Wonderland is a weird, unsettling place at the best of times, and this is anything but the best of times. Seen through an Arkham lens, Lewis Carroll's creation is a dark hellscape of traps, dilapidated towers, and nightmarish illusions. Somewhere deep within it lurks the Mad Hatter, who's kidnapped a young woman to be his new 'Alice', and whose hypnotic devices have planted the realm in Batman's mind. The Hatter's idea of protecting Alice involves running a surreal obstacle course designed to 'break in' Batman's mind for servitude. Clearly, Batman needs to get out and back to what's important: restoring order in a city overrun with madmen, and finding out why he suddenly has a price on his head.
The Hatter and his mental Wonderland is only a small part of Batman: Arkham Origins, but it's an important one. After Mad Hatter's memorably eerie turn in 2011's Arkham City, the sequence has some big shoes to fill. So, for that matter, does Origins as a whole. As the first Arkham developed entirely by a studio other than Rocksteady, it needs to convince fans that WB Games Montreal can deliver Arkham's trademark mix of explosive action, thoughtful storytelling and creepy atmosphere.
'Tis the season
So far, the results have serious promise. Set during Christmas Eve in roughly the second year of Batman's career, Origins gives us a Gotham twice the size of Arkham City, comprising South and North islands connected by a bridge. Fans will immediately recognise North Gotham as the setting for Arkham City. This version hasn't been turned into a prison yet, however, and steps have been taken to ensure that nobody feels like they're re-treading the same ground.
[Gotham] has been hit by a major snowstorm, and it's also been hit by the storm of Christmas," says WB's Eric Holmes, "so there's a large amount of Christmas-isation that has gone on to create this ironic, 'Hey, Christmas! Christmas is happy and warm and turkey and family and presents,' and yet here are people getting beaten to a bloody pulp. So the two of them make for this happiest-night-of-the-year and worst-place-in-the-world kind of contrast."
That contrast permeates Gotham, from the festive wreaths in Mad Hatter's otherwise drab, d**kensian hat shop to the party decorations strung up around the Royal Hotel - now taken over by Joker, Bane and an assortment of thugs. Why have they all chosen Christmas Eve to crawl out of the woodwork? It all comes down to a name Arkham has only ever whispered: Black Mask.
Arkham Origins features a Batman who's much younger and rawer than the experienced crime-fighter from the previous games, though he isn't starting from scratch. "Arkham Asylum Batman is issue-500 Batman. He's completely formed, he knows exactly what he is, and everyone else knows, too," Holmes says. "He has no friends inside the police department. Some of the criminals in the city think he's an urban myth, because they've never seen him."
The younger Batman is also used to dealing mainly with mobsters and street thugs, so when a terrifying crime boss known only as Black Mask orders a hit on the Bat - with a $50 million bounty - coping with the sudden influx of assassins and costumed villains presents a new kind of challenge. And that's to say nothing of dodging the attentions of a skull-faced psychopath with immense resources and a penchant for torture.
"[Black Mask] is not hamstrung by some exotic neurosis, or some quirky personality trait that seems to lead to him being self-defeating. He's just practical and scary," says Holmes. "Of all the characters we looked at, he was the one that really fit this early-career mould. The world hasn't gone crazy yet. We haven't got all these costumed villains with really big and somewhat 'off' personalities going around yet. So he really fit that space."
Arkham Origins handles a lot like its predecessors. Even though our demo is set among the taller towers of South Gotham, navigating the skyline with Batman's grappling hook and cape feels exactly as in Batman: Arkham City. So do the fights, with a couple of interesting exceptions. New enemy types roam the streets now, including the Armored Enforcer, a huge thug who can unleash area-of-effect ground-pound attacks, and who needs to be stunned with Batman's cape before we can punch the armour off him. There's also the Martial Artist, who can counter Batman's attacks (which really just gives us the chance to counter them right back).
On the case
Another addition is the new Case Files system, a twist on previous games' crime-scene investigations, which we get a taste of when a police helicopter briefly threatens Batman with lethal force - only to dramatically spin out of control and crash seconds later. Scouring the crash for survivors and finding none, we turn on Detective Vision and begin scanning evidence. As pieces are scanned, Batman's cowl builds a holographic recreation of the crash scene, which we can scrub through second by second and examine from every angle.
