open-world/big-sky type games; you know the moment
I'm talking about. It comes after the obligatory prologue mission
when you're set free in the sandbox and allowed to jump or fly or
dive into the virtual world, going wherever the wind may take you.
The developers usually strive to make your starting point someplace
bracing or visually arresting so they'll elicit a 'whoa'. Then
invariably they'll plop your next objective someplace far away so
you're sure to pass something amazing on the way over, prompting
'whoa' number two. Sure, it's the designers screaming 'Look at
this!! See how AWESOME we made this world?!', but, hell, it takes
hard work to do what they do and I won't begrudge them a little
showing off.
In
the case of 'Origins' the folks at WB Montreal set Batman loose in a
section Gotham you've never seen before, but immediately instruct his
keister to turn around and fly north, which brings the Dark Knight
squarely in the middle of the area that is destined to be Arkham
City. The 'whoa' here is not one of visual overload or
effects-driven bafflement, the sort of “WHOA!” that spews
chocolate milk across the room, but rather a reverent, whispered
“whhhooooooaa...” as the snow glare dissipates and the original,
uncorrupted version of Old Gotham unfolds before you, unveiling a
place before Hugo Strange and Protocol Ten, before the concrete walls
and sniper perches went up, before everything descended into the
terror and madness of Rha's al Ghul's mysterious final solution.
Only later do you fully appreciate the greatly expanded scope of
Gotham in this title and enjoy the added breadth through which the
Caped Crusader can soar. If you're a veteran of 'Arkham City' you're
likely to spend the first couple hours dumbstruck, marveling at how
the developers conjured the ghost of Gotham's past and meticulously
recreated the last game's playground denuded of Alcatraz decor. It's
effective, it's stirring, it's positively haunting...doubly so since
'Origins' takes place on Christmas Eve. Dickens would approve.
The
past seems as good a place as any to go for the next (last?) game in
the wildly, deservedly successful 'Arkham' series. Arkham City
was one of the greatest console action titles I've ever played,
but let's face it: they kind of burned the forest down with that one,
presenting us with one of the bleakest scenarios Batman has ever
faced wrapped up with just about the biggest downer of an ending
imaginable, with (SPOILERS) both the Joker and the Dark
Knight's lover Talia al Ghul stone dead as John Cleese's parrot. Even the DLC epilogue Harley
Quinn's Revenge did little to resolve the gloom of that jarring
aftermath. But with the revelations proffered by City came
innumerable questions about how it all got going in the first place.
It's only natural then that the next Bat-game would look to the past
and explore the seeds of the insanity that is to come. That is where
younger, greener Bruce Wayne comes in, taking to the streets with a
head full of piss and wind and employing decidedly less finesse than
we're used to seeing.
Not
that subtlety is going to help the Caped Crusader this time. Black
Mask, Gotham's criminal kingpin, has escaped from prison and declared
a $50 million bounty on the winged avenger's pointy-eared head,
summoning a rogue's gallery of exotic assassins to each try their
hand at besting the Bat. Expect to run into them at the most
inopportune times, usually right as you're about to plop a bookmark
on your game and retire for the night. But the hired guns are just
one set of a multitude of challenges awaiting our hero: as before he,
that is YOU, are called upon to tackle a healthy to-do list of
non-story missions, including trashing stockpiles of illicit weapons,
sleuthing out criminals Philip Marlowe-style, and dive-bombing into
hordes of Gotham ne'er do wells intent on committing 'random crimes',
the sort Batman can stop while still half-asleep. If this all sounds
familiar...well, it should.
The
gameplay is a near-clone of Arkham City, which
for me does not constitute a complaint (although it has been the
lynchpin of some other folk's tepid reviews). There
was no need to reinvent the wheel here, not when the last game
achieved such intuitive perfection with virtually every aspect of
combat, stealth and open-world flexibility and movement, all wrapped
up in a fun, easy control scheme to boot. With a new studio taking
the reins from Rocksteady some minor tweaks were inevitable, perhaps
because the new guys really could improve upon this and that, or
perhaps because it is just human nature for people to want to put
their own stamp on something, even when the the other guy's stamp
worked just fine. Most of the 'new' ideas are just twists on
tried-and-true elements from previous titles, but they include a
couple of fun new gadgets (it was love at first sight for me and the
Remote Claw, an auto-guided tether that creates instant perches or
can smash two goons together from a distance), or new uses for old
gadgets (the multi-Batarang option from Arkham Asylum
is back). But there are a couple of genuinely innovative elements
incorporated here in Origins
for the first time, both of which fit Batman's style like a brass-knuckled
glove.
