Show of hands: who wants to be Batman? Okay, let’s rephrase that: who doesn’t want to be Batman? He’s a brilliant tactician, an Olympic-class fighter, a billionaire who can buy loads of gadgets… Sure, he’d trade it all to bring his parents back, but that pain just makes him stronger — fueling his determination to stomp out crime wherever it lurks. For a hero without powers, he’s amazingly powerful.

Letting you take full advantage of all those skillsets made Arkham Asylum one of the best, most diverse superhero games in years. And as we wander Arkham City — the vastly bigger prison-setting of Rocksteady’s next Batman game — our options feel that much greater. Shall we soar across alleyways? Dangle from flagpoles? Do some high-tech detective work? Battle gangs of thugs? With so many possibilities, there’s only one thing to do: jump off a building and into the fray.

Learning to Fly

Before trying any kind of missions or objectives, we should first get a taste of Arkham City and how Batman navigates it, advises the WB rep overseeing our hands-on session. He starts us high atop the Ace Chemicals building; in the surrounding sky, a full moon lurks and a blimp calmly floats by. We know we’re breaking character, but we’re a bit nervous — like a Year One Bruce Wayne who’s still learning the art of being a superhero. Finally, we steel ourselves up and run toward the edge of the roof, where we’re prompted to hit A to jump off and glide. We make the leap of faith, and a second later, we’re airborne, coasting slowly through the nighttime sky.

For a moment, gliding feels much as it did in Arkham Asylum, when you, say, jumped off a guard tower and drifted over the plaza below. Except this time, you have way more control. While gliding, you can hit RB to grapple to various objects — a flagpole, a rooftop above — giving you an instant boost in that direction. Or you can hold down the right trigger to launch into a power dive, building more and more momentum until you pull back on the left stick and swoop back up, having gained enough speed to soar for hundreds of feet over the city streets.

In that giddy moment, we neither grapple nor power dive; as we spy a “Live Nudes” sign on a nearby building (more decoration than promise, we’re told: given the game’s Teen rating, you won’t be visiting a strip club), we squeeze the left trigger, which cancels our gliding and sends us plummeting toward the street below. Panic turns to relief as we spaz out on the A button and manage to restore just enough of a glide to land clumsily on the sidewalk, hoping no thugs are pointing and laughing.

As luck would have it, we’ve touched down near Crime Alley — the fateful spot where Joe Chill murdered young Bruce Wayne’s parents — so we walk down it. An outline on the ground indicates that ancient crime; if you like, you can place flowers to honor Thomas and Martha (accompanied by a stirring score), or pick up an audio diary of Hugo Strange recounting the effect their death has had on you. It’s a bit disturbing to realize that the villainous warden of this walled-off slice of Gotham knows your true identity, and that as a psychologist, he’s fully prepared to exploit it.

Starting the game with all of your Arkham Asylum gear means it’s easy to go from street to rooftops: you just look up and around you, choose the grapple prompt you want to use, and fire. The Grapnel Gun has considerable range now, allowing you to latch onto objects more than 150 feet away — Rocksteady’s way of making sure you can reach high ground as easily as possible. Zipping our way from fire escape to gargoyle to rooftop, we’re back atop a building in no time.

Before proceeding further, we whip out one of the game’s new devices, your Cryptographic Sequencer, and scan for audio signals we can intercept. We listen to three: a police report about a suspect arrested for a petty crime; a radio station playing jazzy music; and a member of Arkham City’s Tyger security forces informing Strange that Two-Face is holding Catwoman hostage in a courthouse. We’ve covered that scenario in this recent preview, so we ignore this mission and go for another — hopefully more respectable — glide.

Riddle Me This

Even after a few tries, we’re still having trouble mastering the gliding and power-diving mechanic, but we can definitely see it getting easier with each go-round. If you want a break, you can always grapple onto the skids of a Tyger chopper and ride it wherever it goes, like a public bus, although gliding obviously gives you much more control over your speed and destination (and makes you feel like a lord of the skies, not some poor ol’ passenger).

Having flown around the small portion of Arkham City that Rocksteady opened up for our demo (the full game won’t have the invisible walls that restricted us to certain areas), we’re ready for something new, so our demo guide directs us to a rooftop bearing a shiny green Riddler trophy. Finding these question mark–shaped collectibles is an even bigger part of Arkham City than it was in the first game: not only are hundreds of them hidden around town, but nabbing them also unlocks various challenges that Riddler’s created for you — as we’re about to find out.

