Edit: Alright, just so no one replies to the thread in terms of me asking for it, I should say I already bought the game; beat it the other day, and as enjoyed it.

Out of the blue, I just simply wondered how it actually is because I was thinking about sneaking games and Batman sneaking around in Arkham came to mind. As someone that thought Arkham Asylum was superb, but was left disappointed with City, I'm wondering what I would personally think of the game. There have been times when I decided to play a game late, and it turned out to be a mistake because it was actually great, and it makes me wonder if this could be one of those games, or if it's really just as I expect. I, from the get-go wasn't all that excited for Origins, because it just looked like City again, and I didn't enjoy City all that much, but I still felt like asking you guys what you thought since I hadn't really read up on peoples take on it. How does is fair to the previous titles; like what's better and what's worse? I heard the story's pretty good.

EDIT: Since now that I've played it, I really enjoyed it. Nothing incredibly special about it but overall I enjoyed it more than City. Both pale to meet Asylum in my book but it is a solid game. I payed $20 for it and it was totally worth it.

If you didn't like City then don't get this game. It is very similar and uses a lot of the same city. Same open world concepts. I found it very enjoyable and an interesting story to tell, but I loved City a hell of a lot.

Why were you disappointed of City? I ask you because its likely this game won't change enough of it to make it better for you.

I liked City (in fact, I believe its the best of the series), but Origins was nowhere near that good. The combat feels awkward and unbalanced, the settings are not very interesting and the villains included are pretty low tier. I don't hold that against it, since the previous two games depleted the bag of interesting villains, but the end result is that it feels like a poorer version of City.

I would say Origins is more of City. I sneaked less in Origins compared to City, but thats probably because some of the areas are set to be open that you can choose how you'd approach it. I felt that Origins focused more on the combat aspect of the game compared to City. Having said that, its ironic that the hand to hand fighting feels less accurate in Origins compared to City. The gadgets that you get in Origins are the same as City, with a few additions. But what I did really like was the story and the cutscenes. On that note, I would say Origins is an average game, its the weakest compared to Asylum and City.

Definitely my least favorite of the three. It's generally a dip in quality, and I'm no fan of how they took the easy route with the story in the back half, but that still puts it on a pretty high pedestal of quality. It's well worth playing and enjoying, but it's definitely Arkham City 2: Now With More City And Less Detail, so if City didn't blow your skirt up, you'll find some major annoyances in Origins.

If you didn't enjoy City, I doubt you'd like this game. More of the same with less polish.

That was kinda my opinion of Arkham City, bigger area to explore and fly around, just less detail and atmosphere and a million collectibles. If it's that times 2 I don't think it's for me.

It's pretty good/totally solid, but unless you really loved those games and want more, it is skippable.

It's fine.

It's easily the lesser of the 3 Arkham games, but it's still pretty good. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game. I'd skip it if you didn't care for City though.

That's how I felt about City. I wanted to love the city, but the atmosphere didn't really do it for me. I like the neon signs that shine in the reflection of melted snowy grounds, and the colors for it are fine (colors are important), but in general, there was too much filler to me. When you're above the city on buildings, it's pretty bare; that wouldn't have been a problem, but there's a lot of it. I also, while still thought the voice acting was great, the dialogue wasn't, and though I still loved the combat, the bosses weren't all that interesting or fun to fight to me.

I don't think City is a bad game, but there were more than on one occasion that I got somewhat fed up with it and became bored and tired of it. I also think, after I figured out Nolan North did the Penguin, he kind of didn't do a great job, or at least for me, all I could think about was Nolan North in a booth doing an accent, and it was kind of embarrassing, while I can't do the same for some of his other work. The twist ending was interesting, but by the end, I was already feeling down on the game so nothing really amazed me as I heard it had for others.

Arkham City to me is merely a good game because it does have many strengths, but it's strengths that don't really make the game a truly exciting, immersive one for me.

If you were disappointed with City then don't play this game. There isn't 1 new gadget in the game. I thought city was phenomenal, it's basically more of that just not as good.

It's totally fine. The worst I can say about it aside from some of the bugs which I'm sure they've patched out is that it's more of the same. I you want more Arkham City pick it up. If you want something different you'll be disappointed.

I enjoyed some story elements more than Arkham City, but if it was a gameplay issue you had, nothing about origins is going to fix that for you.

