I played the Shadow of Mordor video game to completion, and I enjoyed it, so this is my review of the game. The game is a Warner Bros. game and I've heard that its combat system is a lot like the Arkham games, but as of this writing I've not played those games (I like Batman, and I've meant to play them, I just haven't gotten around to it). For me, the game feels a little more like Far Cry in Middle Earth (or Middle-earth™ or Middle-Earth™ or whatever license this version of Tolkien's work this game ties into), meaning that it lets the player set the pace of the main storyline while providing a world of little exercises so you can practice the skills you need to become good at the game. I only have one minor complaint about the game, so here's all the stuff I love about it, and the one minor frustration.
Tolkien immersion
What I love about a good setting is that no matter how limited the scope, there are arguably always opportunities to tell the story of what was happening over there. You know over there, it's the place the narrator of the actual story wasn't writing about. It's all the directions the camera wasn't pointed.
That's what Shadow of Mordor does. It doesn't dare try to be a sequel to Lord of the Rings, and instead takes place in that decades-long gap between Bilbo's return from Erebor and his farewell birthday party. There's plenty of references to the "Tolkien legendarium" (that's what people call it, I guess), and much of it seems "safe" but there's a lot of nuance to Tolkien's world and this game takes a pretty casual stance on it. I mean, it's all made up anyway, but a lot of the lore in this video game is really made up. As long as you're either a Tolkien scholar who can detect inventions for the video game or a casual fan like me who just doesn't care, this video game is a great way to immerse yourself in Tolkien's setting. You get insight into how orc armies are structured (which feels mostly true to the book), you get lots of cool-sounding Elven words, you get really familiar with how being a Wraith works, and you feel like you're hanging out in Middle Earth.
Is this the game Tolkien would have made, had he been a video game writer? Probably not. But it is a world with strong Tolkien flavoured lore, and it's a fun place to spend 80 hours.
You don't get a feel for human (or Hobbit or Elf or Dwarf, for that matter) society. This isn't Dragon Age or The Witcher. You're a human whose soul got unjustly intermingled with a Wraith, and now you and the Wraith are determined to use your dark powers to weaken Sauron's growing army.
Setting the pace
I don't play nearly as many video games as I mean to, and so the only other video games like this one that I've played is the Far Cry series, and I find the method of storytelling pretty similar. If you're not used to being thrown into the deep end of an open world game, it can be disorienting and I admit it took me a while before I caught on to what I could do to progress the story. In fact, if I may humble-brag, I didn't even understand the leveling-up process for the first 10 hours of the game, so I played as a level 1 character until I'd acquired 6 levels and realised I was supposed to be choosing power-ups for myself.
I said I had only one complaint about the game, but I guess technically I have two complaints and communication is one of them. The game doesn't force you to level up, even if only the first time it happens. It alerts you somewhere that you gained an ability point, but it never pauses the game and shows you the screen where you spend your ability point to purchase items on the skill tree. It never explains the map, or the screen where you unlock and inscribe runes onto your weapons. It just assumes you know that style of play. I probably should have, but then again I didn't know what kind of game I was playing. I assumed I'd be guided along the path both in terms of mechanics and story, but the game mostly leaves that up to the player. For example, I didn't realise I could unlock the "silver towers" of the world to provide myself with Fast Travel locations, so I played from the same silver tower waypoint until hour 20. Live and learn.
Once you understand how to drive the story, though, it's kind of the perfect structure for a game (in my opinion). You get to decide when you feel ready to go to the next main story mission. You don't have to go straight from main quest to main quest. You can spend time doing side quests, like freeing human slaves from orc camps, or learning to ride wild beasts, or finding runes or artefacts with pieces of your past locked within them. The side missions are fun because the combat system is fun, and it's fun to hang out in Middel Earth, and of course you gain powers and boons that eventually make the main quest a little easier. Or, if you're just here to complete the game so you can move on to the next in the series or the next game in your queue, then you power through the main quest directly. You bought the game, so it's up to you, which is a principle I very much appreciate in a game.
