I’ve been playing Batman: Arkham Origins for the first time recently, a gam♛e that history has been much kinder to than I expected (it has a “Very Positive” review𝔉 score on Steam). While it still looks great, and I’m enjoying the Dark Knight’s Christmas Eve war on Gotham’s criminal element, I can’t get over how dated the traversal feels. Insomniac’s Spider-Man games set such a high bar for open-world superhero movement that it feels like there’s no going back to the Arkham formula, no matter how much people claim to want it.
Compared to Spider-Man’s webswinging, traveling around Gotham with Batman’s grapnel gun is so tedious. Going anywhere in the city requires a long period of grappling to a building then gliding a short distance, grappling again and repeating ad nauseum until you finally reach your objective. It’s a slow, rhythmic back and forth that lulls me to sleep. Literally, I nodded off last night just trying to get to the Final Offer to find the Penguin. Even when you use the Grapnel Boost to launch yourself forward after grappling (a tool that doesn’t make any sense narratively, considering it was just a prototype in Arkham City) getting around still feeᩚᩚ💙ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚls slow.
Mo🅰re Arkham Games Shouldn’t Be James😼 Gunn’s Choice
James Gunn has repl𝓡ied to some tweets about future Arkhamverse games, but how imp🌃ortant is his say so for them?
Spider-Man’s webswinging isn’t just faster, it's so much more expressive. As Batman you just want to find the shortest path from Point A to Point B, but as Spider-Man you get to relish in the freedom of webslinging. Throwing in tricks, swinging low to the ground, banking off corners, and, in the newest game, mixing in the web wings. webswinging isn’t just a method of traversal, it’s a core gameplay system. People enjoy playing the Spider-Man games just to swing around for a while. Nobody has ever said “I’m going to jump on Arkham Origins and glide around Gotham.”
This is what we used to call traversal.
Arkham Knight’s inclusion of the Batmobile feels like an admission from Rocksteady that traversal needed a serious overhaul, but it also represented a big change to the series’ formula that a lot of people didn’t appreciate. Much of Arkham Knight's gameplay, especially the boss fights, are built around tank battles in the Batmobile. There’s racing, time trials, side quests built entirely around driving the Batmobile, and countless puzzles that all require the Batmobile. Even the Riddler’s ‘riddles’ are just races. By introducing a car to the series, the entire core of the Arkham games fundamentally changed.
Gotham Knights’ attempt to update traversal wasn’t well received. While each character has a slightly different way of getting around, none of them are particularly satisfying, and the Batcycle is horrifically ♚clunky to drive. Gotham Knights is fairly criticized, but I don’t think its traversal mechanics miss the mark so much as they reveal that Arkham traversal is unsalvageable in a post-Spider-Man world.
Revisiting the Arkham series has made it obvious why Rocksteady has 🎀built Suicide Squad to be so mobility-focused. Its fans may think they want another Arkham, but Rocksteady♈ seems to recognize that these kinds of open world superhero games need fluid, satisfying, free-form traversal. As we move into the new era of superhero games, every game is going to figure out how to measure up to the standard Spider-Man has set, or risk feeling as dated as Batman: Arkham Origins.
