Since its release mid-October this year, Batman: Arkham City has been variously described as 'one of the most important games made for this generation' and 'the best superhero game ever made'. Pretty good eh? Even more impressive is that the last game to be described like this was none other than its predecessor, Arkham Asylum. Added to Christopher Nolan's success with the movie franchise, it's starting to seem like all you've got to do to make vast amounts of cash these days is put Batman somewhere in the title of whatever you're trying to sell. There's probably hard work and dedication and talent and all that kind of stuff involved as well, but the word BATMAN seems by far the most important. Yep. Holy Moly Batman. See? Gizzus your money.

Of course, being the leading and thoroughly professional media publication that we are, we've had to play the game before we can give you our own, completely objective, opinion. So here it is...

It's essentially like playing the videogame of Saving Private Ryan but with more awesome costumes and more realistic deaths. Basically, if you liked Arkham Asylum, you'll probably cum in your pants with this one - Asylum felt like a big game but this feels like you have an entire planet to explore. An entire planet.

So yes, we agree that it's amazing. So much so, in fact that we decided to go and speak to some of the guys (including Sefton Hill, the man in charge of the whole operation) at London's Rocksteady game studios, the people behind Arkham City, to see exactly what was going on when they made it. That's right, investigative journalism. Kind of. Oh, and it turns out it wasn't just the word 'Batman' that made it a great game. Supposedly.

Paul Crocker, Lead Narrative Designer, Rocksteady Studios

Holy Moly: What was your role in making Arkham City?
Paul Crocker: I do all the story elements in the game, I work on the script, work on what characters look like with our artists, and work out who's going to be in the game. I also speak to DC and Warner Brothers about the Batman title itself.

With a character as well known and with history as long and rich as Batman, how do you get the tone of the game right?
From our point of view we're very different to the Christopher Nolan films. Obviously there are similarities, we've still got a very dark feel, but we'll take it more in a comic book direction. This includes the outlandish characters that make Batman what it is, but we then try and take those outlandish characters and put a realistic spin on them, so it's sort of halfway between the full-on comic version and the more realistic movie approach.

How surprised were you at the success of Arkham Asylum?
You never know whether a game is going to be a success right up to the point people walk into the shop and buy it, although we're quietly confident with Arkham City. We love making Batman games, so getting a second chance, building on everything we did on the first game was great. Our goal was to take everything good about the first game and make it better. Arkham Asylum was a very claustrophobic experience, but we couldn't have done a game like Arkham City four years ago. It took making Arkham Asylum for us to be able to blow the roof off the Asylum and take Batman into a city street environment.

Do you need to have played Arkham Asylum to play Arkham City?
From the story point of view their are connections. The now mayor of Gotham City used to run the Asylum, but to be honest we explain that throughout the game anyway. All you need to know is that there's a super-cool guy called Batman and he's going to kick and punch pretty much everything.

How difficult was it to please the die-hard fans?
The great thing about Batman is that the fanboy aspect works across a lot of different groups. You can be aware of who Batman is and like Batman, but never have watched an episode of an animated series or read a comic, and still know him from the movies. Or you could be the biggest comic nerd and not like the movies because they didn't do it right but still find something that we've put in our game. We endeavor to take this kind of detached look at the Batman universe and try and please everyone. You can play it as a game, not paying attention to the story and just go around punching people in the face, in which case it doesn't really matter what the cut-scenes are telling you. Or you might be aware of Batman beforehand, and take a little bit more time to talk to people, listen to the plot and maybe explore. Or maybe you're a hardcore Batman fan who just wants to find out everything about the universe, collecting every single trophy. It's up to you.

All this depth must have made the whole process fairly similar to creating a film script
The script for Arkham Asylum was around five or six thousand lines of dialogue long (a standard 90 minute film may have around 1000), Arkham City is almost 15. It's that kind of step up.

How was it working with Mark Hamill as the joker?
Well, as well as our games he did the Joker in the cartoons, and it's a role he's becoming more famous for now, even though he's done it for years. It kind of took the success of the first game to bring that back into the public light. Plus, getting to hang out with Luke Skywalker is brilliant, and his particular take on Joker is one that we actually tailored the Joker in our games around.

Batman vs Superman ever going to happen?
I have no idea. I guess for us, we've only just finished this, so we really have got no idea what we're doing next.

Sefton Hill, Game Director at Rocksteady Studios

Holy Moly: How did you start with Batman?
Sefton Hill: For us, we were really excited to take Batman into his spiritual home after finishing Arkham Asylum, we wanted to take Batman out of the confines of the asylum and into Gotham City, where he belongs. At that point we knew it would be a technical challenge, but we thought 'if we're going to do this properly we've got to give Batman freedom to move inside this huge district of Gotham City'. That is where we started. In fact, that 's normally where we start with all our games, coming up with ideas about about what makes us passionate, what makes us excited.

Arkham City has a pretty huge ensemble cast doesn't it?
We ended up with a lot of characters, in fact we were pretty much like kids in a sweet shop, getting to pick from characters like Two-Face, The Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman and Poison Ivy. It's fantastic.

And Mr Freeze? Did you feel like you'd be the one to finally get him right?
We just felt that Freeze was a really interesting character. We never felt that he was a bad guy. In the animated series he was a nice guy, not really evil. There was obviously a lot of genuine bad guys, but we always saw Freeze as quite a sympathetic character. His goal was never really to do wicked or evil things, but if something stands in the way of him curing his wife, then its understandable that he does what he does. It's quite nice to have these characters like Penguin, Joker and Two-Face, characters who are fundamentally psychologically deranged, and then have Freeze, who's totally different to that.

How do you cater for those who want story and involvement and those who just want to smash stuff up?
We definitely tried to make a multi-tiered game, gamers who are more into the visceral side of the fun can play happily, but then there are also levels underneath that where you can explore the character motivations. Batman is defined by how he interacts with his supervillain nemeses, ans so we made sure put that in there as well. On the other hand, if you do just want to go and beat people up, there's always the option

How was it to work with DC, the people who created an icon like Batman?
You hear a lot of horror stories from people who work with licences and how their relationship is with the license owner. But for us, we're fortunate because we've had Arkham Asylum now and there's a lot of confidence from Warner and DC on what Rocksteady can do. If anything we feel that DC really add to it because they know the characters well, when we present ideas they don't come back and say you can't do that and you can't do this, it's more about. have you thought about this, or what if this character did this at this point? I find that they add to it, they don't force the stuff, it's just positive suggestions on what we can do.

Thoughts on the next one?
Parts of our philosophy in terms of development is to make the best game we can possibly make at that time, there's no holding ideas back for the next one. You never know what's going to come next year, you never know what's around the corner, maybe other developers can do it, but I'm just not smart enough to do that. I just think lets do the best possible thing we can do, and then the next game, that's tomorrows problem. We'll figure that out tomorrow.

What about tackling Superman next?
I feel like where we are with the Arkhamverse as we call it, Batman's kind of in charge of making sure Gotham doesn't fall apart, and that works, so we're not sure how Superman would fit into that.

Any secrets in Asylum that haven't yet been found?
There's some things in there that are referenced in Arkham City, that may not have yet been discovered. That's all we're saying.