Batman: Arkham Asylum was one of the first good Batman games made... ever? The characters, the voice acting, and the set pieces all came together to let us know how it would feel to become the world's greatest detective. It was also a small world—you were fighting through a single facility in Asylum. In Arkham City, that facility has been expanded to be an entire city. In fact, the world is five times the size of Arkham Asylum.

The idea was to make Batman feel small. During the demo, we saw the caped crusader crouched at the top of a building, looking down over the streets and buildings of Arkham City. You still feel powerful, but it's the power of a mountain climber looking up at Everest. You may have the conditioning and tools needed to get the job done, but it's not going to be easy, and it's going to hurt like hell.

Taking the Batman for a spin

Getting around the city was a joy once I learned how to use the grappling hook to gain momentum and glide from place to place. You can tuck forward into a dive to gain speed, and then grapple to a faraway location to get more speed and height. In this way you can fly nearly anywhere you can see very quickly. You can also attach yourself to passing helicopters if you'd like a lazier approach.

Batman feels agile, and his movements match the massive city around him. It takes a little bit of practice and muscle memory to master the controls, but once you get them down, it's very freeing.

You can dial into the frequencies of the radios and phones the criminals use to communicate, and you can listen to nearby thugs talking as you fly about. You can drop down and break up a brawl, or simply glide above it to your next destination. I dropped down once or twice and discovered that the free-flowing combat feels just as good as it did in the first game, with a series of new moves. It's fun to grab an enemy with the grappling hook, pull him towards you, and then clothesline him out of the air. The fighting is appropriately brutal and, while Batman never kills anyone, he certainly breaks bones and does what looks like permanent damage.

The Bat, The Cat

At one point we're shown a few cats at the top of a building, and the game asked if we'd like to take a break. By answering in the affirmative, you unlock Catwoman, a playable character with her own single-player story that takes place at the same time as Batman's campaign. Instead of trying to stop the chaos, she's trying to take advantage of it to steal everything she can. In fact, instead of a Detective Mode, she has a "Thief Mode" to help you find things worth taking. In the short demo we were shown, it was mentioned that she has an uneasy alliance with Poison Ivy.

Catwoman uses her whip and extensive gymnastic skills to move around the city much like Batman, but using different animations. It looks a little like Spider-Man as she whips around from building to building. Her movements are slow, deliberate, and very sexy. This was a pleasant surprise during the demo, and when I was able to play as Catwoman I enjoyed the more vicious, slashing combat over Batman's punches and bludgeoning.

The Catwoman missions look and play great, and this should help to break up the main story and give you something else to do in the game.

There will be other surprises

Warner Bros. will of course dribble out information about other characters and reveals to keep the game in the headlines, but who cares? Everything I needed to know about the game I learned in my hands-on. The larger setting works brilliantly and expands the scope of what Batman is capable of in the game. The combat is still wonderful, and the addition of the playable Catwoman works very well. I was already excited about the game, and this just confirmed what I already knew: this is going to be a great time.

Batman: Arkham City is coming to the PS3, 360, and PC on October 18.