Ranger fantasy
As a kid, I pretty much loved the entire Fellowship (even Boromir, to be honest, because while he had that moment of weakness, the way he stands up to the orcs is pretty cool), but Strider has always had a special place in my heart. And frankly, Strider has a special place in modern fantasy fiction. The fantasy ranger archetype is, more often than not, just trying to capture the reflection of Aragorn.
It's no surprise that you play a ranger in Shadow of Mordor. And it's a really fun implementations of a ranger, even though I feel like some of the most ranger-like abilities are actually Wraith abilities. But even that's kind of cool, because first of all Ringwraiths are cool (terrifying, but still cool) and secondly because the Ringwraiths were hunters and trackers, like rangers. Whether you're using skills you've learned as a ranger or magic you've gained from your Wraith counterpart, you get to track down orc captains and warlords from [a fifth of] a mile away.
There's a lot of stealth in the game, too. You have to be stealthy to avoid an onrush of orcs, so you sneak around their camps, climb up the ruins of buildings, creep through bushes and around rocks, until you're within reach of your prey. It's addictive, until you're noticed and you're surrounded by orcs. You fight for your life, or you run, but either way you'll be back to fight again because you're a Wraith now. When you die, you appear again within the mortal realm whether you like it or not.
Button mashing and the art of escape
There's a really interesting duality in the way combat is implemented in Shadow of Mordor. On one hand, you're encouraged to be stealthy. On the other hand, there are lots of orcs and eventually you're going to be spotted, so you also happen to be a supernaturally gifted duellist. The game engine is pretty smart, and as long as you press an attack button the engine does its best to make sure you have a target. Trust me, you haven't button mashed until you've played this game. Weigh your attack button down with something heavy and take a coffee break during combat. You'll do great.
The funny thing is, I really like that. Yes, you're button mashing and the engine does its best to make every attack meaningful, but there are endless orcs so it's up to you to figure out a strategy. Maybe you meant to sneak into a camp, assassinate the captain, and then sneak back out. That didn't go to plan, so you have to come up with a new plan as the bodyguards of the captain surround you. Are you going to jump over the orc behind you and scale the wall to get out of reach? Or should you use your bow and arrow to disrupt a nearby campfire, spilling flames out onto the guards? Or should you dispatch the guards as quickly as possible so you can face the captain before reinforcements arrive? Or should you just run away and come back later for a second try?
There are lots of choices. Many of them involve mashing buttons, but where you are as you're mashing definitely can be the difference between undeath and respawing.
The one complaint I have about the game engine, really, is movement. The movement controls are a little rough. I've been slaughtered by countless caragors and orcs as I run to a wall to scale it, and end up doing a somersault in the corner instead. I've ruined many an assassination attempt by jumping from one ceiling beam to another instead of down upon my target. It's pretty frustrating, especially when the combat system seems to mostly know exactly what I want it to do.
I say that the combat system "mostly" knows what I want to do, but actually in the late game there's another quirk to the controls that surfaces. Some point after the 50% mark of the game, you gain the ability to forcefully recruit orcs to your side by spiritually "branding" them with a wraith mark. (It starts out as a surprisingly weak ability, in fact frustratingly so. I was leveling up dilligently, working for that skill, and the first several orcs I branded seemed to conveniently get converted to 1 Hit Point minions once they were fighting for me. However, once you start branding captains and warchiefs, it gets to be very powerful.)
You might think that once an orc is on your side, you would never want or need to target them during combat. The game knows this, on some level, because when you cause an area of effect explosion your orc minions are magically excluded from damage. However, the combat system is perfectly happy for you to grab and cut your branded orcs during the most frantic combat. It's not just annoying, it's conspiratorial. You go into a battle thinking that you've got lots of backup, but once you're in melee you start accidentally targeting and killing the forces you're relying on instead of the forces you're supposed to be fighting. It's ruined several combats for me, and it was almost enough for me to just quit the game. I didn't quit the game, in the end, and you sort of learn to work around it, but it's definitely a bug.
Good game
Orcs are getting churned out the tar pits of Mordor (or whatever) every day, so your work as a ranger-turned-good-Wraith is never done. That's what makes the game fun, of course. If you want to kill some orcs and run around Middle Earth like an Avengers version of Strider, Shadow of Mordor is great fun.
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