Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman: Arkham Origins

BY MATTHEW MURRAY
Real art usually lies less in creating something than in making something difficult look effortless. Christopher Nolan demonstrated this with his record-shattering, kept-getting-better trilogy of Batman films, but Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment hasn't fared as well with its games based on the adventures of the Dark Knight. Batman: Arkham Asylum£15.99 at Amazon (2009) was an exciting trek through Gotham City's signature madhouse; 2011's Batman: Arkham City$26.00 at Amazon  expanded the playground to a chunk of the city, and despite reheated game-play elements rather than devising new ones and delivering an improbable story it still was quite a bit of fun. The latest chapter, Batman: Arkham Origins$34.50 at Amazon, the first developed by Warner Bros. itself rather than Rocksteady Games, doesn't get off so easily: This prequel is numbingly derivative (even compared with Arkham City), limited in scope, and strangely sloppy. It doesn't completely disappoint because its base conceit and engine are solid, but unlike its predecessors it never really takes wing.

Up at Bat
Propping up Arkham Origins somewhat is its refusal to be just another garden-variety origin story. Instead, it's set about two years after billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne began donning a black cowl to clean up the streets the Gotham City Police Department left to ruin—and, as we arrive on a blizzard-torn Christmas Eve, neither the bad guys nor the good guys (assuming there are any) are yet certain that Batman actually exists.

Taking Flight
From one standpoint, the quality of production has not diminished at all from the norm established by Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. The graphics retain their crisp, Gothic clarity, and to my eye the cinematic sequences that push along the story are the best to date: inventive and smooth, deftly combining the just-barely-caricaturish feel of video-game animation with the fluid drama of a movie without short-changing either.

Likewise, the game play that propelled the first two games to success is in full force here. Fighting remains a thrill, derived entirely from Batman's incomparable martial-arts training and rewarding you based on how well you chain both attacks and counters; you continue to feel a real surge of adrenaline when the number edges past five, eight, 15, 20, 30, and beyond. Tracking down and solving Enigma's challenges, as was true of the Riddler's in the previous two chapters, is a comforting cerebral change of pace from all the skull cracking. And there's still something awe-inspiring about grappling your way up to the top of a skyscraper, leaping off, and gliding for hundreds of meters above the Gotham streets—it captures both the wonder and isolation of being Batman as little else does.

Though much has been made of the recasting of the key voice actors, particularly Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker, I was never yanked out of the game by the new performers. Roger Craig Smith's throaty intensity, if perhaps less supple than Conroy's delivery, is certainly right for the hero, and Troy Baker's Joker was an eerily good approximation of Hamill's portrayal. What's more important: They seamlessly blend in with the holdovers (Martin Jarvis as Alfred, Kimberly Brooks as Barbara Gordon, Peter MacNicol as Mad Hatter, Nolan North as Penguin) and the new performers alike.

A new multiplayer mode lets you team up with Robin to quell Blackgate uprisings by Joker and Bane, and is a decent way of getting others involved in the action. And Challenge mode, in which you revisit maps unlocked during the story to fistfight or stealth your way through encounters that are then ranked against others who've tackled them, are a superlative example of a smart reusing of the other games' familiar idea.