izigame.me

The summary of my wall of text is that Arkham Origins is an alright game. It's not as much of a churned-out sequel as I expected it to be, but it does feel like an anemic Arkham City most of the time. If you absolutely loved Arkham City, you will most likely at least enjoy Arkham Origins.
Basically, it's very much a caveat-ridden "but" game:
- The city is huge and the interiors shine with attention to detail but too much of it is a 1:1 retread with a coat of snow.
The basic premise of revisting the exact same setting we got to explore in Arkham City really appealed to me, assuming that I would get a kick out of seeing "Old Gotham" before it was turned into a walled-off prison city. Sadly, it literally never feels like that. Origins' Gotham is visually nearly identical to City's, and is still a de facto wasteland with only cops and criminals running around.

- The "Riddler" puzzles are still there (the character is going by Enigma in this one) but this aspect of the game is severely simplified both mechanically and in terms of variety/scope.
This baffled me a bit, because Origins is even simpler than the original Arkham Asylum in this regard. Obtaining the datapacks (Origins' equivalent to the Riddler trophies) is much less of a challenge as it rarely requires a clever interaction with the environment or a combination of your skills and tools. One specific tool usually does the job.
The "scanner riddles" that require you to scan something specific in the environment according to a vague hint by the Riddler don't even exist at all in this game, and even the equivalent to scanning Riddler's question marks, which usually involved precise positioning in order to get the right perspective for the question mark elements to line up, is an extremely simplistic hunt for Anarky's hidden graffiti tags.

- The combat adheres to the mantra "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" but somehow still feels a little off.
Many reviews have described how certain moves have a tendency to miss their target for no clearly identifiable reason. Sadly, I experienced the same thing. Especially the "Ground Takedown" and "Directed Aerial Attack" are prone to this problem, which is, of course, an annoyance in a game where combos are so important.
I also think that many boss fights overstay their welcome to the point where you've already figured out the intended or optimal strategy/gimmick but it's repeated so many times or dragged out over so many phases that you end up feeling relieved, not accomplished, when they're finally over.
- The villains and rogues are plentiful but nowhere near as iconic/interesting as the ones in AC.
Last and least bullet point since this is clearly entirely subjective. Personally, I just didn't care much for characters like The Electrocutioner, Anarky, Firefly or Copperhead. Origins' representations of Bane, the Joker and the Penguin are still quite cool, though.
This may all sound overly negative... but I still had a lot of fun with Arkham Origins. It certainly lacks any kind of unique identity, sometimes even feeling like an AC DLC, however the core "Arkham" gameplay is mostly still there (and in spades; they didn't really cut down on the amount of extra content, like the combat and predator scenarios, etc.), combat's mostly still satisfying, even helped by the addition of the Shock and Thermal gloves, and the writing is pretty good. I particularly liked this game's rendition of the younger Penguin, and there's some stuff between Alfred & Bruce and The Joker & Batman that's pretty charming.
As I said, if you've loved Arkham City, then Arkham Origins is likely to at least entertain you as well.
:EDIT:
I have recently played through the entirety of Arkham Knight, and now my respect for the writing in Arkham Origins, especially for the writers' ability to show some damn restraint when appropriate, has risen tremendously. In a word, the Origins writers knew when to make the characters shut the hell up. The Knight writers absolutely didn't.