I played through it twice. It has some framerate issues on consoles, and some loading times that bugged me. From a gameplay perspective it holds up fine. It's more Arkham, so if you like the combat systems, riddler trophy puzzles, and sneaking around in those games you'll be fine here. The fact that it wasn't released a year after City made me interested. The only real improvement I found, although not much of an improvement was I thought the boss battles in Origins were some of the best of the series. Aslyum had one really great boss battle in Scarecrow, and City had a couple but recycled the "big man" gimmick from Aslyum a bit too much. I felt every boss battle in Origins was unique, interesting and challenging. More importantly a bunch of the boss battles made you actually feel bad ass.

Ultimately though if you aren't big on what City was doing this is just more of that with a decent new story beat (with some pretty raw/great moments) tied into the same combat with a couple new tricks.

I was pleasantly surprised with the game. I definitely agree it's the weakest of the three, but still a very solid game and I'm even a bit surprised it never came up in top 10 talks. The biggest flaw in my mind is it was a lot more of the same. A lot. I can see how this series is going to really suffer from franchise fatigue unless the formula is drastically changed. But that said, I was extremely surprised and pleased with the story, the cut scenes, and definitely the boss battles. Each assassin fight felt extremely unique and tense, and was the biggest 'new' gimmick brought to the series.

I am playing it on the Wii U for some reason and it is totally alright.

It's probably the weakest of the three. Retreads a lot of ground from Arkham City, so if you got tired of that, you won't have fun with it, though some of the story beats are pretty good.

Personally I can't stand the changes to the combat because it really messes with the way I played the previous two games, as it really breaks my freeflow.

It rectifies Arkham City's two biggest problems(for me); a dragging story which felt constantly disrupted for no good reason, and boring, tedious boss fights. The story in this one, especially near the end, is the best in the series, and I'd reccomend it on that alone if you're any kind of Batman fan. Each boss battle is unique, can usually be conquered in multiple ways, and uses your actual skills from the rest of the game. I also thought combat was greatly improved from the previous two, being more about careful timing and counters than attacks.

If you didn't like City, this is definitely more of that albeit with some large improvements that I really enjoyed, but it sounds like if you were bored by it, you honestly might not. Still, gets a firm recommendation from me, as long as you know what you're in for.

Not to mention the city is actually more interesting this time out. It's pretty much all of Gotham, I believe, and most of it is not ramshackle and rundown. Which is a nice change of pace from the previous two games. Oh, and it's Christmas Eve during the story, so there's snow everywhere and Christmas decorations sprinkled throughout the world. Very interesting setting, honestly.

Although the critics didn't like it all that much, me and my friend prefered it over the whole franchise. To-the-point story, faster and meaner combat, beautiful graphics on PC and awesome Christmas-setting/snow. Really great game. As a Batman Arkham vet, I beat it nearly 4 times like its predecessor. Good boss fights too.

I absolutely hated it because of truly enfuriating menu issues. You earn xp points to put into skills and if you don't use them straight away and keep them for a path you're interested in then every single time you want to look at the map it'll take you to the skills page. You'll set nav points on the map all the time to various collectables to smash, when you smash one you'll hit back to mark the next one it'll take you to the collectables page unless you wait for a few seconds. Usability is my thing because I have to design interfaces. This is fucking terrible. If you mainline the story it's fine, but if you want to milk the game then it's a pile of shit. Played 37 games last year and this is the only one I can think of hating.

@klei@joshwent I didn't really like the boss fights that much, or think they were really that flexible in how you approached them. The final boss fight is very similar to the Mr Freeze fight from city, Firefly is beaten using two gadgets after dodging his attacks. Deadshot was virtually the same as the Two-Face fight at the end of the catwoman stuff in city. Shiva is just a slightly stronger assassin/martial artist default enemy. Copperhead was pretty good and electroceutioner was a pretty funny joke fight and the first Bane fight was pretty rad.

@eternalvigil: You're coming pretty close to spoiling a ton of things in a thread created by someone who explicitly hasn't played the game. I respect your opinion, but maybe put that stuff behind a spoiler tag.

Fair point, edited the original post, just to be safe.

Contrary to the general tone of this thread, I just picked up a copy and the responses here have me totally pumped to start playing it.

Stealth is funny in Batman since really you're hiding mostly out of the sake of efficiency rather than mortal danger. Unlike most stealth games Batman is absolutely the hunter, rather than the prey.

