Which game do you recommend over the other?: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor or Batman: Arkham Knight

Mordor, hands down.

Shadow of Mordor. It does some interesting stuff that differentiates itself from similar games, and while Arkham Knight isn't a bad game, it does have some problems.

I'd say it's pretty close. The nemesis system is interesting, but ultimately felt kind of empty to me, and so does the rest of the game. Arkham Knight is the worst rocksteady Batman game (not counting origins), but that doesn't mean it's bad. If the bat-mobile gameplay doesn't look cool to you, then I would avoid Arkham Knight. A good 1/4-1/3 of that game involves the bat-mobile.

I vote for "wait for shadow of war and see how that turns out".

Well, I enjoyed Shadow of Mordor almost solely for it's gameplay and the Nemesis system. Didn't hate the story, but I probably couldn't tell you a single thing of what happened in it. The landscapes were also pretty bland, though the second area improved on that at least a little bit.

Arkham Knight had a story which maybe wasn't the greatest, but at least I followed it with interest. I was also one of the people who didn't dislike the Batmobile, though I'll say that it could've been used a bit less. I also enjoyed the various boss fights in other Arkham games, so it was pretty disappointing how Knight barely had any in it and the few that were there...well, those weren't too hot.

I just recently replayed Arkham Knight a little on my new TV and it still looks pretty damn good. Shadow of Mordor isn't ugly, but it's pretty...brown in general. I did enjoy how visceral the combat got, so it's got that going over goody two-shoes Batman! The basic combat is, like you said, pretty similiar, but at least Knight offers up more opportunities for stealth play and Batman has those fancy gadgets he can use. I guess you can stealth a bit in Mordor too, but I always enjoyed just rushing in and cutting off orc heads way more.

I don't know if that helped at all...I guess it depends a little on how long it's been since you played the previous Arkham Games. Playing Mordor in between might be a refreshing change, even if the combat's familiar.

Arkham Knight is the better game. I got a 110 hours out of it and only 44 from Mordor.

Well Batman maybe ran at 15fps on my PC despite my rig exceeding specs

So Mordor.

Mordor. THe nemesis system is worth checking out, and the skills trees are fun to unlock and play with in the open world, whereas Batman is a less good version of a game you've already played twice before. I didn't dislike arkham knight, but mordor was more interesting, novel and fun.

Arkham Knight and it is not even close.

Arkham Knight is a vast improvement on Arkham City, which is a vast improvement on Arkham Asylum.

Whereas Shadow of Mordor is a slight improvement on Arkham Asylum

If a significant part of Batman didn't require the Batmobile, I would've chosen Arkham Knight. Since I played Mordor like a stealth game, the Nemesis system never worked for me.
But it didn't force me into a vehicle and didn't run like absolute garbage on my pc, so Mordor wins.

Arkham Knight is a repetitive slog. Mordor has the nemesis system to keep things fresh.

I dunno, I got tired of both pretty fast. Arkham Knight has neat cape physics, I guess.

I'd probably say Batman in most cases, if you have any love for the source material at least, though I didn't like those games much (but then I'm not that huge a Batman fan either).

Shadow of Mordor is most interesting as a showpiece for a technology that sadly hasn't been widely adopted since. As a game I didn't enjoy it, and it sure as hell isn't making any fans of the actual Tolkien setting happy.

Man the hate on for Arkham Knight is so strange to me. I may consider it the best game in that series honestly. Aslyum is more of the groundbreaker no doubt, but Arkham Knight is the most complete version of their vision.

People vastly overrate how cumbersome the Batmobile is. Those people simply didn't have the patience to get good at it, or it's not something they enjoy. Which is fine, but that isn't indicative of how great that game can feel if you know what your doing. You can go through stretches of 40+ minutes bounces between so many of the different dynamic activities without missing a beat, and the ability to quickly transition from gliding/flying to Batmobile to get to destinations or interact with things on the fly. There is just such flow to that game when it gets working, that really makes you actually one hundred percent feel like Batman. Which is something I think City and Aslyum were missing to a degree. In their best moments they accomplished that, but it was a lot harder for that to maintain from longer than for scenes or moments.

