Freeze a jolly good fellow...
The second and superior piece of story DLC for Arkham Origins, Cold, Cold Heart serves as the Arkhamverse's introduction to one of Batman's best and also most ridiculous villains: scientist Victor Fries, known to the citizens of Gotham as Mister Freeze. Batman must spring into action to rescue a friend and solve an icy-hearted crime as cold-empowered thugs and a man in a cryogenic suit attack a charity gala hosted at Wayne Manor, claiming to have a score to settle with Bruce's old pal and fellow one percenter Ferris Boyle (Get it?! Fries! Boyle! Aren't we subtle!?), whom they violently attack. Origins' younger, brasher Batman comes to the fore here as an enraged Wayne swears vengeance on the depraved degenerates who would dare attack such a paragon of the milk of human kindness and decency as Ferris Boyle.
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Not pictured: the five gallons of sweat Bruce has to pour out of his
boots after stomping around a burning building in this thing. |
The plot is well-written and full of plenty of twists and turns as you might expect from an Arkhamverse game but - and it's a 'but' so large that Jennifer Lopez' pants don't fit it - there is absolutely nothing here that is going to surprise you if you have seen or are even vaguely familiar with the Batman: The Animated Series episode 'Heart of Ice', which won an Emmy for its nuanced and emotional reinvention of what had previously been one of the Caped Crusader's lamer villains, and with only twenty minutes instead of this DLC campaign's four or so hours. And even that time is padded time: with the final room of the GothCorp building - Mr Freeze's boss arena - blocked off by a thick wall of ice, the Dark Knight is forced to schlep over half of Gotham to find the pieces of a special drill that Penguin's men have captured and, for reasons best known to themselves, disassembled and spread over the city. Why the drill is the only one apparently in existence and another can't be found in, say, an R&D lab in the headquarters of the corporation that manufactures it, which also conveniently happens to be half-frozen at the time, I don't know. Oh, wait, plot convenience is anathema to free-roaming game design, right. I mean, what's the point of giving them a whole borough of the city to explore if we don't come up with some paper-thin reason to drag them all over it?
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"Hey, that guy fights just like Batman! And he has access to
incredible resources and technology, just like Batman! What
a coincidence!" |
In fact, the game is perfectly happy itself to provide you with a better reason to cover so much superfluous ground, in some additions to the Arkham series' well-ridden old warhorse of collectibles. Alongside the more pedestrian Anarky tags, there's some nicely in-character and lore-appropriate 'collectibles' to be found: police officers who've gotten in the way of Freeze or his men's objectives and been frozen solid in blocks of ice. Never mind that this sort of freezing would almost certainly result in fatal suffocation - and then fatal hypothermia if it didn't - it feels nicely old-school to be busting Freeze's victims out of man-sized icicles like in Batman: Vengeance or just about any of Freeze's appearances (even *shudder* Batman & Robin).
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Mister Freeze, his wife, and everywhere he goes are all frozen,
but he just can't let it go. |
One of the new features of Arkham Origins is Batman's bulky, padded Heat Suit, which enables him to survive the cryogenic temperatures of Mr Freeze's renovations in GothCorp, as well as resist his and his goon's freeze rays, and use the specially-installed Heat Gauntlets (basically a re-skin of the Electrified Gauntlets from the base game) to release frozen guards and bust through enemy shields and armour as before. One nice touch of the suit that stops it from being just a palette swap - aside from the added bulk and height - is the sound design. Batman's footsteps are heavier, and he speaks through an electronic filter now that the cowl completely covers his lower jaw as well - a nice touch is that Batman's inner monologue and voice when he speaks to Alfred is slightly muffled, as it must sound inside the helmet, but is fully electronic when he speaks to enemies or other characters around him. The 'interactive' crime scenes return as Batman enters a flash-frozen lab at the core of GothCorp, discovering a guard dead of heatstroke on the threshold of the freezing lab, a strange machine that seems to have exploded from the inside, and a few strange assortments of cryogenic technology. As Arkham Origins crime scenes go, it's quite a good 'un, and there's plenty of scope for witnessing the carnage that gave birth to Mister Freeze from every conceivable angle, and there's the same satisfaction to be had as in the main game of peeling back the layers and revealing the truth of the guilty party - in this case, colossal asshat Ferris Boyle, who promised Victor he'd find a cure for his wife's Huntington's, provided Victor make weapons for GothCorp against his conscience, and then promptly welshed on the deal in the way that rich industrialists in comic books who aren't Batman tend to do.
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"It was you! You stole my goggles!"
"Uh, boss, we all did." |
Initiation was really just a re-skin of Batman and his enemies, with a couple of new maps thrown into the challenge mode and a few curious design choices, even if they do make the game easier (wooden grappling gun? Really?). By contrast, Cold, Cold Heart is truly its own beast, featuring several new character models and environments, including an impressive introduction where you play as a suitless Bruce Wayne fighting to get to the Batcave through a burning Wayne Manor (Wayne Manor is the Jean Grey of the DC Universe, isn't it? No matter the continuity, it seems to burn down at some point). Unfortunately, it's not really a disadvantage to be robbed of your equipment - sure, you have less health and gadgets in the fight scenes, but those hardly make a difference when you're still built like a brick privy and faster than Jeremy Clarkson when there's a sale on Denim. The one stealth section that could genuinely have been challenging without your suit and toys is woefully simplistic, with a grand total of 3 guards, the first two of whom are programmed to stand stock still next to each other as you walk up and smash their heads together like cymbals, and the third who somehow won't hear the bony crack behind him, or indeed budge an inch from the spot his feet have apparently been glued to, facing comfortably away from you near the exit door. The final battle with Mister Freeze, similarly, falls tantalisingly short of the greatness of the similar fight in Arkham City. Instead of the AI of Mister Freeze, here all you have to worry about is the scarcity of available methods for hurting him - prepare to find yourself laboriously timing stalactites to drop on his head and jumping out of vents onto him a lot - and the constantly respawning goons who turn up all over the arena like a bad smell stuck to a bad penny, as well as the extremely few vantage points to escape to, make evading the enemy once you've been spotted an irritating chore of repetitive swinging, especially when Freeze starts icing the damn things.
Like the game that spawned it, Cold, Cold Heart falls just short of greatness. The use of the Batman mythology, characters, dialogue, visuals and sound are spot-on as ever, but drawn-out fetch quests, hit-and-miss game mechanics and a plot as predictable as the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest often threaten to render the game stale beyond the preserving power of any freeze ray.
6/10 - I'm not sending it to the cooler.
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