Playing A Game Batman: Arkham Origins (PC, PS3, WiiU, X360) PC

Batman: Arkham Origins is Batman: Arkham City, but worse. "Worse," of course, is a relative term. Arkham City was fantastic, even as a follow-up to the also-fantastic Arkham Asylum; Arkham Origins, though falling short of Arkham City in many ways, is still fundamentally a good and fun game. Given that it was developed by a totally different studio (a WB-owned studio in Montreal, rather than series steward Rocksteady), it's not really a bad outcome.

The story is jumbled, slapdash, and poorly-written, with embarrassingly bad character development -- but it nevertheless manages to offer thrilling encounters and tense pacing, stringing the game along while unlocking new areas and devices.

The enemies are overly familiar, both figuratively (Copperhead functionally replaces Scarecrow) and literally (seriously, how many fucking times do these guys want me to fight Bane?) -- but they serve up a satisfying amount of interesting boss fights anyway.

Grunt-level combat seems to have taken a hit, with more frequent counter-misses than I'm used to, and an incredibly annoying habit of throwing out way too goddamn many enemies at once -- but the moment-to-moment fighting is still solid, and a lot of fun.

Batman's library of gadgets is mostly the same as the last game, and even the "new" gadgets are just reskinned versions of old ones -- but the puzzles, hazards, and takedowns they enable remain as fun as they were two years ago.

The huge world map is more difficult to navigate through than Arkham City's free-flying landscape, due to crowded skylines and a river splitting the city in two -- but there are enough side-missions, collectibles, and random activities to keep things exciting during cross-town flights.

There are a handful of unwelcome bugs, mostly in terms of faulty level geometry, getting stuck in or falling through things here and there -- but the majority of the time, the Arkham engine delivers just as well as it did before.

And the new voice actors for Batman and The Joker are, frankly, not as skilled as the legendary Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill -- but they do a pretty good job in general.

Overall, yeah, Arkham Origins is worth it for another Batman fix. It's "good enough," and certainly substantial enough, in terms of its amount of content. But I worry about the machinations behind the game's production. It could hardly be more obvious that this game only exists because WB wanted a "filler" release between Rocksteady games; and given that the engine and design framework were laid out for them by Rocksteady themselves, WB still managed to break a disappointing number of things in their iteration.

Crucially, all the creative elements of Arkham Origins - its placement in Batman's timeline, the story pacing, the dialogue writing, the selection of villains, the Gotham City venues, the gadgets, the techniques, the upgrades ... all of these - are lacking in original quality. To put it bluntly, the things that work about Arkham Origins work solely because they were inherited from Arkham City. Except for the sheer amount of sidequests, and for the visual fidelity of the cutscenes, Arkham Origins feels more like a mod than a sequel.

The slightly insidious motive behind this game, then, is that WB can lazily iterate on a great developer's tech, put little effort into rehashing it, and sell it as a new installment. And they can get away with it! They totally can. Again, Arkham Origins is fun enough to be worth playing. But it would be a real, damn shame if more lazy iterations like this were to dilute Rocksteady's commendable standard of quality.

Better than: LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (3DS, Mac, PC, PS3, Wii, WiiU, X360)
Not as good as: Batman: Arkham Asylum or Batman: Arkham City
At least we'll know what to expect: if WB maintains a trend of alternating Rocksteady and B-team installments.

Progress: Finished the story, going back in for sidequests..

Rating: Good