Highlights

  • Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate, often overlooked, offers a unique 2.5D Metroidvania experience in the Arkhamverse.
  • The game excels in offering classic side-scrolling gameplay with hidden collectibles and a narrative featuring Batman's first interactions with Catwoman.
  • A remake of Blackgate could improve controls and combat, but the Arkhamverse has moved on, making a remake unlikely.

Often forgotten among its Arkhamverse counterparts, Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is the one incontestable black sheep in a series of excellent gems. Batman: Arkham Origins—the main installment to Blackgate’s companion piece—hasn’t always been widely appreciated, either, but with age and retrospection it’s coming around as a hit from WB Games Montreal that firmly belongs in the Arkhamverse. Armature’s Blackgate has never wielded that same praise and, while a modern remake could work wonders for it as a full-blown 2.5 Metroidvania, the Arkhamverse’s ship has already set sail in a new direction.

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Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate Has Its Metroidvania Heart in the Right Place

Even though it shares a genre with Batman: Arkham Asylum as a Metroidvania, Blackgate takes that much farther in an explicit sense because it leans on all the classic gameplay tropes of a side-scroller. The mechanics from the Arkham games were arguably adapted well to Blackgate’s 2.5D direction, allowing players to grapple, glide, and employ a wide suite of the Dark Knight’s gadgets.

Just like Asylum, Blackgate offers gadgets incrementally and players will see points of interaction they can’t access until a gadget is procured later on. However, Blackgate includes case files and collectibles that are much more suitable for the 2.5D space, such as chests with alternate skins or character upgrades that are hidden and left to players to find in their exploration of the map.

Blackgate’s Story and Gameplay Could Benefit Greatly from a Remake

Then, from a narrative perspective, Blackgate is intriguing as it depicts the first time Batman and Catwoman meet in the Arkhamverse. Blackgate is officially overexploited in the Arkhamverse, however, with Origins having two Blackgate riots bookending a single game and the prison being overrun once again three months later in the titular companion game. This saliently explains why an insane asylum would’ve opened as an alternate, but repeat villains such as Penguin, Black Mask, and Joker feel appended out of obligation more than anything else in Blackgate.

The game struggled most with its controls and gameplay in general, though, with the Arkham games’ Freeflow combat not translating as fluidly or responsively. That’s why a remake of Blackgate would be phenomenal at this point; it could learn from the mistakes it made and iterate on all of the fantastic Metroidvanias that have launched since, such as the recent Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown.

The Arkhamverse Has Effectively Moved on from Batman

That said, it’s unlikely there will ever be a remake of Blackgate, or any Arkham game for that matter because Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has illustrated a new direction for the Arkhamverse, and looking back now would be redundant. Unless Rocksteady or Warner Bros. was in the market of exploring previous stories in the Arkhamverse with Batman at the helm again, it seems as if the canon will be trekking forward into its multiversal journey with Task Force X hunting each iteration of Brainiac across dimensions.

It’s impossible that a story as epic as the one in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League would revert back to one as intimate as any of the Arkham games, and the decision to kill Batman makes it fairly clear that there are plans in place to move out of his shadow.

Of course, Rocksteady’s never been able to shed its obligation to feature the Joker, and it’s always possible that Rocksteady might not be able to resist exhuming Batman in the future. As of right now, Batman might be shelved indefinitely in the Arkhamverse and a remake of anything Arkham-related is implausible, let alone a title as maligned and forgettable as Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate.