4/5 ★ – elk's review of Batman: Arkham Origins.

I really love this game. I know it's the worst of the Arkham's and no Kevin Conroy or Mark Hamill but It's so unique and awesome. Combat is sick and in NG+ there are no counter warning markers so it's a lot more crazy and fun. Gadgets are really cool too like the remote claw and the glue grenade, they really spiced up the combat and I loved getting high combos and doing the bat swarm. I felt the stealth portion of this game unlike the other ones felt pretty unpolished especially on PC with keyboard and mouse. Some inputs like the one where you knock out a guy lying on the floor needs ctrl+right click to do and everyone knows combination button presses are terrible. Maybe it worked on a controller but on a keyboard, I've got like 90 other buttons there's no need. Especially considering the spacebar is used for sprinting, jumping, gliding, interacting, and generally acting like the x button on a ps controller. Very lazy pc port. The worst aspect of this is the contextual button prompts. Walk up behind a guy no you cant' just knock him out with the punch button, you have to wait for the game to pull up the prompt so you can right-click and knock him out. If you do it before the game can comprehend you're crouched behind a thug, you just do the counter animation which moves you forward in what I'm seriously considering to be a massive troll on their part to ruin my predator runs. But considering the pc ports of the other Arkham games, we should feel blessed that this one even works at all. Anyways I love the Christmas setting and the assassin's setup. This game really delivers on all their boss fights - this series is known for awesome bosses but I think this one has the best collection. spoilers for the story below: I understand why they had to set up the joker in this early moment of batman's career but I loved that they had black mask. I wish the plot was more about maybe a gang war between the two and eventually joker overtakes him but just having joker take over his entire empire out of nowhere was pretty anticlimactic. I love joker but he's got enough stories man there are so many joker stories. Honestly, I would have preferred black mask but if they had to have joker It's fine. I just would have preferred if he had a larger role in the story.