The
first is the greatly expanded deduction/crime-solving aspect, which
was missing entirely from the first game and present only in
rudimentary form in the the second. Vets of Arkham City
will remember a handful of times
when the Dark Knight had to analyze a crime scene before he could
proceed, usually following footprints or examining bullet holes and
extrapolating their trajectory back to a shooter. Origins
took that and ran with it,
turning what was an amusing distraction into a genuinely compelling
element of the gameplay. Players will periodically be confronted
with crime scenes where the dirty deed has already happened and the
assailants are long gone, leaving Bats to reconstruct the events
based on evidence left behind. This involves scanning the area for
clues and recreating the crime a little at a time, using Detective
Vision to weave a complete picture that plays out like the first
three minutes of any given episode of Law and Order. By
rewinding and advancing the scene and studying it from every angle
you can find a previously hidden clue and use it to fill in the
blanks in an appropriately Sherlock-ian manner. It's not what any
gamer would consider challenging exactly, but analysis and deduction
is a huge aspect of Batman's character that had heretofore been
absent from the previous titles – he is the World's Greatest
Detective, after all – and it's gratifying to spend some time doing
what the Dark Knight does best when it doesn't involve breaking other
people's bones. Kudos to the developers for having the patience to
develop this idea and for making the crime scenes so deliciously
ominous.
Not
entirely new but heavily revamped is the experience/reward system,
which now allocates XP based on your performance. You receive more
points for a flawless beatdown than you would in one where you get
knocked around, and are given bonuses for employing more combos and
variety in your attacks. The same goes for the stealth/predator
sections: clear a room without being seen and you're rewarded
accordingly versus making noise and giving away your position. This
system gives you an incentive to plan your attacks ahead of time and
think on your feet. XP is also tied directly into item acquisition:
you spend your experience ala carte instead of collecting new gadgets
and upgrades as you progress, purchasing new weapons and
enhancements only when you have the cheddar to do so. This is a
nice twist because it allows you to tailor your arsenal based on your
style of play, eschewing toys you'd barely use and mod-ing up the
ones you like even more. I would have liked more freedom here: the
tech tree only has so many branches, forcing you to occasionally blow
an upgrade on something with little application outside the arena
challenges. WB Montreal ratchets up inventory management even
further by tying your equipment list into the Dark Knight System, a
checklist of challenges and goals you need to complete before
unlocking some of the coolest bling. Overall it's designed to make
you to be the best Batman you can be, which is no less than what
Batman expects of himself.
 |
| Gotham Dentistry Annex, here I come! |
The
visuals of Origins take some getting used to if you're a vet
of the last games. From the commercials and demos before
its release it certainly looked an awful lot like Arkham City,
but on playing for any length of time you realize there are subtle
variations in the artistic sensibilities this time around, as if the
new studio decided to give the foundation a painstaking restoration,
some fresh paint and a spit polish. The new sections of Gotham look
decent, although not awe-inspiring compared to other virtual
cityscapes of recent memory (and I would have liked some more variety
in appearance of the different neighborhoods), but Old Gotham, the
future super-prison, is a study in understated contrasts versus the
last time we saw it. This may not be an accident, as it is supposed
to be depicting a saner, more rational time in Gotham's past, a time
when the veneer of the great city was starting to slough off but
hadn't yet been utterly stripped by corruption and Batman's
detractors. Everything looks a little better-proportioned and
realistically arranged, the colors are less manic and better layered,
contrasts in light and shadow are more subdued, and the streets
themselves seem elegant and rich with Gilded Age filigree that is
only slightly worn at the edges. This approach is evident in the
character models, too: the villains haven't dressed themselves with the outlandish
costumes that are their trademarks, the henchmen wear bomber jackets
and three-piece suits, and Batman himself dons a utilitarian
throwback to his iconic outfit, wearing thick pieces of armor
fastened with heavy straps like the Teutonic knights of yore and a
belt that has actual pouches (and, in what must be a nod to the last
two films, a skullcap cowl with a flexible neck).
I
was especially impressed with the copious detail of the environments,
which are strewn with hundreds of tiny, endearing quirks from the
graffiti on the walls to ashtrays with still-smoldering butts in them
to the gorgeous interior level designs. The GCPD building looks and feels like
a real police headquarters, as though an actual architect had to draw
blueprints of the place before the digital artists could attempt to
render it in three dimensions. In all, it feels far less like a
comic book and more like a crime novel, and for the kind of story
Origins is trying to tell that is a good thing.