Oh and I haven't played this game. That's all I got.

Stylistically it looks better.

And you should be. It's still a great game, flaws and all.

It's more City than Asylum, but it gets a lot of undeserved crap for not being made by Rocksteady. This game is totally fine. Great, even. Unless you marathoned the previous two, there's no reason to believe these mechanics that are just in this one franchise are played out on the third game already.

Serviceable, but nothing super amazing. The Deathstroke boss fight was a fairly neat twist, I also thought they did a very good job with casting a younger Conroy Batman (dudes seriously sounds almost the same as Kevin did 20 years ago).

The environments are a little flatter, less attention to detail here and there. Also there was a fair few number of quite game breaking bugs when it was released (one of the fast travel points couldn't be unlocked, you could get stuck at the river in wonderland).

It is a good game, but in some senses it does feel a bit restrictive. Like there are places that you think you should be able to grapple (and you really should) but you can't. Like some of the collectibles it looks like you can grapple but you can't and it feels like it has been done that way just to make it a little trickier. There are some other buggy stuff but nothing I'd say that would completely hinder you from enjoying it, this game is literally for people who just want more Batman.

I just finished the game myself and with only 53% done. I have all the collectibles, which made me feel like I was insane after doing cause there is so many. But outside of that there is seriously so much stuff to do it is almost unreal. You can get a lot of fucking mileage out of this game.

It definately lacks something special that the previous games had, but it's not a terrible game.

Also, don't play on hard mode... it's extremely difficult to the point of not fun.

I agree with this. In a vacuum it might be a pretty great game, but considering the previous two games it just doesn't really work.

The hard mode is only really difficult in the beginning before you have any abilities. It actually gets easier as you go...

Just finished Arkham Origins. Wanted to jump in and chime in again, after earlier expressing a lot of excitement I had for playing the game.

I really enjoyed the first two hours or so of the game, even though some of the imperfections seemed pretty glaring. By the end of the experience, however, I was totally burnt out by the game. It simply doesn't have near the polish the previous game(s) did. A litany of minor bugs and hitches. That might be easy to overlook in other situations, but the without their vaunted tightness and reliability, a lot of the franchise's systems of operations just don't hold up.

This is probably most evident in the game's combat, which just seems to play like total garbage once the game introduces the new enemy types. The new enemies gunk up the flow or just plainly ignore the rules of the combat system altogether. They present situations that will lead to, at best, awkward combat and, at worst, inescapable damage. And combat scenarios make up almost the entirety of the game--meaning Origins deviates from the stealth-combat-detective-traversal structure of the earlier entries pretty dramatically. You'll be noticing the pitfall canyons of the combat for certain.

The story presentation is fantastic, even if the plot is mostly nonsense. The music and voice acting I found to be great.

The camera is almost always a problem in fights, boss scenarios are kind of whatever across the board, and getting from one end of the city to the other is never not a drag. Your choice is a three-minute glide or a three minute load screen.

So, yeah. An alright experience if you can get it for cheap. Rocksteady's presence is absolutely missed in this final product, though. Ended up being very glad it was over.

If you're a pc person and you're on the fence because of price you might like to know it's like 17 bucks on Green Man at the moment. I still can't bring myself to buy it because these Arkham games seem to have inevitable game of the year editions.

God, I hope the next Rocksteady game is a Batman Beyond game. That'd be amazing.

It handles the story/cutscenes better than any of the other batman games. It lacks the polish of the first two, though. I saw a bunch of glitches and bugs in my play through, although only one was potentially game breaking. It doesn't have any riddles, so that kind of sucks. Still, it's my personal favorite of the series. They definitely did a much better job than Rocksteady in the story department.

It's on par with an annualized Spiderman game.

The PC has been updated to the point where it's better, there was some really horrible glitches even in the stealth gameplay, enemies would get stuck you could trapped inside of grates. And the Fighting mechanics introduce a series of power mittens which break the combat mechanics by giving you a about the series of 3 punches for every one punch, which breaks the game and makes you feel more like Sonic the Hedgehog spin balling around enemies instead of this frank miller style fighter who knows where each punches land.

It's a big disappointment they reuse Arkham City, it's never the city off in the horizon, but it's technically the map from No Man's land so technically this is Gotham City. The lack of civilians is ridiculous and makes Arkham City look smart in adding politcal prisoners. It's a real slog to back track around the city and enemy encounters are handled really poorly.

