Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Oh boy, this game. There was a lot going on so itâs kind of hard for me to wrap my head around it.
Letâs start with things I liked.
The open world was really well done. Bumping into Captains while you were doing some other unrelated mission was a really cool way to add variety to missions. The fact that the world changed over time, with captains rising and falling on their own, was also really fun to watch. It made it feel like the world was alive independent of your input, which I think is a crucial feature for an open world to succeed.
The game has lots of cool states that you can play around with. Orcs can be terrified through various acts, you can light them on fire, drop wasp nests on them, turn them against each other, the list goes on. There are just lots of fun ways to interact with the orcs and change the rules of their behavior.
Hunting Warchiefs is a cool bit of self-directed gameplay. You can decide if you want to usurp them, turn their lieutenants against them, fight them directly or do something entirely different. The degree of freedom they give you, especially combined with the above-mentioned state richness, allows for some really rewarding plays to be set up, particularly if you go out of your way to capitalize on enemy fears, such as specific beasts or conditions.
The nemesis system was interesting, but I honestly didnât get to see a lot of it. I very rarely fast traveled, which meant that orcs took quite a while to respawn after I killed them. I also rarely died, so I didnât have a lot of cause to seek vengeance, though on the few occasions that I did want to avenge myself I could do so in style, meticulously stalking my prey and lining everything up just so. And perhaps even just in creating such an experience the system has succeeded. But I would have liked it to be a bit more robust all the same.
Fighting the first major boss was really cool, using his minions to build up enough combo to hurt him was an entertaining mechanic that made good use of the system they put in place, even if on the whole Iâm not a super big fan of the combat.
Now on to the not so good stuff.
The upgrade system is hit and miss. While some of the runes for your weapons were interesting, some of them also felt really lazy and boring. 35% chance to restore 5 health when you headshot someone with the bow...oh boy. Whereas I had another rune that gave me back slow-mo time every time I killed an enemy from stealth. So if I was picking guys off from afar I had basically unlimited bullet time. Which was potent to say the least.
Buying health and other stats was whatever. Felt kind of arbitrary but itâs what the people want I guess. Buying runes for your weapons felt kind of dumb though considering that they could have easily tied the system to the weapon-specific lines of sidequests, which would have been a double-whammy since it would also make those useful on their own instead of being (as far as I can tell) no more or less valuable than any other mission that provides you meager income with which to buy more upgrades.
On a similar note, none of the side missions felt very impactful. Rescuing slaves didnât seem to change anything - granted I only did about half of the missions, but I would have liked to see some changes to their behavior or the state of the world as I did more of them.
The survival and hunting challenges were both kind of inane, though the former was kind of a fun boy scout simulator that did a pretty good job fleshing out some of the âranger feelâ of the game. I do think that they missed some opportunity to give specific plants short-term buffs, so you would have a reason to go after plant A instead of plant B. I think some of them restored focus instead of health but who really cares.
Hunting was pretty much dumb though and I could never really be bothered to go out of my way to kill spiders or rats or any of the other lame shit they thought it was worthwhile tasking me with killing. At least the herbs restored health so you could feel like they were useful, the hunting was just a waste of arrows until you got the reward.
The skill tree was at least mildly interesting, presenting a few pretty nifty upgrades to some of your abilities that you could pick and choose among, and gating it by power gained from killing captains did a good job of tying that into an overall progression vibe.
The plot was pretty hit or miss for me. There were a few scenes that I thought came together surprisingly well, but there were also a lot that felt forced or unnecessary. Some of this probably also comes from the fact that the open world dynamics were so fun and interesting that getting dragged into cutscenes to see Talionâs meager arc march forward felt like eating your vegetables before you could go back outside and play. I think they had some opportunities for interesting themes around revenge and the endless cycle, particularly as illustrated in the endless hordes of orcs who will rise to captain rank no matter how many you dismember, disfigure and disembowel. But they also could have honestly gotten away with taking a much lighter touch on the story in my opinion. Find a way to let the orc-hunting drive the story more organically and let it go from there rather than trying to force a narrative into a game that is not terribly accommodating to one.
