izigame.me

Objectivelly speaking, this game is NOT bad! Infact, it is quite the impressive product given how rushed it was. If played in a vacuum, you might enjoy it quite a lot. But playing it after 100%'ing the previous game - Arkham City - it becomes jarringly aparent that this is the same game, but half assed.
The combat is the same free flow system where you have specific methods of countering different types of attacks, aswell as different combo specials, such as take downs, crowd stuns, and disarming of enemies. However, it is not as tightly implemented as previous games. In Asylum and City you could very reliably cancel out of animations and jump from enemy to enemy, and perform blocks almost instantaneously if your reflexes are fast enough. That was a good thing! It gave you a lot of agency in combat, you could gamble on whether you could get another hit in before having to block the enemy behind you, or when to use your multiple types of specials, or gadgets, or when it was better to outright dodge out of the way. But in Origins, it feels as though they screwed up the timing in multiple animations, to the point where you wonder if the game is dropping inputs (which I wouldn't rule out, given that this game is *much* buggier than any previous game in the series). To add insult to injury the simple and functional upgrade shop from the previous entries has been replaced by a god awful skill tree. Words cannot describe how much I hate these goddamn skill trees every game feels the need to shoehorn in to begin with, but in this case it is particularly offensive. You are FORCED to invest all your points into melee/ballistic armor upgrades before you can unlock more advanced combo specials, such as the stun and the multiple ground takedown. This is terrible, and ruins the level of freedom the previous games afforded you where you could choose between getting all combat skills as soon as possible at the cost of keeping you squishy, or being a tank from the get go but with fewer moves, or simply splitting things more evenly. No, you are now forced into this linear progression that the developer wants you to go through. Apparently some combo specials are locked behind story missions too, so you'll go through the bulk of the game without the "disarm" special for example.
You could argue that "disarm" was a little overpowered, but it's nothing compared to these "shock fists" you get halfway through the story that basically stun enemies in a single punch and do more damage once charged, which might aswell be a "win instantly" button, because very few enemies can stand a chance against that. You can basically stunlock a crowd of 10 thugs with no effort on your part, for as long as they're active.
The stealth "predator" encounters aren't much better off. One of the first upgrades you can get in your miserable skill tree is one that boosts the damage of batarangs. Thing is, that it seems like it also boosts how far back enemies are thrown back by the batarangs? Which basically means that during predator encounters you could very easily just use remote batarangs to knock down thugs from high ledges (even over rails on certain occasions!) with so much ease that it trivializes these sections completely, specially when you aim them from a low angle which just sends dudes flying. The remote grapple gadget also makes predator encounters too easy, since thetering a propane tank to an enemy will pretty much guarantee their defeat on a direct hit, and you can do it without even leaving your vantage spot. And trust me, you WONT wanna leave your vantage spots. Grappling back to them is a gamble. In previous games you could point in the general direction of one and the game would give you the prompt to grapple back up. In this one, it feels like Batman is miopic with how close to the thing you have to be for the game to allow you to go back up.
The story of the game is all over the place. The stuff with Batman learning to be less arrogant, and be a team player, is decent enough. But the rest of it is just the writting equivalent of spaghetti code. So basically Black Mask has hired several assassins to take you down on Christmas eve. Most of them don't get much development besides a side mission which, while Arkham City had many small side missions featuring other villains, the difference is that this game hypes the hell out of the other assassins in the intro, only to make a mediocre delivery for most of them. Some are painfully simplistic side quests, others are just infuriating boss battles. But anyways, turns out that the real Black Mask had been kidnapped all along (might I add, they do Black Mask DIRTY in this game, people just walk all over the guy like a bitch). The Black Mask you've been following is actually the Joker pretending to be Black Mask!!! Because god forbid there is a Batman anything ever without the Joker as the headliner! So then Batman meets the Joker for the first time, then the Joker gets arrested, and it feels like Bane is gonna be the real antagonist. Until it focuses back on the Joker, who seduces Harley, stages a riot, and breaks out of prison all within the span of probably under 24 hours since his arrest.
Speaking of plot, I should point out that while the previous games seemed intent on channeling the same energy of Batman TAS, this one feels like it's going more for a Nolan Batman aesthetic, from the visuals, to the writting, to the design of the enemies, even down to Troy Baker's performance as the Dark Knight, who seems like he's trying his best to do a less goofy version of Christian Bale (That's right, no Kevin Conroy in this game). So basically it's trying to take itself a lot more (I.E overly) seriously, to the point of being melodramatic and pretentious, ruining that magical comic book feel the previous games captured so wondefully. Considering this game came out in 2013, fresh off the heels of The Dark Knight Rises movie the previous year, I guess they were trying to capture the audience of that very successful movie, but instead just created a miserable story, and a very usightly gotham city open world.
And some notes on the open world: Did you not enjoy the riddler's multiple hidden riddles and throphies in the previous games? Tough shit! Because now on top of having to find all of his hidden mcguffins, you also have to hack the big towers (every open world game needs the "big tower" objective, right?), AND also find and destroy his antennae he has scattered throughout the city. Oh! And the game world is like twice the size too! And there's a giant bridge in the middle that is a massive chore to get through! Mercifully, this game at least introduces fast travel points which can be unlocked after hacking the stupid towers, making traversal less agonizing.
The only reason I'm so livid is because I consider Arkham City one of the best open world games ever made. So while this game isn't the worse, it is simply insulting when you come for it fresh off of Arkham City. And as such, I cannot recommend it to anyone, when I have the option to recommend Arkham City instead.