Ok, upon making this thread I was eager to get Days of Ruin, since it was the latest game. After reading the comments I am almost convinced to get Dual Strike but then again Ursus Horribilis and cactus point out that the gameplay is more balanced in Days of Ruin. So now the two games are almost even. I'm slighty in favor of Dual Strike right now.

If you intend to play multi-player (whether hot seat, local multi-card or online), balance is something you want, for that reason I'd go with DoR first.

Get Dual Strike, best game on the DS, brillant gameplay. I'd skip Days of Ruin, it changes everything that made the series fun, horrible COs, the world sucks, the new units aren't interesting.

Make sure you get Dual Strike, then you may wanna try DoR, but Dual Strike is a must

I found DS to be the more entertaining of the two

It is not even a dilenma at all. They are not in the same category. Dual Strike is about a million times better.

Does that mean days of ruin drops the dual CO's and Dual screen battles? because as much as I love Dual Strike, I'd love it a lot more if that was cut out. Hell, I'd like the game a lot more if CO's were cut out all together.

If Days of Ruin brings the series to a more streamlined, balanced combat... I may really have to pick it up.

This is quite entertaining, someone asks for advice on making a decision and the responses contain so little on what makes one better than the other. "a million times better"? Priceless.

According to Metacritic DS has a 4% advantage, which is a difference of 1/25. Days of Ruin gets the biggest criticism because it tries to move the story into a more serious territory and the dialogs aren't up to par. Dual Strike had similarly cheesy dialog. If you didn't cringe reading Jake's lines, you should turn off MTV and try reading a book. But not many people cared because the story is so silly to begin with.

Dual Strike was an attempt to amplify the series to justify using dual screens. At any given time you can have 6 CO's, each with half a dozen power-ups and two CO powers and combinations for Tag powers and an additional battlefield and on and on. If this is an indication of greatness, "Batman and Robin" was the best movie in the series by far. It had the most heroes and villains. All of this clutter adds little to your strategy when you are facing "uber" powered bombs and a beast like the pipe-cannon.

Days of Ruin takes out the pizazz, the special effects and the clutter. It goes back to the roots of the series, think "Batman Begins". :) It adds units which add strategy to the game. It forces you to think twice before moving even the smallest unit on the battlefield, because that may be the difference between victory or defeat. Whereas on Dual Strike, you may play like an idiot for half a mission, make mistake after mistake and then release two tag powers in succession and still come out victorious. Don't get me wrong, this is still fun, but not satisfying.

If you are going to put in your two cents, please do little more than claiming "It is not even a dilenma [sic] at all" and provide some reasons.

Yep, that's exactly what you get. CO's still exist, but their powers are more subtle.

If you can tolerate the horrible setting and crappy characters, you may like it, since basically all CO's are equal and useless. The good thing about AW was picking a CO that suited your playstyle, and CO powers were a part of that. Stripping all that makes it just a matter of picking and moving units, and it takes away a huge part of the game in my opinion

In Days of Ruin, matches are decided by pure skill and strategy. Unit placement matters more, unit matchups matter more, and using military funds competently matters more. Lame strategies built around broken CO powers diluted the strategic aspect of Dual Strike, since even if you were majorly outclassed by your opponent, you could still win rather easily if you chose the right CO's, or got your CO power at the right time.

I do agree that the narrative and characters are horrendous though.