After deploying our Batclaw to yank this first trophy from a bear trap, we use our map to find two more in close proximity: one under a car (a new move lets us slide beneath the vehicle to reach it), the other behind a destructible gate (we bash through to snag it). Success: grabbing two of these trophies unlocks a Hostage Rescue challenge, which Riddler actually issues himself via holographic message, looking equal parts distinguished and menacing in his stylish suit and mask.

These challenges aren’t short: in fact, the one we’re about to do is a 15-minute, multi-step puzzle vaguely reminiscent of the Assassin’s Tomb scenarios in Assassin’s Creed II. As you enter a large rectangular room, you see a firefighter (probably part of the medical center set up to treat Arkham’s inmates) dangling helplessly from the ceiling; the floor is electrified, while enormous, whirring buzzsaws sweep back and forth across the area. Clearly, this won’t be easy.

Turning on Detective Mode, we see a fuse box controlling the electrical current in the floor. We can’t hurt it, so we hack into it with our Cryptographic Sequencer, nudging the thumbsticks until we spell out an unlock code (the very appropriate CONUNDRUM). That shuts off the electricity on a few floor panels for 15 seconds, letting us dash to a safe point. Phew! In between ducking to avoid those giant buzzsaws, we use Detective Mode again, spot a question mark across the room, and throw a Batarang at it, which briefly shuts off more floor tiles. Sprinting maniacally across the room, we climb onto a platform, run some more, then use our Line Launcher to zip into a high-up area.

After a few more steps — spraying explosive gel to blow open a wall, then using a remote-controlled Batarang to get an awkwardly placed Riddler trophy — we gain access to a long, cylindrical room with a hole in the side, through which we can see the worried firefighter. Now it’s a matter of timing: we line-launch across the room, and once we’ve zipped halfway down, we use its new braking feature to slow our movement, allowing us to spin 90 degrees and fire a second line in the firefighter’s direction. Bingo: we zip toward the firefighter, automatically grabbing him in our arms and crashing through a window on the far side of the room. We’re free!

Enter the Pit

With that puzzle completed, our demo continues in a completely different area of the game: the Gotham Natural History Museum. Walking its halls, we get growing hints that something’s not right: a human skeleton on a bench, another lying next to a dinosaur model, and then an odd painting of a short, beak-nosed, Popeye-ish little boy with his parents.

That child, of course, is Oswald Cobblepot — now the Penguin, a longtime Bat-villain who has a unique status in Arkham City: unlike the rest of the inmates, he wasn’t arrested and placed here. The Penguin had bought the museum from the government years ago and set up shop, but when asked to move as portions of Gotham were converted to this penitentiary six months ago, he refused. When Tyger security forces were unable to forcibly evict him and his hunkered-down minions, Strange chose to let them stay.

This situation makes Penguin particularly dangerous, as he’s on his home turf with his own resources, including his very carefully chosen henchmen. If you’re used to the blue-suited, top-hat’d, gentlemanly foe from old-time Batman stories, you’ll be surprised: Arkham City’s craggier version looks more like a vagrant who stole someone’s snazzy suit…but with the character’s trademark monocle, of course. “Where Joker is driven by pushing Batman’s buttons, Penguin is more ruthless about what he wants to get,” game director Sefton Hill tells us. “He’s like the worst, nastiest mob gangster you can imagine.”

We see that viciousness pretty quickly: as we walk by the Cobblepot painting, we enter a large, circular room — a sort of miniature gladiatorial arena — where we find Penguin and dozens of minions, not at all surprised to see us. Batman says he’s here for someone specific (Rocksteady bleeped the name, so as not to spoil the story), along with some unspecified police hostages. Naturally, Penguin’s not giving up any of them — and when the Dark Knight says “I’m taking you down,” the villain responds by unleashing a mob of at least 30 henchmen armed with sledgehammers, chairs, and other weapons. There’s at least twice as many foes as any fight in Arkham Asylum…can we handle it?

With a reaction somewhere between “Oh crap” and “Let’s do this,” we rush the pack and unload a barrage of attacks, being careful to counter anytime we see the familiar sign above an enemy’s head. If multiple opponents display the counter sign at the same time, you can actually pull off double or even triple counters now — for example, a sweeping crescent kick that floors two or three opponents. We don’t get to execute one of those moves, but we do counter a sledgehammer attack by grabbing the weapon and ramming it into the chin of the guy holding it — take that! Rocksteady’s claim of having doubled the number of combat animations is more than verified as we perform plenty of moves we don’t recognize, including kicking an enemy in the back and brutally slamming two guys’ heads together.

A bunch of his cronies may be unconscious, but Penguin’s not backing down. With a devious laugh, he says he has something else that can stop us, then uses his umbrella gun to shoot the chain suspending a heavy-looking cylinder from the ceiling. Cruel secret-keepers that they are, Rocksteady ends the demo with that object falling toward us, and we’re left wondering if it’s just a heavy block, or if another, more powerful enemy lies inside. Dum-dum-dum…

A Little Cooldown

Maybe it’s the smile on our face, or our twitching hands, but our demo guide kindly gives us a few extra minutes to tinker around in the heart of Arkham City. A chance meeting with a Two-Face gang lets us try a few more tricks — like using the Remote Batarang’s new boost, brake, and U-turn features to nail a distant enemy — and we spend our final moments practicing our glide-and-dive. In a demo or a game, it’s always a good sign when you finish the main portion and are instantly ready to jump back in, and that’s exactly how we feel.

Because Arkham Asylum so completely redefined our expectations of what a superhero game can be, Arkham City may not strike players with that same shocking, revelatory impact, regardless of how good it is. But everything we sampled suggests the same stratospheric production values and commitment to riveting gameplay, made bigger, better, and deeper. A decade ago, if we pictured a superhero game with a massive world and an emphasis on verticality, we’d have thought “Superman.” Today, we can’t imagine any other crimefighter soaring quite so high.

Keep reading to find out what we know so far and what we hope to see...

The Rest of the Game: Knowns and Hopes for the City We Haven’t Seen

Known: The entire game takes place at night. (One night, to be exact.) Why? Probably because, as game director Sefton Hill notes: “Batman works best at night. He looks coolest at night."

Hope: We certainly like the announced villains — Joker, Harley Quinn, Penguin, Hugo Strange, Riddler, Two-Face, Victor Zsasz, Calendar Man, and Catwoman. But three baddies we’d love to see are Man-Bat, the feral, tragic half-man/half-bat; the shapeshifting Clayface; and Prometheus (right), the purple-suited “anti-Batman” who exploits heroes’ weaknesses. (Sure, Clayface was in an Arkham Asylum prison cell, and Prometheus was referenced in that game. But we mean full-fledged appearances — i.e., we want to fight these guys!)

Known: You can spend XP on around 30 different upgrades. Though all of Batman’s Arkham Asylum gear returns, and you’ll start off with many of the upgrades earned during that game, these devices have other cool upgrades. From the start, the Batclaw can do a slam move where you can pull an enemy toward you, then sweep their legs and smash their head into the ground for double damage. But with a Batclaw upgrade, you can also use the device to snatch a weapon from an enemy’s hands. Another cool upgrade — this one to your abilities — lets you jam someone’s gun without them realizing it, so when they go to shoot you, they’re screwed.

Hope: We can’t really see Rocksteady going here, but we’d love to play as Bruce Wayne at some point. Not the clichéd “you’re in a jail cell and you’ve lost all your weapons” scenario (please, no), but something different, like Batman having to shed his costume to go incognito or join a gang for a mission.

Known: Locations that showed up on our in-game map were The Bowery, Steel Mill, GCPD Building, Amusement Mile, Church/Medical Center, Ace Chemical Building, Park Row, Tyger Storage Facility, and Wonder Tower. (We’re guessing that last one is the immense, Eiffel Tower–like building right in the center of Arkham City; Rocksteady wouldn’t elaborate on what it is.)

Hope: We want to re-enact Batman history (or alternate history) by pushing either Joker or Hugo Strange into a vat at Ace Chemicals. It’s not murder if they survive, and come on: you know they deserve it.

Known: Rocksteady has said the main story will take 12 to 15 hours to complete, while doing all the Arkham City Missions (i.e., side missions you can tackle whenever you find them in the city streets) and finding all the riddles and secrets will add another 12 to 15 hours. Getting 100% completion — which presumably includes completing the new challenge mode — will take 50-plus hours, says Hill.