I’ve never been a comic book guy. As I kept telling people last week while New York Comic Con was in town: I’m not anti-comics; I just never got into them.

But I do know a stupendous game when I play one, and that is “Batman: Arkham City,” released this week by Warner Bros. for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. In its ambition, scope and sheer love for its decades of lore, “Arkham City” is the finest comic book video game ever to slip into spandex.

That’s actually not much of a surprise. “Arkham City’s” predecessor, “Batman: Arkham Asylum” (2009), was the first comics game to match top original video game franchises in its professional design and thoughtful play systems. But this new version goes far beyond its ancestor. Even as I lauded “Arkham Asylum” two years ago, I noted that it “may not provide the definitive superhero experience.”

“Arkham City” most certainly does. In the earlier game I felt I was playing a well-realized Batman character as he traversed an interesting, if fairly linear series of missions and challenges. In “Arkham City” I simply felt like Batman. “Arkham City” now joins the likes of the “Grand Theft Auto” and “Assassin’s Creed” series among the pantheon of great single-player open-world games.

In developing “Arkham City,” Rocksteady Studios in London systematically attacked every aspect of the previous game that was holding it back from greatness and made those solutions into strengths. For instance, two years ago I said of “Arkham Asylum,” “The entire game takes place on the island, so there is no soaring around the heights of Gotham itself.” The game was “confined and structured, even claustrophobic.”

Now, soaring around the spires and roofs and power lines of an urban expanse populated by freaks, lunatics, maniacs and, of course, supervillains is exactly what “Arkham City” is all about. As in a “Grand Theft Auto” or “Assassin’s Creed” game there is a strong main story line, but you are free to take off and explore. The game offers dozens of optional side quests, calls to action and chances to foil evil. After more than 25 hours I am still far from finding all “Arkham City’s” secrets.

You come to inhabit Batman and make him your own because you, the player, are deciding whether stopping the Joker’s master plan is more or less important than, say, stopping a gang fight or a robbery at this exact moment. In the main story Quincy Sharp, the former head man at Arkham Asylum, has become mayor of Gotham and has turned a swath of the city’s slum and industrial zones into a walled superprison where the inmates hold sway. Batman is trying to keep a lid on things as various bad guys, including the Penguin, Two-Face, the Riddler and the Joker, vie for supremacy.

Visually, “Arkham City” conveys a delightfully dark sense of madcap decay. Basic combat is just that, basic, meaning you can essentially tap the attack and counterattack buttons most of the time against normal thugs. Later you will have to master what can become a daunting array of Batgadgets and special combat moves.

As in any great open-world game, however, the real star is not the hero or the foe but the city itself. There always seems to be another warehouse or wharf to explore and another cabal of crazies waiting for you.

As a strength of the game the richness and depth of “Arkham City’s” virtual landscape may also explain what was always missing for me in traditional comic books. I always saw the basic conceit of comics as the idea that a normal person in our everyday world could one day take on superpowers. He or she discovers that a select few others can also leap tall buildings with a single bound (or whatever) and that not all of them are good guys. Conflict ensues.

I realize now that what left me uninterested was that the setting itself was not fantastic. “The Lord of the Rings” took me to a fantasy realm in which elves and orcs were normal. “Star Wars” took me to a faraway galaxy where laser guns and spaceships were common. But comics left me right here in present-day mundanity. Sure, the heroes and villains seemed different, but they were set on everyday street corners in everyday neighborhoods.

Fantasizing about being a superhero or a villain in my own town was never as interesting as the chance to explore an entirely different world that, at least superficially, had little to do with reality. To me that sense of discovering and mastering a coherent new universe has always been the most captivating element of video games.

Most comic book films still seem to hew to the pen-and-ink tradition of setting the superhero against the backdrop of a “normal” place. In making “Arkham City,” however, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. realized that such an approach would not gird a great game. The environment itself had to pique players and fuel their curiosity.