Okay, before you read further, let me just set the mood here. Set it to play and then come back.

If you’re now feeling a wave of nostalgia about the Emmy-award winning Batman: The Animated Series, well…good. I bring it up because I’m convinced these Arkham games are for everyone like me who loved those Batman cartoons as kids, and are now adults who can appreciate things like mild profanity, suggestive themes, blood, and on-screen murders. I’m also convinced that Arkham Asylum, as glorious as it is, was just a lead-up, a test run, a proof-of-concept for the Batman game that Rocksteady really wanted to make. Arkham City is that game, folks. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s just because of how much I love the character and his world (especially the darker, grittier, more psychological incarnations). But I don’t think I’m being at all hyperbolic when I say this game will make you feel more like the Dark Knight/Caped Crusader/World’s Greatest Detective/The Goddamn Batman than anything that has come before.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who liked Asylum not liking City more. Rocksteady knows they had a good thing going with Asylum and didn’t mess with it much. The core mechanics and design are intact, there’s just more of it – a lot more. The premise this go-round involves an entire chunk of Gotham City being converted into a walled mega-prison, which provides players with a playground of dilapidated urban chaos to explore. I’m not sure if Arkham City is larger than Arkham Island in terms of geographic area, but it certainly feels like it due to the sheer density of activity and challenges thrown at you. There is little to no control by prison officials except to maintain the impenetrable walls. The cityscape inside has been carved up into turfs by familiar villains, and the streets and landmarks are teeming with gangs of thugs representing various members of the Rogue’s Gallery.

Even if you avoid all the combatants, your attention gets pulled in several directions at once to respond to calls for help from civilian prisoners, answer phone calls from the twisted serial murderer Zsasz, investigate shootings by sniper assassin Deadshot, track down a murderer who literally rips the faces off his victims, or complete skills-training mini challenges for upgrades, just to name a few of your Dark Knightly duties. Oh, and remember those pesky Riddler riddles and trophies from Asylum? Dude’s been busy in City, because there’s an avalanche of puzzley scavenger hunting to keep you busy for hours and hours.

I’m very impressed at how the game could contain so many challenges without them ever really getting stale. I’m the kind of gamer who tends to bang his head against an obstacle until I overcome it (Super Meat Boy saw some dark days). With City, I frequently found myself in the midst of a particularly difficult challenge getting distracted by a second challenge, but content that I’d come back to the first one later. I think my one quibble is that I was sometimes unsure if my inability to complete a puzzle or training mission was because I didn’t have the required gadgetry, or because I was just failing at the required skills. Sometimes I’d be forced to give up on something, which I hate, only to discover later that I was doomed from the start to even try.

Combat is similarly true to the original, but again more fleshed out. It’s still mostly a game of crowd-control, and your bread-and-butter are two buttons: one for directional attacks and the other for counters. The biggest differences in City are threefold – they throw more enemies at you, they throw more types of enemies at you, and enemies seem to take a bit more pounding to defeat. For all three of these reasons, you’re under more pressure to execute special moves to either quickly drop a guy or to provide your only means of offense against, say, body armor. There are more options for melee and gadget special moves, and it will take time to get them all down, but that generally strikes me as a good thing. Asylum suffered a bit from combat monotony, which City counters nicely with a larger arsenal of moves, but also a more varied stable of enemies that demand their use. Regular attacks and counters seem mostly designed to build up a combo meter that enables Batman to cut loose with effective crowd controlling maneuvers and brutal insta-finishers. In no time, you’ll be snapping enough limbs to make Stephen Segal queasy.

The combat in both Asylum and City is a thing of beauty, stylish and sharp, easy to get the hang of, but often very demanding that the player be on top of his game to keep from being overwhelmed. The game makes excellent use of that fast-motion, slow-motion film technique showcased in the movie 300 (there’s probably a term for it) to accentuate badass face-poundage, but also to punctuate the speed of the fights to give the player a chance to process their next strike. Somehow it’s even more satisfying when executed on a particularly noteworthy foe.

I’m going to go on record as defending Arkham City‘s version of Gotham as the best-looking one in any medium. There is no comic book character more defined by their environment than Batman, a fact to which Rocksteady was sensitive. I would sometimes just park on a quiet roof and slowly pan the camera around to take in the visuals. This Gotham evokes Tim Burton’s and The Animated Series, with a skyline of gothic skyscrapers, pierced by perpetual searchlights, which seems only to cast larger shadows on the ground. The full moon is always partially obscured by clouds, and the streets are under the watchful eye of ever-present spotlight blimps. This is Batman in his natural environment – an open world of high rises, dark alleys, and fire escapes, occasionally dotted with Riddler’s signature neon green graffiti, where he can grapnel to almost any ledge, swoop with cape billowed down on an unsuspecting thug, then pound his friends into the pavement as they scream in horror “It’s the Ba-urk!”

It’s also worth noting that while fan service in Asylum came mostly in hints and allusions, City is knee deep in the mythos and famous characters from the start. You never even saw the Riddler in Asylum (despite his ever-present voice), but he and other nefarious types make appearances to drive the plot, instead of just cameos. It’s nice to see meaningful screen time doled out to an expanded cast, and the stars of the voice performance – The Animated Series veterans Kevin Conroy (Batman), Mark Hamill (Joker) – certainly seem to snatch the spotlight (although keep an ear out for an appearance from Castle‘s Stana Katic). In the interest of reeling in my gushing, I’ll resist temptation to expound on why Conroy is the Best. Batman. Evar.

Before I wrap it up, I should address Catwoman. She is an unlockable playable character who is accessed via a one-time-use code, as an incentive to get the game new. She isn’t just a skin swap of Batman, she’s her own woman with her own gadgets and her combat style is flashy and gymnastic, contrasted to Batman’s blend of kung fu and gnarly street brawling. The problem is there’s just not all that much to do with her. There are certain Riddler trophies that only she can grab, and…that’s mostly it. With a mind toward avoiding spoilers, I’ll say that Catwoman’s presence felt kind of half-baked.

Dark, gritty, violent, and gloriously executed,  Batman: Arkham City strikes the perfect tone for the Halloween season. This is the Batman game that was always meant to be, and for the vast majority who have at least some side of them that thinks Batman is cool, here’s your chance to revel in a concentrated distillate of the character and his universe at its richest and best. For the rest of you, I’m not even sure I even want to know you. But maybe Arkham City would be my chance to win you over.