This will totally end well.

In 2009, Batman: Arkham Asylum was easily my favorite game of the year (along with probably being the biggest surprise of the year). But since then, I’ve been curious to see how Rocksteady would handle the sequel. I was almost convinced that they caught lightning in a bottle the first time. They had the perfect setting, all the right villains, all the right voices, and everything just seemed to fall into place almost too perfectly. How do you follow that up? How do you reach that level twice?

Well, you make Batman: Arkham City, and take a bit of a different approach.

The game starts itself pretty simply. After the incident at Arkham Island in the last game, the Asylum is closed and all of Gotham’s criminals are moved to a walled-off mega-prison named Arkham City, overseen by the Batman-obsessed Hugo Strange and his team of soldiers. It’s a bad idea, and Batman knows it, so it’s only a matter of time before he has to go in and try to shut the operation down. What he quickly finds is that the City is in the middle of a triple threat turf war between the Penguin, Two-Face, and the Joker.

It’s enough to get you started, but it actually leads to pretty interesting story overall. The main missions will take the opportunity to introduce you to a lot of villains that we didn’t get to meet in the mad house last time, and I can’t really think of one I didn’t enjoy. Mark Hamill’s last Joker performance is a hell of a way to go out here, and I was especially surprised by how much I enjoyed the Penguin, who I had never really been a fan of before. You have to stop all these villains from fulfilling their goals, while trying to figure what’s really going on in this city.

Unfortunately, the story is also where my only real problem with the game lies, and it’s in terms of focus and pacing.

You see, in Arkham Asylum, you always knew the Joker was the main bad guy and that was the confrontation that you were heading towards. In Arkham City, too many villains are gunning for that same role and it gets a little convoluted. By the time you know the one villain you have to stop, you find yourself in a pretty anti-climactic final boss fight.

Meanwhile, the pacing suffers because the game places Batman in a more open setting. In gameplay, it’s a lot of fun to navigate and explore, but it’s hard for there to be a lot of urgency for some of these main missions when I’m messing around with Riddler trophies for 5 hours beforehand. Combine this with the Catwoman parts, which can be kind of fun, but really just seem to come in at random and sometimes feel like they’re just there to artificially lengthen a game that really doesn’t need any help in that area.

With that said, the story does take some pretty interesting twists and turns, and actually has a really powerful ending that had me taken aback.

And, honestly, the main story is just a small part of what Arkham City has to offer.

There’s plenty of side missions to do, and some even directly involve villains that may not appear in the main story. These are all really interesting, and also quite time consuming.

Of course, the king of these is the Riddler challenges, which are more plentiful and better than ever. Along with the classic Riddles to solve, there are hundreds of Riddler trophies and most of them have an almost Zelda-like puzzle attached to them. Find enough of his secrets, and then the Riddler will allow you into one of his secret rooms to save a hostage. The Riddler has a more direct role this time around, and once again, his stuff steals the show. I spent at least twice as long on just the Riddler stuff than I did on the main missions, and I loved every head-scratching second of it.

From its design, you can see Arkham City is a game that goes for quantity, because the systems put in place by Arkham Asylum already got quality down for the most part. Rather than just improve a gameplay system that was already really damn good, Rocksteady shows just how versatile the Batman gameplay system really is. In Arkham Asylum, it showed how it can do both stealth and combat really well at the same time. Here, it’s even more ambitious, showing that this system can be used to navigate the new, more open world as well as the linear locations that will seem more familiar to the last game, and do both rather well.

A combination of gliding and the batclaw may not seem like the smoothest ride on paper, but after you get the hang of it, you’ll feel like you’re practically flying through Arkham City. There’s a fluidity to how you get around, and it definitely captures how Batman should feel in a City-type of setting.

Other than that, most of the systems remain mostly unchanged from the previous game, and it’s actually a good thing. You get a few new gadgets, and you’ll pick up a few new moves, but everything plays pretty much how you’ll remember it. Using stealth is still necessary and satisfying, and the combat system is still probably one of the best in games today. The real twist is just using what’s available to you in this larger environment, all of which translates over very naturally.

When it comes down to it, Batman: Arkham City is almost like the video game equivalent of gorging yourself on your favorite food. You stuff yourself until you literally can’t eat another bite, but you’re so full and satisfied. Maybe it was wrong to enjoy it that much, but you don’t care.

Batman: Arkham City does so much, and it does all of it so well. I can’t even tell you how much time I’ve spent with it so far at this point. I’ve done the main story, all the side missions, all the Riddler stuff minus a few physical challenges, and I’m still only 70% done with everything the game has to offer. I still have Riddler Challenge rooms available, and a New Game + mode with more difficult enemies, which I’ll be happily jumping into after I’m done writing this. It’s a game that offers some of the most fun you can have this year, and it offers it in bulk.

This game makes it clear that this is a series that isn’t just trying to do justice to Batman. I would go so far as to say these games are trying to represent Batman better than any other medium out there, and in my opinion, they succeed.

Batman: Arkham City definitely reaches the level of excellence set by its predecessor. The question now is, does it surpass it? I think a case could certainly be made.