Batman: Arkham Origins

Batman: Arkham Origins tells a prequel story to Arkham Asylum - it's Christmas Eve, and Batman is only in his second year on the job when Black Mask puts a bounty on his head, drawing eight hired killers to Gotham, including Deathstroke, Bane, Deadshot, and Firefly. Instead of the quieter police-thriller tone of the first two games, the player moves through the nighttime city from one combat gauntlet to the next, watching Batman only just becoming the legend known from the later games. Batman is also, for the first time, not voiced by Kevin Conroy but by Roger Craig Smith, which helps make the character feel younger and less sure of himself than in the rest of the trilogy.

The game was, for the first time, not made by Rocksteady Studios but by the Canadian studio WB Games Montreal, which took over the proven Freeflow combat system and detective mode and used them to build its own, even bigger version of Gotham than in Arkham City - the player now moves across the entire city, including new districts, and can encounter lesser-known villains like Anarky or Copperhead. Origins was also the only game in the trilogy to add an online multiplayer mode, Invisible Predator Online, pitting Bane's and Joker's gangs against each other along with a pair of players in the roles of Batman and Robin - an experiment the series never returned to. This ambition came at a price, however: the game paid for it with a notoriously unfinished launch full of crashes and bugs that the publisher was still patching months after release, permanently branding it the technically weakest entry in the trilogy.

Why play: Anyone who loved the Arkham series' combat system and wants to see the story of how Batman became a symbol of fear for criminals will get a solid helping of more Gotham here, plus a decent gallery of villains, including the fight against Deathstroke, which ranks among the highlights of the whole trilogy. Today's patched version runs without major issues, making it an ideal choice for fans who want to play through the whole series from start to finish.