I’ve played the other two Batman games and really enjoyed them, and so have been considering the third one. Is it as good? Better? Worse?
It’s good-ish.
Combat is more or less the same as Arkham City but with a bit of added jankyness (for example, you’re no longer safe when doing the stun-and-goomba-stomp move) and a few really annoying things (eg stun grenades and smoke and other stuff that disorientate enemies cause them to start punching at random. Including while you’re punching dudes, or parrying dudes). On the whole, it’s still pretty fun and the new enemy types are a’ight. I think I like AC’s combat flow best, but A:O is still leagues ahead of, say, Shadow of Mordor.
The boss fights are a bit copy-pasted on those of AC and none are as extraordinary as the Mr. Freeze one, but they’re still entertaining.
Story-wise, I really liked it, and I think it’s probably the best and most internally coherent of the whole series. The voice acting can be a bit hit-or-miss but nothing tooth-grindingly bad.
There is one **gigantic **pain in the ass however : upgrades and gadget unlocks are split between those you can buy with XP (as usual) and those unlocked by a variety of ingame challenges - kind of like Riddler’s Physical Challenges were in Arkham City, you know, do a x50 combo or glide 500 meters without touching the ground or knock a guy over a railing with a remote batarang, that kind of thing. Which is fine. Except that there are 15 individual challenges for predator sections, and story predator sections do not respawn once you’ve cleared them. There is one respawning city section that counts as a predator section, but many of these challenges can’t be done there.
So unless you’re a) planning ahead and b) always clearing predator sections keeping in mind arbitrary, silly or difficult ways to do things, well, you won’t get those upgrades until New Game+ or later. They’re not necessary or anything like that, but if you’re as much of a completionist as I am it’ll grind your gears.
I liked it. The variations between it and Arkhan City are pretty small, honestly, so it feels like a large expansion pack to the previous game. If you liked Arkham City, and aren’t expecting any big innovations over that games model, you’ll probably like Origins.
From what I’ve heard the detective mode is an improvement over the previous games, but generally speaking it’s a step backwards. I would wait for Arkham Knight, which I believe will be made by the team behind the first two games and not the B-team.
The detective mode would’ve been cool if they’d let you use it to actually try and notice and figure things out, but the developers didn’t seem to have faith in players to do that, so the amount of handholding they give you makes it basically just a cut-scene generator. Was kind of disappointing.
I’d say be glad you didn’t pay full-price for it but that it’s worth it somewhere in the 20 dollar range. It doesn’t deserve a lot of the anger it received but it definitely feels more like an expansion pack than a new game. Various little bits just don’t seem as polished as Arkham City.
Everyone I’ve heard says the fighting rhythm is off, and that it’s basically worse in every respect other than detective mode, but still fairly decent.
I found it a LOT of fun. The combat is pretty much the same, but with a few tweaks. The riddler stuff is a lot more interesting. It’s fun to find on of his puzzles and taking the time to look all around and break it down piece by piece. There side stuff in general is better than in Arkham City, IMHO. I liked the detective mode “murder” side content a lot, and collectibles aren’t as impossible to find as in City.
The main story is fine, I mean it’s setup like a big mystery, but common, you know what’s going on the minute it starts. Voice acting is mostly excellent as usual, even without the iconic Batman voice.
If you’re playing on PC, with an Nvidia card, the cape, snow and turbulence effects exclusive to that hardware are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. REALLY cool.
Great information, folks. I’ll confess that I never did get all of those Riddler challenges does in City (and I couldn’t get the Robin stuff to work either, but that’s a different annoyance). I’ll check it out the next time it comes up in a sale. Now if they could just make a good Superman game…
Yeah, I got the whole deal for $10, but you can get it for $7.50 now sometimes. I think it was the best in the whole series, though I hated Cold, Cold, Heart, the DLC.
Anyway, Origins is the best one and you should get it on sale. 
You can get AO at nuuvem right now in the “batman pack” for 14 real or approx us$5. Or you could buy AO only, at more than twice the price :).
http://www.nuuvem.com.br/produto/2567-batman-pack
Its a brazilian reseller of steam keys, I’ve had no problems using the keys I bought though I live in Denmark. I paid through paypal to mask my nonbrazilian status, but I’m not even sure they care.
This. They changed the timing just a tad, changed when you can be hit out of a combo and reduced enemy stun times slightly. All of that together made all of the core skill you gained in the other two games totally useless and effectively ruined this game for me…
I can confirm from the US that nuuvem is perfectly fine.
Wow, I never noticed and I played all three.
I absolutely loved the first two, put them among my most satisfying games to play of the last several years. After Christmas I started Arkham City and finally got bored of it about 20% of the way through. Yeah, the rhythm of fighting is a lot harder for me to get this time around; I feel like I need to be stopping and waiting for people to attack me so I can counter them, or else I’ll get punched while I’m punching someone else. I don’t remember that happening in the first game, at least not to this degree.
And, minor spoiler about a side mission:
I quit after trying the Deadshot fight about a dozen times. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, except that it takes awhile to get to the final part where you can sneak up and hammer him from behind, presumably, and my timing’s nowhere near perfect; when I inevitably get seen from him, and the mission ends, the last save point is all the way at the beginning of the whole shebang, meaning I have to play through the same monotonous predator sequence over and over and over and over.
Games that use boredom as a penalty for failure aren’t, IMO, engaging in good game design.
I agree and I’m curious about what you think might be alternatives to it.
No penalty? Then what else?
If some penalty, what penalties do you think are good game design?
That encounter was a pain. I do wish the game would save at different spots instead of only at the beginning.
For a single example, Five Nights at Freddy’s seems to make good use of jump scares as a punishment for failure, and using dread of future jump scares rather than jump scares themselves to build atmosphere.
Simple: unlimited saves wherever the player wants. A player who’s looking for a hardcore experience can have it, simply by saving less often. This is the solution in most PC games that aren’t ports from other systems, in my experience.