Batman: Arkham Origins is an action-adventure game from WB Games Montréal. I finished the game and had a great time with it. I’m a major fan of the Arkham games and have finished all of the mainline titles except Arkham Knight, which I intend to play before Gotham Knights releases. While I still think both Arkham Asylum and Arkham City are better games than Arkham Origins, there's a lot of fun to be had with this entry in the series. The game is a prequel to the other Arkham titles, and it follows a less experienced Batman who’s still learning about fighting crime. To begin the game, Black Mask places a bounty on Batman's head, enlisting the help of eight of the world's deadliest assassins in an attempt to eliminate the Dark Knight. I think the story is the best part of the game, even though I felt some things were overdone. The base concept of having to defeat eight killers before they assassinate you piqued my interest, and the game's progression from there with unexpected twists and turns was great. While I loved the story, I really disliked the open-world nature of the game and slightly disliked the graphics. While the game looks good, I feel like it could have been a bit more visually appealing overall. Everything in-engine just looked a little off to me, though the cutscenes looked amazing. The game is an open-world title, which I wasn’t expecting going in, and I wished it wasn’t after a few hours. While there were lots of side activities I could partake in, none of them seemed very worthwhile. After completing a few side activities, I played the rest of the game by fast traveling to the next objective marker and keeping on the main path as much as possible. The gameplay is fantastic and feels just as good as the other Arkham games. Its fluid nature is wonderful, and it didn’t get repetitive in the twelve-ish hour long campaign. Overall, Arkham Origins is another great Batman game that I would recommend to fans of the other Arkham titles. However, if you’ve never played any of the Arkham games, I recommend starting with Arkham Asylum or Arkham City if you prefer open-world titles. Batman: Arkham Origins is available on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, and PC.

Mini Motorways is a strategy puzzle game from Dinosaur Polo Club. So far, I’ve spent about five hours with the game. In this title, your mission is to build roads, bridges, roundabouts, and more to allow the citizens of your city to reach their destinations in a timely manner. Each round of the game starts out straightforward with only direct connections between houses and locations, but as time passes, it starts to get more and more hectic, until citizens are unable to reach their intended location in a reasonable timeframe, and you lose. While I couldn’t always figure out what I needed to modify to save myself from defeat once a city grew large, I never felt like I should just give up. On Sundays, at the end of each in-game week, you get to choose between two upgrades. This adds some strategy to the end of each in-game week by requiring you to choose the best upgrade out of the two for your current situation. While there's not much else to the gameplay, I found it to be really engaging. Daily and weekly challenges are nice additions that provide a nice level of challenge to the game with certain restrictions. For example, in this week's challenge you’ll start with nine motorways, and you’ll receive double the number of road tiles throughout the game, and bridges won’t require road tiles. Trying to beat a high score or get into the leaderboard makes replaying stages to find the best strategy pleasant and fun. Similar to playing a roguelike, I even found myself saying “just one more run” after trying for hours to beat my high score. Whether you’re replaying stages to achieve the top score or just playing around in the levels while listening to a podcast, Mini Motorways won’t blow your mind, but it’s a game that I highly recommend regardless. Mini Motorways is available on Apple Arcade, Switch, and PC.

Now what games have the Community been playing?

Level Zero: Little bit of Witching Hour, Mad Max, and really looking into V Rising.

Wafl3: Lost in Random, such a fun game! Also, dipped my toe back into Overwatch and been having a great time again.

David: Dragon Ball Z Kakarot on Xbox series x and Sifu on PS5.

Brandon Wilson Creative: The Nomads of Fantasy have been playing Overwatch and The Division 2 lately. Mostly Overwatch.

Thank you for the submissions!

I’d love to hear about what games you’ve been playing recently, so please send your submissions to our email: contact@elevategames.net. I may also ask what games you’ve been playing recently on my social media accounts and on my Discord that you can join here. You can either submit the name of a game/s you've been playing or a bunch of text explaining what you enjoy (or don't) about that game/s. I look forward to hearing about what game/s you've been playing. Thanks.

This has been this week's What Ya Playing Wednesday. I'll see you all in two weeks for another article about what games you and I have recently played and/or enjoyed.

Thanks for reading and Game On!!