Pygmalion_4678: Origins was a great Batman story without doomsday fantasies and Gotham looked at least halfway like a real city.
Asylum was also atmospheric, apart from the Titans nonsense. The fantastic design of Gotham City inspired me in the second part, but I did not like the appearance of Penguin or the idea of populating the city only with rogues.
In Origins, I only miss Catwoman and the Batmobile (Burton style, please, not the street tank). the snowy city and the gloomy christmas mood were great.
The story the Sekretagent guys wrote for it is not bad, I will agree. Past a certain point, the focus of it kinda just flies out the window and it falls back to the ol' "Batman v. Joker" rivalry as if it couldn't get by on sticking with the whole assassin setup for fear of deviating too far from the "Arkham" story formula.
It has a really intimidating interpretation of Bane in it, as opposed to the version shown in Asylum, which is something I liked.
The biggest shortcoming the game has is that it's really just nothing "new" - it's like WB sat around waiting for Rocksteady to move faster with Knight and got too anxious, looked at the Montreal team and said "we're paying these guys to essentially drink coffee, so why not have them replicate what we know makes us money?" and off they went. It's an Arkham game in a different wrapper, more or less. We get the city in a bit of Batman Returns flavor, we get a few "new" rogues and... not much else. While there's nothing wrong with the "if it ain't broke" approach, it just feels like a squandered opportunity to deliver a wholly different experience.