That said Mordor is a fine game, the Nemesis system works and is enjoyable. But the gameplay isn't even half as varied, I mean that in earnest. I enjoyed Killing Orcs, but whether your shooting them with arrows, stabbing them, or batman combatting them with a sword, it's still all just killing Orcs. In Knight in a 40 minute stretch I mentioned you can go from doing detective work solving a murder, to chasing down bank robbers, to blowing up other tanks with your tank, to hand to hand combat, to a more heavy narrative cutscene moment. The city is more dynamic, there is more going on, the tasks are varied enough and you have way better faster movement. Mordor has a fast travel system from Towers just to speed things up.

For open world games I've always found that to be a huge deal. There is nothing wrong with using slower movement to help build a sense of place, but once I've got the lay of the land you better let me have quicker and more interesting ways of traveling around than just walking/running. AC figured that out like right away with it's first few sequels. Mordor has nothing. You run faster, big woop. There was no kite, no magical force of something. You can ride Caragors I guess, which is fun but mostly for melee reasons. Mordors setting really didn't allow it to explore anything interesting from a gameplay experience other than to capture the killing orcs feel.

I just don't even see how it's a comparison honestly. As someone said above, Mordor is like a sequel to Arkham Aslyum. Hell it's even more like they put a LOTR skin over Aslyum. But even then you had more dynamic abilities in Aslyum than you do in Mordor. And the Nemesis system is a fun way to micro manage an open world set up, but it's not better than actual proper narrative. Which Batman had undisputed way more of an interesting whole story from side stories to main stuff in Knight than Mordor.

Mordor is a better game. The nemesis system goes a long way in making the world feel lived. The story makes very little sense if you put it together with the rest of LOTR, but it is, overall, a better game.

Batman Arkham Knight is the weakest of all the Batman games. Not only it runs like crap (even after several patches, it is far from smooth), but the story and writing are pretty weak and you are forced into driving a tank for large portions of the game (you didn't like the Batmobile? Too bad: here is some vehicle stealth, some vehicle platforming, some vehicle combat, some vehicle detectiving, some vehicle bosses and some vehicle puzzles, and I hope you like those because they are all part of the main quest). Besides, if you played City or Origin, you already played better versions of the Arkham games.

Let me put it another way. Even when I completed all sidequests in Knight and only played about 2/3 of Mordor, I still consider the latter a much better game.

Shadow of Mordor, absolutely.

Batman: Arkham Knight is mediocre and the worst of the four main Arkham games. Notice that I didn't say "bad," though. It wasn't bad... except on the PC, where it was so bad that they had to very publicly remove it from the Steam store for half a year to fix its endless mountain of glitches and bugs. Not the best day for Dave Lang and Iron Galaxy, and it still doesn't run too great unless you can brute force your way through the needed specs.

Rather, Arkham Knight was a plodding, lamentable case of open world-itis. It had lots of writing, but none of it very good (and a decent chunk of it downright lame). Lots of side content, but almost all of it consisting of egregious fluff and padding in the grand "open world" fashion of destroy XX number of checkpoints, do XX number of this activity, go do XX number of that, etc.. A much bigger world, with much less attention to detail given to it than the hub worlds of Origin and Asylum received (and yeah, I said hub. Those games weren't open world. They had hub worlds that you traversed going from one linear story dungeon to another linear story dungeon, and they worked great). A nice enough Batmobile, but one that was wedged into every facet of the game in an exacerbating, ridiculous way. Batmobile riddle race challenges, Batmobile tank battle sequences against innumerous armies of identical robot drones, Batmobile tank stealth sequences because "why not?", Batmobile platforming sequences, Batmobile detective sequences, and so on. Bigger is not always better. Arkham Asylum and Origins were smaller games, but they were also more tight, cohesive experiences that didn't rely on virtual checklists for the majority of their content. I wish that Arkham Knight had been more in line with its predecessors rather than offering up an anemic Grand Theft Auto version of the Arkham-verse. Oh well.

