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Mini Review: Batman Arkham Origins – Cold Cold Heart DLC |
Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser quickly goes wrong at the beginning of the game. Spoiler alert: Bruce Wayne is Batman.
This DLC takes place a week after the main campaign during a fund raising event for Gothcorp that is rudely interrupted by a mysterious man wearing a cybernetic suit. The big selling point of this DLC is to get to take on Mr Freeze and of course, the much touted new XE Batman armour. This is a very large and imposing extreme weather suit which keeps the user safe even in extreme cold environments (exactly the ones Mr Freeze prefers) and replaces the shock gloves with thermal gloves which can be used to remove ice walls and to pulverize thugs quicker once they are charged up with a long combo. According to Batman himself that despite visually seeming bulky, the honeycomb weave structure insulates without adding extra weight so you are not slowed down at all after acquiring it. This suit however is not obtained until quite late on in the DLC (which is a few hours long overall) so you still have plenty of time that you need to circumvent or avoid the cold in your old suit.
The new XE cold weather suit is very imposing
Game-play remains near enough identical to the original game with only a few new additions such as the aforementioned armour, ice walls that block your path until you get the new armour, a few new heat based gadgets and a new type of enemy with a freeze gun. I was expecting to be able to take on Mr Freeze hand to hand after getting the awesome new XE armour but sadly, no. The final boss is once again a stealth predator mission and a series of popping out to surprise him to deal a small amount of damage. It may be that I was out of practise with the Arkham games, or it may have been an intentional difficulty ramp-up for the DLC, but I found this one quite rough going with the vast majority of the enemies being armed requiring slow and careful stealth tactics rather than just beating the snot out of them.
The new suit is put to good use in the many dangerously cold environments
Summary
This DLC is very much more of the same as the original Arkham Origins only with the late addition of a cool new suit. If you enjoyed the main game, it’s definitely worth trying out.