Batman: Arkham Origins: A Younger Batman, a $50-Million Bounty, and a Joker Who Steals the Show

Batman: Arkham Origins arrived in 2013 as the third main installment in the Arkham series, a prequel set eight years before Batman: Arkham Asylum. WB Games Montréal developed it. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it. It came to PlayStation 3, PC, Wii U and Xbox 360. The pitch was simple: a younger, less-refined Batman, a snowy Christmas Eve, and a $50-million bounty that draws eight of the world’s greatest assassins to Gotham City. It is a good game with a real problem, and the problem is not the one people remember.

Trailer, via Batman Arkham.

A younger Batman on Christmas Eve

The story is the strongest thing here. Crime lord Black Mask puts a bounty on Batman, and that single act pulls the whole cast into one night. The eight assassins are Bane, Deadshot, Deathstroke, Copperhead, Firefly, the Electrocutioner, Killer Croc and Shiva. Black Mask is Roman Sionis, head of Janus Cosmetics, hiding behind an ebony mask while he consolidates power. The police are not allies yet. Captain James Gordon pursues him, Detective Harvey Bullock pursues him, and Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb and SWAT team leader Howard Branden are corrupt enough to make the hunt worse. Batman is an outlaw in his own city.

That setup does more than justify a long night of fights. It explains why this Batman is raw. He has fought gangsters and ordinary criminals and is used to being stronger and faster than everyone he meets. Then the assassins arrive. The game sells that shift, and Roger Craig Smith plays the part without the settled confidence of the later games.

The Joker problem

Troy Baker’s Joker is the best performance in Batman: Arkham Origins and the biggest argument against its own premise. The prequel wants to show a Batman before the relationships that define him, but the Joker keeps taking over the story, and Baker is too good to waste. The same goes for the supporting cast: Nolan North’s Penguin, Peter MacNicol’s Mad Hatter, Matthew Mercer’s Anarky, Wally Wingert’s Enigma. This is a deep bench drawn from Batman comics history, and the game knows how to use it.

The weakness is that the best material belongs to the villains. The main character is mostly a man in a suit hitting people on schedule.

Combat, stealth and the Batwing

The core loop holds up. Batman: Arkham Origins is an open world action-adventure game with stealth tactics, played from third person. Batman glides on his cape and uses the grapnel gun’s retracting rope to reach ledges and extend his flight. The gadgets return: the Cryptographic Sequencer hacks security consoles, the Batclaw hooks onto surfaces, the Batarang throws, the Remote Batarang steers, Explosive Gel destroys weak surfaces, Smoke Pellets cover exits and entrances, the Disruptor disables guns and mines, and the Grapnel Accelerator is an early version of the Grapnel Boost.

New tools matter. The Remote Claw tethers two objects so Batman can slam enemies together or string a tightrope between wall points. Shock Gloves block electric attacks, stun shielded enemies and short-circuit objects. The Concussion Detonator stuns large groups. Fast travel arrives for the first time in the series: Batman summons the Batwing to cross the map faster than gliding or grappling. Enemy towers block the summon until they are disabled, and some need equipment the player has not unlocked yet. It is a smart way to gate movement without walling off the city.

The crime scene that actually works

The best new idea is the virtual crime reconstruction. Batman rebuilds a crime scene, investigates it, and identifies the culprit. It is the one mechanic that makes him a detective instead of a brawler, and it fits the fantasy better than any new gadget. The multiplayer mode, a first for the series, pits players in a gang war. It is not the reason to buy the game, and it never became the reason to stay.

What eight years buys

The setting does the heavy lifting. This is midwinter Gotham, and Batman is in the second year of his career. He is a mystery to the police, who do not know whether he is a vigilante, a myth or something supernatural. The assassins change the math. Black Mask’s henchmen push crime and gang activity up across the city, and villains like the Joker exploit the chaos for their own schemes. The writing team — Dooma Wendschuh, Corey May and Ryan Galletta — keeps the night moving.

Here is what matters, ranked:

1. The bounty premise, which gives every fight a reason to exist and turns the whole city hostile.
2. The crime reconstruction, the one mechanic that serves the character rather than the combat.
3. The Batwing fast travel, which fixes the series’ worst habit: long, quiet trips across a map.
4. The multiplayer, which is present and forgettable.
5. The Joker, who is excellent and quietly undermines the point of a prequel.

Batman: Arkham Origins sits below Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City, and it does not pretend otherwise. What it gets right is the thing the later games take for granted: a Batman who has not earned his reputation, in a city that has not decided what he is. That is a better idea than most of its execution, and the execution is still solid. The bounty structure gives the campaign a spine, the gadgets give it texture, and the Christmas Eve setting gives it a clock. The multiplayer is noise. The Joker is a gift and a distraction. A younger Batman should feel like a risk. Here he mostly feels like a schedule.

action-adventure · Arkham series · Batman Arkham Origins · Batman games · game review · WB Games Montreal