Rewinding the crash reveals the chopper's missing a piece - the rear rotor, which we find on a nearby rooftop. Once scanned, we can look at the chopper the second before it began to spin, which reveals the trajectory of a bullet that struck the rotor. Following it, we find the corpse of a SWAT sniper. He wasn't the shooter, though - he'd been aiming at Batman, only to be cut down by a bullet which then ricocheted off the wall to hit the rotor.
Only one sniper has that kind of talent: Deadshot, one of the assassins on Batman's tail tonight. His guardian-angel act lands him on Batman's Most Wanted list, a series of multi-part side missions that involve hunting down familiar villains - often for the first time - and which can be completed in any order, at any time, even after you've finished the game.
While it's comforting to see evidence that Origins' gameplay measures up to that of previous Arkhams, it's something Holmes says about the Mad Hatter that convinces us he knows what he's doing. "We loved Mad Hatter in Arkham City," he tells us. "We loved his presence, and we really wanted to do more with him. A core experience of the Arkham franchise is its abstract experiences.
"It's not just walking into a room with a bunch of thugs who are doing some sort of deal and knocking them out," he continues. "It's also these inner journeys, where you're mixing a bit of what Batman's mind is with a bit of what this villain is, and how he might get inside Batman's head. Where Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum was this fear-driven experience, the Mad Hatter is more of a psychotropic experience. It's more psychedelic, more trippy."
'Trippy' definitely describes the feeling of watching thugs storm out of a mirror, or of using the Batclaw to latch onto giant flatware to pull a raft across a rushing river of tea. Wonderland might be a hallucination, but it's a lengthy, involved one, and the Hatter taunts us all the way through. It's only when Batman reaches a clock tower that he starts to get agitated, and as Bats climbs it, his taunts turn to cries of outrage.
As Batman summits the tower and comes to, Hatter stares at him, holding a knife to 'Alice's' throat. As he whines about his ruined party, Batman hurls a batarang, which seems to miss - only to curve round and smack the Hatter in the back of the head. Later, Batman tries to console the kidnapped girl. "Everything's going to be all right," he says. She pauses between sobs and looks up at him. "It won't be," she says. Batman walks away, back out into the dark and the snow. She's not the only one who needs rescuing tonight.
Batman: Arkham Origins is down for release on 25th October 2013.
Source: OXM
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Thanks to: Rheena.com
The Hatter and his mental Wonderland is only a small part of Batman: Arkham Origins, but it's an important one. After Mad Hatter's memorably eerie turn in 2011's Arkham City, the sequence has some big shoes to fill. So, for that matter, does Origins as a whole. As the first Arkham developed entirely by a studio other than Rocksteady, it needs to convince fans that WB Games Montreal can deliver Arkham's trademark mix of explosive action, thoughtful storytelling and creepy atmosphere.
'Tis the season
So far, the results have serious promise. Set during Christmas Eve in roughly the second year of Batman's career, Origins gives us a Gotham twice the size of Arkham City, comprising South and North islands connected by a bridge. Fans will immediately recognise North Gotham as the setting for Arkham City. This version hasn't been turned into a prison yet, however, and steps have been taken to ensure that nobody feels like they're re-treading the same ground.
[Gotham] has been hit by a major snowstorm, and it's also been hit by the storm of Christmas," says WB's Eric Holmes, "so there's a large amount of Christmas-isation that has gone on to create this ironic, 'Hey, Christmas! Christmas is happy and warm and turkey and family and presents,' and yet here are people getting beaten to a bloody pulp. So the two of them make for this happiest-night-of-the-year and worst-place-in-the-world kind of contrast."
That contrast permeates Gotham, from the festive wreaths in Mad Hatter's otherwise drab, d**kensian hat shop to the party decorations strung up around the Royal Hotel - now taken over by Joker, Bane and an assortment of thugs. Why have they all chosen Christmas Eve to crawl out of the woodwork? It all comes down to a name Arkham has only ever whispered: Black Mask.
Arkham Origins features a Batman who's much younger and rawer than the experienced crime-fighter from the previous games, though he isn't starting from scratch. "Arkham Asylum Batman is issue-500 Batman. He's completely formed, he knows exactly what he is, and everyone else knows, too," Holmes says. "He has no friends inside the police department. Some of the criminals in the city think he's an urban myth, because they've never seen him."