Meanwhile, Shadow of Mordor is an innovative tour de force. It takes the movement from Assassin's Creed, the combat from the Batman Arkham games, and melds them with its own Nemesis system that creates dynamic, unique orc chieftains for you to fight. The Nemesis system makes every game experience different for each player while still providing intriguing, interesting foes for you to fight (how they avoided a No Man's Sky litany of same-same, bland orcs is beyond me). It's incredibly well done and I wish more open world games would try to replicate the Nemesis system in their own franchises. Hasn't happened... yet. *shrug*

Arkham Knight is the best and the worst of the series, but it's still Arkham which is great. Shadow of Mordor is an AC clone with an interesting emergent gameplay system tagged on top of it. If you're just gonna play through the campaigns Arkham is easily the better one, but if you want something you can play around with for a while then you might be better off with Mordor.

Though Batman is a more memorable character than Generic Heroface Magoo, I did have some pretty dumb and fun Benny Hill-esque Assassins Creed shenanigans in Mordor.

Orcs are dumb. Go figure.

Mordor is a really good game. Arkham Knight has the Batmobile, and is therefore disqualified.

Unless you really like Tolkien, the answer is Batman.

Haven't played either, but I like Batman and dislike anything Tolkien based that refuses to acknowledge the existence of Tom Bombadil.

So Arkham Knight is way more interesting to me.

A) It depends on the platform. Because Arkham Knight still works unpredictably on PC, despite being two years post-release.

B) You can't REALLY go wrong with either game. But they are very similar. The extreme dichotomizing in this thread's responses borders on comedy.

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I think the big question mark here is whether you've played and/or grown tired of the "Batman" tropes and formula. Have you played Arkham Asylum and Arkham City? What is your interest in playing another game of that ilk?

If it weren't for Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system, I would say Arkham Knight has more bang for your buck. On a fundamental level, Arkham just offers more to do. The open world is better, the combat is tighter, and it's still an enormous amount of fun to soar in the sky above a truly beautiful, rain-slick Gotham. It is the quintessential Batman simulator, full stop.

But the Nemesis system is so unique that you'd be crazy to ignore it. To this day I'm shocked more games haven't stolen that system outright, because it leads to some of the most personal and memorable moments you'll ever experience in a video game. In all fairness, you won't see the true depth of that system until just past the game's halfway mark (after you receive a specific ability). But once you get there, the game shines.

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Ultimately, this is the comparison: One competent game with an extraordinary feature vs. One very good, if unsurprising, game with a handful of questionable decisions.

No matter what, you're probably going to get a game you'll like. So don't fret too much. And don't listen to someone who is going far out of their way to throw either game under the bus.

Arkham Knight. It's the best in the series and a more complete piece than Mordor. Mordor is an experiment for a great game.

I love me some Arkham games, and the Arkham Knight story was fun, but personally I'd recommend the something new and different over an 8/10 sequel without much new to offer (especially much new that was actually fun, looking at you, Batmobile.)

Hm. Gotta go with Arkham Knight. Got a whole lot more outta that than Mordor, for as fun as the Nemesis system was to mess around with.

Knight had a great story + sidestories, tighter gameplay, more varied encounters, a way more interesting world, occasionally had you play other chaacters, and I happened to really enjoy all the Batmobile stuff. Probably the best Arkham game to be honest.

Specifying the platform is important for these games in particular. I don't think they ever fixed Arkham Knight for PC, so it's still unplayable for a lot of users. Shadow of Mordor is technically available for both PS3 and XBox 360, but it's completely broken on those consoles and doesn't even include the Nemesis system.

I love both games but I'm going to say Arkham Knight. It's the best Arkham game by a mile, in my opinion. I actually just decided tonight to finally play new game plus, 2 years after getting 100% and not playing it again.