Full disclosure, Iâve never been a huge fan of Arkham-Creed-style combat. So when I say that I found it annoying in this game I know that some of that is bias. But particularly in this game, the low skill floor for the combat system undermined the early parts of the game when I think youâre supposed to be more afraid of big groups of orcs. Because itâs so easy to fight even large groups of enemies from pretty early on, youâre not really punished for breaking stealth. I often tried to maintain it early on because I thought it was more fun to play that way, so combat still felt like punishment but a very boring kind of punishment. One small fix I would have preferred is to remove the counter markers. It wonât fix the fundamentally broken combat, but it would have at least made it slightly less braindead.
The parkour/âplatformingâ controls were boring. Climbing things very rarely had any more consideration than âdo I want to be on top of that thing?â Which is to the gameâs detriment because high ground is incredibly powerful in this game. Orcs are bad at looking up, so once youâre above them you have pretty free movement and options to engage. Climbing things is also a good way to break line of sight if youâre trying to regain stealth after being spotted. For all this power to be tied into the gameplay of ârun at the wall and press Aâ seems pretty irresponsible.
As a side note, since it was so automated it felt frustrating and disempowering when it didnât work - I often had trouble running up a certain wall when in a corner.
I also think they could have done away with the minimap, or at least the omniscient version of it. Much like my complaint about climbing, theyâre giving you way too much power for zero player effort. In a stealth-based game, having more or less perfect information on the disposition of your enemies is just too strong. If theyâd made you rely more on ghost-vision I think it would have helped, but then you get the Batman problem where you spend almost all your time in wallhack mode because of the tactical advantage. Maybe tie it to a meter, like focus is? Even make it the same meter, so you have to choose between the combat applications and the scouting abilities.
On a related note, I wasnât a super big fan of how the game would point you directly to artifacts and other collectibles if you set a waypoint on them. I think letting them get you into the neighborhood is fine, but it kind of ruins the spirit of exploration if you can just go straight to them. I realize this is a minor complaint since you can opt out of it like fast travel, so I donât hold it against them too much.
Speaking of fast travel, I wish theyâd presented some other option for moving across the map. Walking often felt too slow (even with the speed upgrade), but I liked going places on foot because it allowed for all the fun emergent behavior to happen, like ambushing bands or orcs or stumbling across a new side mission. This could well be player error if they were intending that you use mounts more, and Iâd accept that.
I also think they could have used the towers better instead of them just being glorified save points. Having to go there to buy upgrades, for example, could have made them feel more tied into the experience. Again, I think this one is pretty subjective. Iâd be curious to see how it impacted the pace of the game if you had to go regroup at one every few missions rather than running from one thing to the next like a sugar-hyped kid at Disneyland.
In each of these complaints I think what Iâm trying to get at here is that I wish the game was a little slower and more deliberate. Theyâve given you lots of cool tools to create domino effects and interact with the world, but they often feel like second-class citizens because you have combat as an easy brute-force fallback in case anything goes sideways. By forcing the player to exercise alternatives and play more thoughtfully I think they can push people into the aspects of the system I consider more rewarding and interesting.
The stealth-oriented boss felt like a missed opportunity as well. I think if it had relied more on luring the opponent into certain positions using Attract and other mechanics it could have had some interesting push and pull, but as-is it was just this weird sequence that felt kind of tacked on. Â Which to be fair could really be used for any of the last few missions. I think itâs tough to tie narrative pacing to an open-world game that players will naturally be tackling at their own speed, but this felt particularly disjointed. The final boss isnât really worth mentioning aside from general disappointment, but at least the story missions before that had prepared me for it.
I also wasnât a fan of the hard-counter resistance system they put into place. Certain enemies were wholly invulnerable to attack types, which felt like it was unnecessarily limiting to your approaches against them. I get that they wanted to encourage you to branch out and keep players from using a single attack type as a crutch, but Iâd rather make the counter softer. Have them only take partial damage from the attacks, and you canât use them to strike the finishing blow. This was particularly frustrating when you had an enemy immune to ranged attacks who liked to run away - you had little recourse other than chasing him across half of Mordor because he canât be slowed down by arrows hitting him in the back.
In spite of my complaints, when itâs working and letting you do your own thing Shadow of Mordor is actually quite fun. I think itâs the fun of it that puts the rest into such stark contrast, and makes me wish for more. They were so close on a lot of things, but wound up tripping over their own feet in a few places that kept the game from being truly great and instead made it into a game with some rather neat mechanics that I hope to see adapted into a more cohesive game.
