I found Batman’s one new gadget, the Remote Claw, hilariously fun. It attaches two objects with a bat-line that goes taught, good for making tightropes across a stealth-centric Predator Mission arena. Used offensively, it can smack two thugs into each other, send a propane tank careening into someone’s head, or string a baddie up from across the room. The claw is highly entertaining, but it did make picking off enemies from the shadows ridiculously easy and risk-free. Hopefully, the scenarios will escalate (as they do in other Arkham titles) to rebalance Predator runs back into the tense hunts I enjoyed before.
Warner Bros. Montreal also wants to point a big finger at its new Detective Mode investigations. These put you inside a first-person, holographic re-creation of a crime, which you rewind and fast-forward. The clues you need are somewhere in the playback.
The demo’s example tasked me with picking apart a police helicopter crash. I followed the copter’s severed fuselage around corners, backtracked to separate locations with new information, and scrubbed the scene down to the cause: a bullet trajectory identical to one I saw in Arkham City, leading to the same villain, Deadshot. This became one of several “random” Most Wanted events I ran into while patrolling the streets — another featured terrorist-of-the-people Anarky.
I do wonder if this enhanced Detective Mode won’t require plenty of handholding to work. Batman offered a lot of “I should do this” prompts during that helecopter sequence. I needed them, too, because the trail from location to location didn’t always follow a linear, logical path. Regardless, it’s definitely more involving than simply tagging glowing items on the ground, though Mattes confirmed that those old-school detection sections return as well.
If you get the overall sense that the third spin through the Arkhamverse didn’t move the needle too far, that’s fine. I got that sense, too. The real appeal of Origins, if it does appeal, will be in attaching the series’ aging but still-entertaining gameplay to a story that showcases Batman’s first encounters with his iconic rouge’s gallery. Roger Craig Smith’s (Ezio in Assassin’s Creed II) stellar voice work as Batman and Troy Baker (Booker DeWitt in BioShock Infinte) as the Joker, replacing series legends Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, sold those moments completely.
Indeed, the demo ended on a confrontation involving Bats, Bane, and the Joker, and all three oozed a degree of brutality and menace I never saw in the franchise’s earlier entries. The moment felt remarkably fresh. And that’s a hell of a thing to say about an origin story we’ve seen many times before.