While overall not a BAD game, Arkham Origins fails to live up to a lot of its pedigree.
I've been anxious to get a chance to play this game since it came out, and a recent sale finally allowed me the opportunity to delve into the world of Gotham once again as everyone's favorite caped detective. Sure, I'd read many of the reviews proclaiming the game "good, but not up to snuff" in comparison to the other games, but I was willing to give it a shot nevertheless on the basis that even a half-decent Arkham game was likely to outweigh the quality of most of what is put out nowadays.
I was quickly surprised by many small signs of quality immediately apparent in the product. The graphics for the game are quite nice in general, with well-detailed and varied enemy models and a solid design for the Dark Knight himself. Controls are exactly what you'd expect from an Arkham game at this point, which is to say a controller is highly recommended, with combat just as fun as it is in prior games in the series if somewhat more stilted due to the ability unlock system, but more on that later. Likewise, sound design is solid as well, with the voice actors chosen doing admirable jobs. Overall the aesthetics of the game are spot-on, balancing appeal with performance and doing it all while pulling solid framerates on my fairly mediocre specs even when maxxed out.
Where the quality starts to fall down is in the gameplay itself. Gadget unlocking is not the steady stream you have grown used to from the older games in the series, and uses are not always clearly laid out. In fact, several of the gadgets fail to serve any purpose in the game whatsoever other than padding out your inventory. The game world itself is large, but even more sparcely populated than Arkham City, and far less visually dynamic, lending many of the locations you visit a very "been there, done that" feel to events. Even the puzzling from the older entries is largely absent, with even the most complicated of applications involving little more than the systematic application of one to two inventory items, and only about six items in total are ever used for the puzzles period.
To give the game credit the story itself is fun and, so far, quite professional in its application. You run into the expected rogue's gallery of villains, and the game does well in playing off of the difference in strength between the various foes you encounter, even allowing for the occasional bit of humor in their handling. On the other hand, there is next to no sense of urgency about events in the game's core story, with the only goals that convey any feeling of anxiety to complete being side quests that are completely optional. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for the existence of a time limit on the overall game, but some sense of a need to hurry and tackle the story would have been nice, and would help to add a sense of purpose to the overall world. Even the goals themselves boil down to nothing more than "open door, punch enemies, repeat," with the puzzles or exploration to accomplish a goal being below the standards set by the previous two games. I understand that the game was made by a different developer, which requires some allowances, but more essential puzzles would have greatly enhanced the game as a whole.
Overall, the game has been good. BUT.
Yes, but.
There are two parts of the game that I have to admit to having serious issues with.
The first issue I'll bring up is one that is not necessarily the game's fault, and that is my problems with stability. I say not "necessarily" the game's fault because, in PC gaming, certain allowances always must be made for different hardware and setting within said hardware. Despite those allowances, though, the glitches I've encountered in the game have all been quite frustrating and not fun. I've encountered multiple instances of interrogation subjects glitching into architecture and refusing to allow me to interrogate them, with one fight in particular requiring me to re-start the encounter four times because the enemy glitched the same way the first three times I tried it. In addition to that, I've encountered issues where controls will simply stop working. The game is simpler than the older games, to be sure, but losing one's ability to use gadgets still renders the game unplayable. This is an issue with the game and not my controller because a quick jump to the title screen and back to my most recent saves fixes it, but this shouldn't be necessary. In addition to all of this, there have been several times the game has slowed to an absolute crawl or even froze up, causing me frustration and even nearly crashing my entire computer. My system's no behemoth: AMD A8-3850 quad-core 2.9 GHz, 8 Gb DDR3 1600, AMD HD 6870 1 Gb GDDR5 -- but it averages 80 FPS in the game at 768p, so these slowdowns are very problematic and disturbing.
More than any of these issues, though, my biggest complaint about the game is the ability unlock system.
The regular ability trees are fine if not exactly ideal, and at the point I'm at I'm facing the frustrating issue of leveling faster than I'm unlocking abilities to apply my ability points to. What's more annoying is the abilities tied to accomplishing goals within the game. The system in general is one I appreciate and even commend, but the linearity of it is a ♥♥♥♥-poor way to handle a system of unlocks that is obviously intended to reward exploration and experimentation.
You have three notable sections of mini-goals for the game that allow you to unlock some of your abilities: abilities that can be unlocked no other way. These mini-goal tiers are each associated with a particular element of Batman, and the abilities and goals that are tied together are well considered. BUT. The goals can only be completed in order. What this means is that you cannot get credit for completing goals in a tree -- no matter how many times you do the action that should do it -- unless you've completed all lower goals. This might not sound flawed at first, but in practice it becomes an exercise in frustration.
As an example, I am stuck in one of the trees on a goal to complete a predator encounter without being seen. This is a VERY EARLY goal in the tree, but one that I have progressed in the story to the point of rendering it next to impossible, partially due to lack of abilities unlocked by moving up in the tree. Why didn't I complete this already? Because my combat style did not automatically lend itself to one of the lower goals, which took longer than it should have for me to accomplish. I managed no less than 3 predator encounters completely invisible prior to completing that one lower goal, but none of them count, oh no, because the system is built so linear. The older games liked to have goals you could accomplish that stacked toward certain bonuses, but were much more freeform in how they handled these, and as a result much more fun and, dare I say it, more user-friendly. By hard locking the order these goals must be accomplished in the developers have turned a system that could have rewarded creativity and experimentation into one that instead punishes the player for not doing things in the precise order the devs wanted, which is a terrible, terrible thing.
Is the game on the whole fun? Yes, it is, as is evidenced by my hours already in it. I've yet to complete the main story, but despite all my issues with the game the overall experience is good enough that I DO intend to. Frustrations with poor design choices aside the game is a good addition to the Arkham universe, albeit one I would recommend playing before the older games, not only due to its prequel status but also to minimize frustration over the game's inferior state. Combat is in most cases just as satisfying as in the previous entries, if a touch slower than Arkham City, but the puzzles themselves are far less interesting and the world feels, for lack of a better word, flat in comparison to the other games.
Final Rating: 6 out of 10
While not a bad game, Arkham Origins fails to build upon, or in many ways live up to, the older entries in the series. Some good visual production values fail to pull what is otherwise an empty and sometimes glitchy experience up to a higher level of quality.
No comments:
Post a Comment