I prefer Batman Arkham Knight runs fine on my 970gtx Shadow is fun but I just don't like the characters or lore I have no interest in the sequel I wish Monolith would just make a new gritty FPS.

Mordor - no question

Batman: Arkham Asylum - fantastic. Arkham City and Knight - meh.

Arkham knight is incredible value. Lots of content, and I really enjoyed it. I think the batmobile tank was used a bit too much, but it has good gameplay and excellent graphics.

Shadow of mordor is shell of what the arkhamgames are

Arkham Knight was a terrible game. Bummed me out to see Rocksteady move away from everything that made AA amazing. Mordor is a good game despite being in the LOTR universe and at least has an interesting gameplay system.

What system are you intending to play on?

That reminds me, did Arkham Knight ever get optimised on PC or does it still run like garbage?

Play them both.

@dgtlty: PS4. They've been in my backlog for a minute...

Finally played Batman: AC earlier in the year and was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. Ended up liking it more than AA but I feel like I have to form an opinion on ME: SoM seeing the spectrum of feelings on that game in a recent thread.

Arkham Knight by far. All the Batmobile hate is a meme at this point. It's used a little too much for tank combat but there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

My vote goes to Arkham Knight.

Shadow of Mordor was fun. They do Batman combat and Assassin's Creed climbing in their own way. It's quick and feels good to massacure orcs.

However, I never really felt invested in the nemisis system. While I like Lord of the Rings, the setting and story only lives in small part of that world and turns it into a macho power fantasy. It's a fun power fantasy, but not very Tolkien.

Arkham Knight is more of the same, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I love the worlds Rocksteady creates. They are super satisfying to explore, especially if you are a Batman fan. Tank combat is fun, but overused. I got sick of it by the end of the game. Ultimately Batman has a greater variety of things to do in a more interesting world and that's why I like it more.

Batman Arkham knight no question for me. Mordor felt stale and clunky, although with a cool new system. (I gotta say though, it got pretty boring after a while. I never felt that personal connection so many people talked about.) Batman felt slick, stylish, and the combat is just as good as it's always been. Movement is a big problem for me in Mordor. I couldn't stand how assassin's creed it was: I kept flailing around. In Batman I felt empowered with the verticality of movement. Imagine smooth butter and cold butter. That's the difference I personally found between the two. (Batman the former and Mordor the latter.) The batmobile is no where near as bad as the internet would have you believe and while the narrative was mixed for people I felt the overall package was great.

I would recommend playing both though. I may not like Mordor that much, but a ton of people would disagree with me, so there must be something there.

Edit: I'm pleasantly surprised to see how many people are for Arkham Knight. And I mean that in a general sense, not as a juxtaposition to Mordor.

Shadow of Mordor, easily. I have a lot of problems with Arkham Knight. I may even go so far as to call it a bad game, and this is coming from someone who loved the Arkham series of games up to that point. The batmobile is fine. Not great, not even really fun. Just fine. I see people saying Knight is the best of the Arkham Batman games, and wow holy shit, I'd love to see the case for that.

Arkham Knight.

The only reason I would recommend Mordor is that it is supported on Linux. I personally found the game very dull and repetitive. After couple of hours I felt I had enough already and just forcefully played it trough. The Nemesis system could have been interesting if I would have never played Crusader Kings 2.

Arkham Knight big time. Mordor to me was kind of middling. Pretty standard, as just an Assassin's Creed/Arkham mix, so it plays solidly, but it's kind of boring in many ways. The nemesis system was not interesting or special to me, just an artificial way of lengthening play time if you wanted it. I played it for thirty to forty hours perhaps just seeing if I could 'get it' as I did just about everything, minus 'everything' with the nemesis system. The atmosphere, story, and characters were bland. Arkham Knight is a great game; arguably my favorite Arkham game which came as a surprise. It's hard to beat how I originally felt about Asylum, but Knight is probably the better game. It has a great story that concludes the Joker side of it all, though the lack of credits you don't get due to side missions was disappointing, and the reveal of Arkham Knight was predictable and underwhelming. The gameplay was still great Batman with some new additions, and I didn't mind the Batmobile sections; it was kind of cool. Perhaps the feeling of 'ah man, not the Batmobile again' came across my mind (I actually don't remember, I just knew there was quite a bit of it), but I still enjoyed those sections.

