Speaking of Batmanology, Origins' story will ring familiar for longtime fans. It's a mix-and-match buffet of Significant Bat-Moments, with Barbara Gordon hero worship, Alfred pleading with Bruce to stop his crusade and the earning of Jim Gordon's trust all nestled in the Story mode. If you've absorbed seminal Bat-lore like The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight, The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One and the previous Arkham games, many scenes and plot threads—psycho-criminals supplanting mobsters, for example— will ping off of your memories. There's also WB Montreal's take on a fateful first meeting between Batman and Joker, where each comes away realizing that their lives are going to be much different because of each other.

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Some of the proceedings reek of formulaic thinking, though. Oh, look, it's another sequence where Batman's stumbling around hallucinating because he's been drugged. Oh, look, more guilt-ridden visions. Oh, look, Batman being terse and dismissive of allies. It doesn't matter that this is a prequel and that these moments may be chronologically justifiable. They may meant to be homage but feel like required assignments on a Batman 101 syllabus.

Baker's Joker is an amazing if occasionally strained Hamill impersonation. You can almost see him clenching his jaw to get the killer clown's cadence just so. To his credit, Roger Craig Smith doesn't try to ape the legendary Kevin Conroy with his Bat-voice. His Bruce and Batman are essentially the same, a medium-rumble growl that occasionally breaks into shouts. It's a safe Bat-voice but I found myself wishing for more enough emotional inflection in Smith's performance.

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It needs to be said that there's a ton of stuff to do in Origins. When the credits rolled on my Story Mode playthrough, my completion percentage stood at 21%, after about 10-12 hours of playtime. It'll take some digging to root out all the characters lurking around Gotham as some of the assassins are buried in side missions. For example, I went through the entire story mode without encountering Deadshot or Lady Shiva, even though I know that they're in the game.

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Origins makes me think about what I want out of a Batman game. The answer has always been a deeper, interactive understanding of what it's like to be Batman. But Rocksteady's efforts had it easy. The first one oozed atmosphere and established Batman as a stealthy opponent, fearsome combatant and observant detective. Arkham City showed us the scope of his crusade, giving us a whole chunk of Gotham to prowl and adventure through. This one? It has the burden of showing you how it all started.

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Maybe the name of this latest Bat-game bothered you. Arkham Asylum and Arkham City were places, locales that the games bearing their names brought to life in expert fashion. Arkham Origins doesn't have the same clear-cut messaging and it has the unfortunate ring of prequelitis, that disease that makes serial entertainment go backwards when it can't figure out how to go forward. But, in its latter third, Origins does illustrate why there needs to be an asylum for the new breed of criminal. There had been thugs and mobsters before but not sheer insanity.

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Origins is an incremental installment, not a transformative one. It doesn't have the massive leaps forward that differentiated City from Asylum. It's almost understandable since WB Montreal have been tasked with harmonizing along to someone else's lead vocals. Right here, right now, the result is good enough. But the very success of the Batman video game franchise could prove to be its biggest limitation. And decisions to ever so slightly vary the template could be a slowly contracting deathtrap that not even the Caped Crusader can escape.

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Note: Arkham Origins also includes an asymmetrical multiplayer mode which I haven't yet had a chance to try. Look for an update to this review once I've been able to log some time online.

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To contact the author of this post, write to evan@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @EvNarc