The younger Batman is also used to dealing mainly with mobsters and street thugs, so when a terrifying crime boss known only as Black Mask orders a hit on the Bat - with a $50 million bounty - coping with the sudden influx of assassins and costumed villains presents a new kind of challenge. And that's to say nothing of dodging the attentions of a skull-faced psychopath with immense resources and a penchant for torture.
"[Black Mask] is not hamstrung by some exotic neurosis, or some quirky personality trait that seems to lead to him being self-defeating. He's just practical and scary," says Holmes. "Of all the characters we looked at, he was the one that really fit this early-career mould. The world hasn't gone crazy yet. We haven't got all these costumed villains with really big and somewhat 'off' personalities going around yet. So he really fit that space."
Arkham Origins handles a lot like its predecessors. Even though our demo is set among the taller towers of South Gotham, navigating the skyline with Batman's grappling hook and cape feels exactly as in Batman: Arkham City. So do the fights, with a couple of interesting exceptions. New enemy types roam the streets now, including the Armored Enforcer, a huge thug who can unleash area-of-effect ground-pound attacks, and who needs to be stunned with Batman's cape before we can punch the armour off him. There's also the Martial Artist, who can counter Batman's attacks (which really just gives us the chance to counter them right back).
On the case
Another addition is the new Case Files system, a twist on previous games' crime-scene investigations, which we get a taste of when a police helicopter briefly threatens Batman with lethal force - only to dramatically spin out of control and crash seconds later. Scouring the crash for survivors and finding none, we turn on Detective Vision and begin scanning evidence. As pieces are scanned, Batman's cowl builds a holographic recreation of the crash scene, which we can scrub through second by second and examine from every angle.
Rewinding the crash reveals the chopper's missing a piece - the rear rotor, which we find on a nearby rooftop. Once scanned, we can look at the chopper the second before it began to spin, which reveals the trajectory of a bullet that struck the rotor. Following it, we find the corpse of a SWAT sniper. He wasn't the shooter, though - he'd been aiming at Batman, only to be cut down by a bullet which then ricocheted off the wall to hit the rotor.
Only one sniper has that kind of talent: Deadshot, one of the assassins on Batman's tail tonight. His guardian-angel act lands him on Batman's Most Wanted list, a series of multi-part side missions that involve hunting down familiar villains - often for the first time - and which can be completed in any order, at any time, even after you've finished the game.
While it's comforting to see evidence that Origins' gameplay measures up to that of previous Arkhams, it's something Holmes says about the Mad Hatter that convinces us he knows what he's doing. "We loved Mad Hatter in Arkham City," he tells us. "We loved his presence, and we really wanted to do more with him. A core experience of the Arkham franchise is its abstract experiences.
"It's not just walking into a room with a bunch of thugs who are doing some sort of deal and knocking them out," he continues. "It's also these inner journeys, where you're mixing a bit of what Batman's mind is with a bit of what this villain is, and how he might get inside Batman's head. Where Scarecrow in Arkham Asylum was this fear-driven experience, the Mad Hatter is more of a psychotropic experience. It's more psychedelic, more trippy."
'Trippy' definitely describes the feeling of watching thugs storm out of a mirror, or of using the Batclaw to latch onto giant flatware to pull a raft across a rushing river of tea. Wonderland might be a hallucination, but it's a lengthy, involved one, and the Hatter taunts us all the way through. It's only when Batman reaches a clock tower that he starts to get agitated, and as Bats climbs it, his taunts turn to cries of outrage.
As Batman summits the tower and comes to, Hatter stares at him, holding a knife to 'Alice's' throat. As he whines about his ruined party, Batman hurls a batarang, which seems to miss - only to curve round and smack the Hatter in the back of the head. Later, Batman tries to console the kidnapped girl. "Everything's going to be all right," he says. She pauses between sobs and looks up at him. "It won't be," she says. Batman walks away, back out into the dark and the snow. She's not the only one who needs rescuing tonight.
Batman: Arkham Origins is down for release on 25th October 2013.
Source: OXM
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[h=3]References[/h]
- [SUP]^[/SUP] Source: OXM (www.oxm.co.uk)
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Thanks to: Rheena.com