The city was really well done, which is the biggest surprise coming off of City and again Origins, and the visuals back it up phenomenally (which I might add is even more impressive considering it was still using UE3). The soundtrack is great and I also enjoyed the side missions (even though they hold the ending back). The only thing awkward about Arkham Knight is that it came out in a time when people seemed to be done with the Arkham games, so the lack of enthusiasm from others was a shame. It also probably, partially had to do with the PC version. I was worried it wouldn't be that good since I thought Arkham City was really disappointing. I actually liked Origins more, even though that had a bit duller looking of an open world from what I remember due to its mostly one color snow setting (but again, it didn't bother me as much as everything that surrounded it was better in my opinion). It did have Christmas lights!

That brings me to say, going off topic here, Origins was actually a really good game in my opinion. The story was maybe the best, contending with Knight, the music was really good. And I enjoyed the bosses and more linear parts of the game a lot. The biggest thing I disliked if my memory serves me right is that the Alfred story was a bit hokey. People said they got glitches, but I honestly didn't see one throughout my two playthroughs. Eh... That's one thing I didn't do with Knight though, play through it again on New Game Plus. I got to the section where you're on the blimps, but that was after much on and off time with the game. I always just reverted back to my first save file and explored the open world more. I liked Arkham Knight enough that I even bought all the DLC for it. But yeah, Arkham Knight by far for me. It's just a shame that there was a lack of enthusiasm for it when I thought it did a good job finishing up Rocksteady's Arkham games for the most part.

In terms of mechanics and mission design they are both middling, but Arkham Knight is a lot more mechanically expansive what with the Batmobile, the grappling hook, the gliding, all of the gadgets etc. Shadow of Mordor does have the Nemesis system which is a cool idea, but it actually adds very little of value to the game.

What Arkham Knight has that Shadow of Mordor definitely doesn't, though, is one of the best audiovisual experiences in video games. Everything in the game looks and feels amazing. The city is gorgeous, sidequests are beautifully presented and integrated into the flow of open world roaming in a way that deserves to be taught in game design classes, the Batmobile feels like an absolute beast that shatters everything in its way, and the animation and sound work makes the fights feels satisfying despite the fact that the combat system is every bit as deficient as it has always been (including when it has been copied by other developers in games like Shadow of Mordor). Even something as stupid and ridiculous as the "fear multi-takedown" mechanic that lets you stealth takedown up to five guys in one go is okay with me when it's presented as beautifully as it is.

It's a much better game than Shadow of Mordor.

If you've ever played AA or AC you've played the best Batman games already. AK was a huge letdown after those, and Origins, in a lot of ways. The story was weak and predictable, the bat-mobile got tiring and was shoe horned into too many scenarios, car combat was too frequent and too boring. The side missions are incredibly dull and do nothing for the characters they're based on - for example, Manbat is literally just glide chasing him around until you can tackle him in the sky a few times, repeated over and over. Firefly is just a series of chasing him while in the bat-mobile until he runs out fuel and you can tackle him (see a pattern here?). None of them do anything interesting or have anything worthwhile.

Compare that with the Nemesis system in SoM and you've got random NPCs who'll you'll end up having more of a repertoire with than any of the villains in AK. That by itself brings enough to the table for me to recommend it over what felt like one Batman game too many that Rocksteady had already checked out of.

Arkham Knight is a bit damp squib (hope you like tank battles), and also technical nightmare on PC, but personally I think that series has been in decline since the sublime Arkham Asylum (as a caveat to that statement, I don't think Rocksteady could have done much better than go bigger as the series continued, but the constriction of the environment in AA is what makes it feel so bespoke and special.)

