💦 FULL SET: Id/ songlian - Collection

Arkham Origins, the pariah of Batman: Arkham series, stands out for its frustrating game design. It copies many of the Arkham City formulas; alas, unsuccessfully.

The game is teeth-clenchingly unpolished and buggy. To name the most pressing issues, the disruptor often fails to disable both guns or weapon crates, snipers see through walls and through the back of their heads, melee combat timing is punishingly counter-intuitive and different from all other Arkham games. Specific encounters are often tedious, unfun or downright broken: Firefly's boss fight mechanics, for instance, are incompatible with each other. In fact, the entire sequence feels out of this game genre, sort of like an unsuccessful experiment. Bane fights are torturously frustrating… and the developers put *four* of them in the game.

To make matters even more sinuous, many of the perk system's essential upgrades are locked behind challenges. Challenges which are extremely difficult to complete during the first playthrough and downright impossible if you do not do more than one challenge per every single scripted predator encounter throughout the story. In other words, obtaining skills is dependent on meticulous planning and scouring the Internet.

Many of the game's mechanics are nonsensical. Once a single enemy realises Batman uses gargoyles, every gargoyle in the room instantly becomes rigged with explosives. Enemies have *infallible* aim – even when they use a shotgun and target you from the other side of the map.

Then there is object interaction inconsistency. Batman is unable to destroy brittle wooden walls with his fists, yet he can break concrete walls with his legs. Then in predator encounters, he can punch through those same wooden walls. The game is also filled with interactive buttons. Most of them have to be specifically pressed with hand, while other must be activated via batarangs. These annoyances quickly add up.

Arkham Origins prides itself in featuring open world, yet once you clear out an in-door location, it forever becomes completely empty – even though its ambience suggests otherwise (e.g. GCPD's bullpen). If a player wishes to collect all Riddler's data packs, they have to crawl through the entirety of every giant building and return the same way they came in. Laughably, the reward for acquiring all the data packs is upsetting the Riddler – or rather, "Enigma". Most of the other "challenges" or quests in Arkham Origins require you to travel back and forth. Completing them is a bland chore.

As if that was not enough, faces look horrendously plastic. Even Arkham Asylum, a considerably older game, aged with more grace.

And yet, while plagued with problems, Arkham Origins manages to convey an exciting story with an odd unexpected turn, optimal combat challenge, and some impressive cinematics. But are these worth the problems?