Origins
looks different; it also sounds different. Sure, most of
the effects have been retained (the roof of the Sionis steel mill
still makes the same clunk when you walk over it!), but the
voices have undergone an overhaul. One of the most geek-tastic
things about Asylum and City was the extensive use of
the very same voice actors featured in the groundbreaking animated
series, most notably Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill as Batman and the
Joker respectively. Neither man reprises his role this time around.
Again, barring any knee-jerk fanboy hated for anything different (the
Devil you say; when does that ever happen!?), this is a good
thing, too. Different game, different style, different sounds. The
new Batman, played by a man with the has-to-be-fake name of Roger
Craig Smith, has found a good middle ground between Conroy and
Christian Bale, blending an alpha-male baritone with a deadly rasp to
come away with something not unlike a young Clint Eastwood ala A
Fistful of Dollars. Filling Hamill's nigh un-fillable shoes is
voice acting's Hot New Thing Troy Baker, the ludicrously talented
dude who gave us Booker Dewitt and Joel from The Last of Us
among a growing list of plum roles. Baker's good, but he falls short
of Hamill if for no other reason than he fails to make the role
entirely his own; rather his genius lay in his ability to almost
completely recreate Hamill's acid-laced intonations and zany,
unnerving cadence, albeit with the edgier menace of a younger – and
perhaps slightly saner – man.
Which
begs a larger question: did WB Montreal just do what Mr. Baker did:
simply copy the gold standard and repackage it? Many seem to
think so, from casual gamers I've talked to numerous pro reviewers,
too. They're not wrong: Origins is familiar wine trussed up
in a new bottle, not from the same family perhaps but certainly made
in the same style. It plays it safe in many respects – safer than
they should, I think, especially when it comes to the side missions,
which are very similar to the last title (and therefore very
predictable) while failing to engage you as intensely as Arkham
City did. I'm putting a big asterisk at the end of that
statement, however, because it's clear as day to me that our Canadian
friends spent the entire development process walking one hell of a
tightrope with this one. They assumed the mantle of 2011's Game of
the Year, a 10 out of 10 from countless gaming sites and
publications, a title that is regarded with reverence by mainstream
players and Bat-fanatics alike and considered the zenith of superhero
games just as the Dark Knight himself is considered the zenith of
'real' superheroes. I'm left to wonder how many strained marriages,
sugar crashes and bald spots are to blame for the stress of
inheriting such a challenge and trying to do one better.
Having
said that, I feel Origins did a good-to-very good job striking
a balance between the the best of the old while earning the right to
carve it's own sigil in this stellar trilogy. In spots – many,
many spots – the developer's innovations border on brilliant, while
some of their best tweaks and details are so subtle you're likely to
miss them the first time around. My favorite from a smorgasbord of
examples big and small: when you advance a certain point in the story
Alfred chimes in via comm link and says “It's midnight, Master
Bruce. I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas”, to which the
Dark Knight replies simply, quietly “You, too.” That's it – no
extra mission, no pithy British wit, just a long-suffering manservant
saying what any surrogate father would say to an adopted son he loves
more than life itself. It's a microcosm of the story as a whole,
which cobbles together Bat history from a variety of existing sources
(Batman: Year One being the most obvious just as Arkham
Asylum was inspired by the Grant Morrison book of the same name)
combined with an original script that is a good deal more
introspective and, dare I say it, adult than the previous
titles. Unfortunately it's something of a jerky story, one that
doesn't flow as naturally as the last two. Many of the plot twists
seems manufactured out of thin air as an excuse to send Batman to the
other side of the map, while the assassin characters, menacing though
they be, are largely second-stringers in the Bat world and not as
interesting as the tentpole foes we know and love but who haven't yet
reached super-villain status (this would be one of the spots where I'm holding off sizable spoilers, just FYI). At times the attempts at subtlety are a hair obtuse but
other times they're just right, especially around the halfway mark when
tantalizing hints of Rha's al Ghul's future involvement worm their way into
the narrative, suggesting the immortal megalomaniac is pulling the
strings even before the incident on Arkham Island.
Origins
lacks the meat of the first two titles; as a prelude to a
three-game saga this is almost inevitable. As a sequel to two of the
best action titles of this generation it had a herculean task to
accomplish satisfying we spoiled-rotten fans. Taken on its own it is
still a damned entertaining title that shines in many spots, copies
most of the best elements from its predecessors, and fudges things
only here and there on the rare occasion it starts to lag.