Shadow of Mordor is a fantastic character action game that borrows elements of Batman (combat) and fuses it with something altogether unique in the form of the Nemesis system.

I will say that although I like the trappings of LOTR movies, and the aesthetic in general, the story is sort of paper thin, and darn right blasphemous depending on how puritanical you are about the source literature.

Seeing the great face animations of terrified orks, and chopping their heads off is a lot more fun that the Batmobile. The way they worked the joker in was cool though.

Both are pretty fantastic in their own ways. Arkham Knight has more variety, even if the car stuff is a little tedious and man some of those final car-based boss fights are a pain in the ass. Mordor has less going for it and is a thinner experience in a lot of ways. But, I feel the quality is higher.

I say Mordor. But, both are dirt cheap nowadays. So, both?

Mordor, because its something a little different. If you are a big Batman though though, there is plenty in Knight for you. Really, I would recommend playing both if you in any way a fan of the open world formula. Sure both get pretty repetitive, but both are a pretty damn fun time if you can suspend your brain for a little bit and just get soaked into a world.

@hippie_genocide: I mean the case is pretty simple. I feel like the people who had serious issues with the Batmobile either really really disliked that control scheme, more than most people. Or alternatively weren't playing in a way that helped that game flow properly. I'm not actually trying to say hey man you played it wrong. But running from story mission to story mission or marking lots of stuff on your map and checklisting it is not the way to play Arkham Knight imo. You can, but once you've gotten good at using a mixture of both the Batmobile and the Gliding/Flying to get around the city, and just starting reacting to the various events all around as they come at you. You suddenly realize that you don't have to use the batmobile in 8 missions in a row or some bullshit, and can just you know dynamically go from event to event moment to moment and mix in the batmobile stuff with it. It allows you to finally leverage the vehicle and you know, feel like actual Batman?

Like the thing I don't really get about people who will claim Arkaham Aslyum is the best of the franchise, is that sure it may be the best playing. It might be very well designed to allow you to go all around that environment. But the strength of Rockstready were games that made you feel more and more like Batman. Batman has a car, simple. AA doesn't. You don't use it. In Knight they not only gave you the use of it, but found a way to make it not so cumbersome imo. The ability to quick fly out of that thing and just hit a button anywhere on a street even if it's on the other side of the map and it just comes to you.... simply makes that thing work imo.

@devise22: If transportation was it's main purpose, I would be right there with you. But how often do you really see Batman doing combat/stealth/puzzle/"riddle" solving with his tank? They created something neat and then felt compelled to force it into a lot of sections in that game. Asylum works because it's a tight experience that doesn't require you to play "dynamically" to alleviate the burden of one of it's core features. The side-content in Knight should enrich the experience, rather than be a requirement for enjoyment.

Mordor has *an* interesting system that never feels fully utilized because the game is too easy. How can I develop a rivalry with or really care about these Orc Chieftains if I kill them the first time I see them? Plus, while you can technically choose between stealth or combat, there's no reason to not just mow through guys. Aaaaand it looks brown / green-brown for the whole game. It's a good game and all competently made, but it got real boring real quick for me. After I screwed around and assigned twenty loyal orcs as one Warchief's (was that the term?) bodyguards to assassinate him, I called it a day.

(I miss Monolith...)

Arkham Knight, on the other hand, is the worst the Batman games have ever been (it's a toss up between it and Origins, which I actually liked more than most people it seems). That being said, the worst Batman game is still more interesting to me than an AC also-ran. It looks pretty as hell, the gameplay (besides the Batmobile) is fun throughout, and the story, while not great, has some cool moments and kept me interested. The main, villain-based sidequests were surprisingly compelling too, not counting the Riddler and all that Ubisoft map barf.

So yeah, neither are great and it comes down to personal preferences. My preferences just happen to be Batman.