The closest games to Batman Arkham Asylum are Batman: Arkham City, Marvel's Spider-Man and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. Below, 9 picks with the reason for each — what carries over from Batman Arkham Asylum, and what does not.
Arkham Asylum is a metroidvania in a cape. One building that opens up as you get gadgets, freeflow combat that reads like choreography, and predator rooms where you are the thing being feared. Almost every licensed action game since has copied the combat and missed why the building mattered.
Batman Arkham Asylum released on the Xbox 360. The list below is not restricted to that console — a recommendation is only useful if you can actually play it, so it spans generations and platforms.
The sequel, opened into a district, and the best of the four.
The same combat lineage with the best traversal ever put in a city.
Freeflow combat plus a nemesis system nothing else has matched.
If the one-building-that-opens-up structure was the real appeal.
Gadget-gated traversal with a combat system that asks more.
The best non-Batman freeflow combat, in Hong Kong.
For the predator rooms — patience, observation, and a plan.
A building that is a character, and powers to tear it apart with.
Stealth where being seen is a choice you made, not a failure.
Several of these have their own page here: games like Batman: Arkham City, games like Marvel's Spider-Man.
Batman: Arkham City. The sequel, opened into a district, and the best of the four.
Batman: Arkham City, Marvel's Spider-Man and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor are the closest. The full list of Batman Arkham Asylum similar games is on this page — 9 of them, each with the reason it is here rather than a genre tag that happens to match.
Yes — Batman: Arkham City is catalogued on the Xbox 360 here. The Xbox 360 list further down has more from that library.
Because the thing you liked about Batman Arkham Asylum is not a property of the hardware. Restricting the list to one console would drop most of the good answers, so the picks above span platforms and eras. If you specifically want more from that library, the Xbox 360 list further down is the place to start.
By hand, one game at a time, on what the source game actually does — its pacing, its movement, its difficulty, its tone. Genre tags alone put Batman Arkham Asylum next to games that feel nothing like it, so they are not the basis for this list. Each pick carries the reason it is here so you can judge it yourself.
No. The whole list is on this page, free, with no sign-in and no email. We earn a small affiliate commission if you buy through a retailer link, which is what pays for the site.
If you already know what kind of answer you want, these are the same list cut by genre — and each one says what it leaves out as well as what it includes:
More from the Xbox 360 library, each with its own recommendations page: