Recent reviews by VisciousFishes

Got product for free in an issue of White Dwarf. Bought DLC because I wanted to play as Elves.

not played in ages, Russian hackers trying to hack my account. recommend 2-step verification for anyone.

Could be my account was inactive for a while and they are just trying their luck. Be aware.

Still, having been reminded of this game I may try it again.

When I first got this game I thought it was a lovely game to play while I waited for other games to download. Couldn't be happier to recommend it.

Now, the game's server doesn't exist and each game mode seems to want to check the server when you leave them creating a hang or crash.

Don't buy it. avoid.

The game we asked for but not the game we wanted.

I write this review as a fan of the Arkham series with a huge preference towards Arkham City. If you believe that makes me biassed I suppose I would be a fool to disagree.

However, on with my thoughts on this game. I was one of the people who experienced delays with getting their game and the issues I experienced with installing it have been well documented on the forum. So after finally getting it installed I started playing with the mindset "I really want to like this but I am already hating it", so I was extremely biassed from the outset. Then the game started and the intro was not really on par with the previous titles.

With Arkham City, the story was broken relatively slowly. Origins certainly upped the ante and decided upon a bit of a more "up tempo" beginning. A bit of a video, a quick change, into the action and off to Black Gate Prison we go for the obligatory "prologue"/"training" level. This is something very common in games now. The prologue not only trains you (if you're not already familiar with the Arkham controls) but gives you a quick intro to the story. After that you're in the city of Gotham, going about doing the ususal goon punching.

The story develops at a pace that is a bit start/stop. After you face the first boss (who I was surprised to face so early) you then hit the city (both figuratively and literally) fullfilling quests that at times feel a little hollow. There has been many comments about the larger city scape being not much more than a cut and paste affair. Which is true, there are often quite literally parts which show that WB Montreal had access to the assets from the previous games and were explicitly told to use them. (I even noticed in the end credits that part of the Rocksteady team that worked on the previous titles were drafted in to help with the game build.) But then, reusing assets is nothing new and has been happening in the animation world for years.

When the developers announced this and did the usual publicity, the adage that was reinforced was "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and it's fair to say that's almost true. However I think they also forgot the "if it's fixed, then don't break it" which is how I feel the combat is sometimes - that is broken. There are times that I find myself swearing at the game because I have felt the combat is not as good as it perhaps should have been. Teleporting enemies, bats that are a foot longer than they're shown in the modelling, counters not working correctly. It's tough to get the timing of the combat in this game at times with the game breaking the rhythm that you've learned to play to (and that's after adapting my combat technique from the City one to the Origins one). Yes, I kind of excused that at first, after all we're playing a less refined Batman earlier in his career but when a game breaks the rhythm and timing that it has established, that's a bit off.

Yes, there's reused world space assets, yes there's reused goons, (both of these things are how games in a series are made) and no this game did not innovate as much as the others. The one area they did innovate gets overlooked and that's the crime scene analysis and detective vision. There's more reason to use detective vision in this game with all the hidden pieces to find but the new Crime Scene Investigation (or CSI:Gotham) part are marred by the fact that they're not used all that often and they are nothing more than interactive cut-scenes with a large portion of hand-holding. It's not a case of finding the evidence but looking where you're told to look. Anyone who's been gaming for a reasonable amount of time is quite adept at finding those elements in games on there own - either by deductive reasoning or by understanding video game mechanics. The whole hand-holding you through those parts just ruined any innovation they had brought in.

Ok, so that's the "packaging" of the game - what about the story?

Well, ladies and gents, if you're looking for a really meaty story about the origins of Batman then watch those films with Christian Bale. This game is about the Origins of the Arkham trilogy (which is only a trilogy due to the fact they bought this a third title out). While it tries very hard to make it's mark on the series, it just come across to me as a "tribute" to the Arkam series rather than a title that deserves to be in the trilogy on it's own merits. Reused assets aside, there are story elements that are all too annoying to forgive. (no spoilers but there was one part when I shouted at my computer and turned the game off for all of ten minutes questioning the whole "did you really pull that?")

There are contrivances to every story in the world, but the contrivances of this game are, not to be melodramatic (unlike this point in the game), plain unforgivable. This game tries really hard not to be but just ends up being contrived. Shoe-horning elements in to fit the canon and making a foul up of it along the way. The plot twists never shocked me and the contrivances annoyed me. Which is a shame because, by and large, the performaces of the voice actors wasn't wholly terrible.

You could easily forgive and forget that Troy Baker wasn't Mark Hammill. While trying to put his own "mark" on his performance of his part (see what I did there?) he did well in aping Mark Hammill's performance. The performance of Roger Craig Smith was passable when he could remember that he was playing the Arkham Batman and not the Christian Bale Batman. (It was funny if I noticed this change mid sentence and even funnier when he did a full Bale/Arkham/Bale conversion in one conversation).

The criticisms of others saying "oh, but it's nothing new" either missed the point of buying another game in the same series (which is to get more of what we already knew, so where's the fail?) or completly overlooked what was new and innovative (which didn't always work). At least this could run in DX11 straight out of the box which left use with a very pretty game.

If you're a fan of the series, you probably already bought it and have made up your mind about it. If you're not a fan of the series, then consider this Arkham Batman light (all the taste but only half the calories), not a bad contribution if it's the first ever Batman game you played. Which I suppose is not a bad thing.

If anything could be considered a fail in regards to this game, that is the setting. Setting a Batman game (or any game for that matter) to a Christmas backdrop and releasing it in October produces two problems. One, when the game is beaten before christmas and you've played quite a few hours of it, you're sick of Christmas before Advent begins. Two - it's Batman. If you're going to send out a lot of people to hunt down a double-hard vigilante who wears a costume resembling a bat then Christmas is not the best time (especially when you release a game in October). The best time (as voiced by my partner) is surely Halloween? Setting a game at Christmas makes replayability a bit weird. Afterall who wants to be thinking of Christmas in May? And replayability of a game is a major selling point to me, personally. Horror can be done all year round but Christmas Eve defines a very short period of replayability to me.

We Batman fans however wanted another Batman game and that's what we got. Unfortunately, we didn't get the game we expected but it seems foolhardy to be compaining about getting what you asked for. Rocksteady set the bar so high that it was always going to be tough for this game to be an "instant classic" and while it doesn't quite live up to it's predessors it's definitely a good introduction to the series for newcommers. I have my own theories about this but it's beyond the scope of this review.

2025 sq miles of game? I can think of no other game as big as this one. Heartily recommended playing this just to try and cover one half of the landmass.