I was enjoying the game for about 2-3 hours before it downed on me that Arkham series became the new assassin's creed. At one point I even tried to run up a building holding space before I remembered what am I playing. We got the same two part separation in gameplay:
- open world part, where you can roam around and do small (quick) tasks to kill time and hunt collectibles, overall focused on scratching that OCD more than actually being interesting gameplay
- story segments, where most of the actually interesting things happens, but in here you're extremely limited and follow the only path through. At most you're given some freedom in choosing in what order will you take out this 10 patrolling guards, but that's about it.
And don't think that just cause Origin's world size is tiny, compared to what we are used to in open world games, you'll be able to knock out all the activities outside. I would not even suggest spending much time outside early on, since majority of collectibles, fast travel points and what not are locked out for you until you progress the main story.
A mall detour here: am I the only one who's really annoyed by the tendencies in games lately, where your upgrades are just that - upgrades? I don't want to add 3 more bullets to the magazine of this shitty starter gun, I want to unlock a minigun or a rocket launcher... Not wait for 5 hours of gameplay when you'll finally bestow it upon me.
But getting back tot he game at hand, detective scenes were supposed to be a major thing in this incarnation, but they don't even hold a candle to Remember Me's memory remixing. Here you literally go back and forth on the timeline until a red exclamation sign appears, then you scan it and repeat until none left. I did get some masochistic pleasure out of second detective sequence forcing the girl in the room meet the table face first over and over again, but that's not really what it was intended for.
Upgrades feel even less powerful for some reason. Before you had more interesting moves to unlock that would help you out immensely, but you get most of it from the start now and it seems developer forgot to add anything good to replace the old stuff. Now you just slowly work your way to "important" things like critical blocks and more frequent combat takedowns, barely acknowledging what you get along the way.
Yes, the combat is still good and ranking system pushes you to do stupid stuff in hopes of a better rank, 'cause otherwise you would just parry every enemy coming at you 'till they all die, just like in AC games. Performance wise, it's OK, although if you're not running something beefy, you'll probably need to drop down the AA settings. But the game is nothing amazing when it comes to graphics, you might say it's just like the previous one.
Also if you're playing it on PC, be aware that there was very little effort put in to the PC port, so don't expect such things like being able to select objects on the map using mouse, or even switch between menu tabs. And when you do get to use it in menus, expect it to do something strange, like going directly to the purchase confirm window, instead of just selecting an upgrade.
Just to sum it up, Arkham Origins feels uninspired and overly safe. First game came up with all the amazing ideas like combat and gadgets, and second placed it in open world perspective, but now it feels like an attempt to ride success of the previous titles. Now waiting for Batman: Arkham Brotherhood, where you'll get to recruit batfollowers and manage their smaller batcaves, sending them out on batmissions.