Despite the excellent boss battles that really utilized their respective villains, the game feels bloated with overpowered gadgets that dumb down the combat into monotonous punching. The gargantuan open world is nice to look at but awfully hollow, and detective mode was somehow turned tedious.

It’s a much more contained narrative than the rest of the Arkham games, with a plot that sadly doesn’t amount to much beyond introducing Batman’s relationship with Troy Baker’s Joker - who totally steals the show with numerous standout scenes! Unfortunately outside of some clever character to character quipping, the rest of the plot is shot full of holes and often undermines its own most interesting twists by plugging them up or forgetting about them. An intermediary game in the series handled by a different developer in WB Montreal - the team took a bold step by creating a prequel, setting the game five years before the events of Arkham Asylum. Oh, Batman: Arkham Origins (opens in new tab). Platforms: Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS3, PS4, PS5, WiiU, PC

The game was eventually ported to consoles and PC, and whilst it looks much better than it’s portable predecessor, a fresh coat of paint can’t fix the poor design behind the scenes. Given that it’s entire premise is framed around one of the less interesting Arkham narratives too - it didn’t have the means to craft a gripping story that could make it worthwhile. It was an attempt at a Metroid Batman game that fell very short of the mark. The inventive use of the camera must also be applauded - zooming in at various flashpoints and courting glides, as well as putting Batman in the literal crosshairs as part of the Deadshot fight.Ĭombat is still crunchy, but the level design is all over the place, and the downgrade in graphics is extremely noticeable, with muddy textures and murky signposting leading to constant misdirection.

Whilst the plot is meandering and ultimately pointless, it did have a number of ambitious ideas - it tried to graft as much of the console experience as possible to portable devices, with stealth gameplay, grappling and even explosive gel making the cut.

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