Arkham City trailer shows Batman facing off against a new enemy

Batman: Arkham City – the follow-up to the popular 2009 video game Arkham Asylum – got a new teaser trailer today, almost a year in advance of its official release date. In the trailer, what appears to be a gaggle of special-operations soldiers sneak through a rain-soaked city in search of Batman. But Batman is one step ahead of his would-be attackers, and across a series of beautifully-realized frames, he handily dispatches the whole team.

It looks great. So great that gamers may forget that Arkham City won't hit store shelves until the third quarter of 2011, months and months away. In the meantime, Warner Brothers, which publishes the game, has been busy registering a slew of related URLs – including ArkhamCity.com, BatmanArkhamCity.com, CityOfArkham.com, and CloseArkhamCity.com – and doing its best to gin up excitement in advance of next year's launch.

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In April, Kevin Conroy – the voice of Batman in Arkham Asylum – told attendees at a Chicago comic books convention that Arkham City will feature the famous villain Two-Face. Conroy also said that the game will have a similar tone to the cartoon "Batman Beyond: The Return of the Joker." "It's really, really dark," Conroy said, according to CBR.com. "It involves a lot of the villains and it goes to that area [as Return of the Joker] – it's that dark."

Unlike Arkham Asylum – which was strictly a single-player affair – Arkham City is rumored to include multiplayer functionality. No details from Rocksteady have been forthcoming, although it's reasonable to assume the game might ship with an online co-op mode, where one player could control Batman, and a second player could control a popular DC character such as Catwoman.

Click here to see the trailer.