Multiplayer is kinda interesting but you feel like your more annoying gears of war players and not really feeling like batman in these matches. Plus it's paid to win with buffs to buy.

The story is worth viewing through one play through, it's really excellent, It would make an excellent movie. Troy Baker's joker is electrifying we get more of an Alan Moore Joker. But then you only see 4 of the assassins unless you seek them out and even then they are disappointing.

It's still an unpolished game, no real sense of well crafted game design like Asylum or City. In fact I recommend replaying Asylum and City, especially since GFW was removed and you might reconsider City more. I'd give the game 2 out of 5 stars, you are going to have to tolerate a lot to get the most out of it. again I recommend replaying Asylum or City, and check out the cinematic online, because it doesn't do the core of metroidvania, stealth and combat elements that made the Arkham Games as good are not very well handled here.

Hearing about the poor sales, I was curious if they would continue, and also Arkham City 2 is probably going to be announced for the end of this year. The rumor is this would be the Black Ops to Arkham City's Modern Warfare annual series.

I ran into this pretty frequently. Also, enemies in stealth sequences clipping through level geometry. Had one instance where two enemies walked into each other, face to face, and then stayed in that exact spot as I cleared out the rest of the room.

yeah, it's a common problem when you do path finding and you do really lazy work. Path finding you need to be really triple check everything, you can't just apply it onto the geometry and trust the AI knows what it's doing. Because as much as people rant over how they reused the City, the AI doesn't know what's going on with the environment. L4D hammer editor uses a mesh but even then you have spend a lot of time just explaining "you can go here, you can't go here."

You can totally feel like Batman in those matches, it just takes lots of playing to get used to the differences between single and multiplayer. You can totally go an entire match without even being spotted and totally handing the thugs their asses. Mastering all of your gadgets is just a lot more essential because you have to vary your takedowns to score more "intimidation", and because real people don't react in as predictable ways as the AI do.

I thought the game's single player was pretty underwhelming, but I absolutely love the multiplayer. Once you get good at it you really feel like a badass in a different way than the single player of past Arkham games.

I've only seen one match where that happened and a player used Batman and Robin well. But it feels a lot like when you get someone new to pilot a helicopter in battlefield compared to a well coordinated team. But there's still are elements that are tweaked down to a more slower state in order to balance it out..... and I' would be happier to have a button that screams "THERE'S THE BAT!" To spot batman for my team ;) But yeah it's interesting.

If you focus on Batman or Robin long enough your character will say something, though they don't yell it like the thugs in single player unfortunately. A mechanic where you had to specifically press a button to do that would be really interesting though.

@mildmolasses: Sorry for being late, but no, it wasn't really gameplay. It was dialogue and atmosphere.

The story and cutscenes are pretty good but the combat is buggy compared to the other games and I ran into a game breaking bug halfway through, I didn't feel like starting again.

So, I bought the game and am installing now.

Alright, I beat the game, and I thought it was good. I read that a lot of people said there were a bunch of bugs in the game, and while I believe them that they had them, I personally didn't run into many at all. The only thing I really ran into was when you first go outside, I jump off the roof of the building I was on and the game froze. I had hoped it wouldn't happen anymore, and luckily it didn't. So the game held up pretty well throughout for me, though I'm not sure if the bugs most people had were fixed by now? I got it on the 360. Anyways, yeah, I still didn't like it nearly as much as Asylum, but I enjoyed it more than City.

The atmosphere still wasn't terrific, though at first, while I was underwhelmed by the City in City, and it's the same here though slightly different, I appreciated to some extent seeing it in the past, even though again, I didn't love it. The main story was more intriguing, though predictable in spots it would have been nice if it weren't, and unlike City, the dialogue was great just like in Asylum (yeah, I didn't think think the dialogue was great in City). There were cool moments. I'm glad I got it, and honestly, if I had got it at full price, I wouldn't have regretted it. I hope if they bring anything up in the new one coming out, they don't somehow retcon any of it, that'd be unfortunate to me.

Alright, this is old, but thanks for all your posts.

If you liked City and Asylum, you'll definitely like Origins.

I just started AO yesterday and as one who thinks Asylum is one of the best VG ever this is more of just an evolution of that game. Also, i did not play the previous Batman game so that might skew my opinion slightly but from what i have played so far it is excellent.