Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
About
Lord of the rings franchise brought a new title to the collection, an open world action-adventure game, that follows Talion, Gondor captain, that survived the sacrifice that was meant to bring the Elf Lord Celebrimbor as a wraith. Losing his wife and his son, Talion is merged with Celebrimor, escaping death. Players will have to gain EXP in order to upgrade abilities through completing various missions and defeating Uruk warlords. Some missions might require special conditions for the greater reward.
Shadow of Mordor implemented the Nemesis System. It tracks the progress of every special Uruk warrior. Each special Uruk has a set of strengths and weaknesses, and players can assassinate higher ranked officers in order to promote easy to defeat Uruk to defeat them at a higher rank, weakening the Sauron’s army. This planning allows players to adapt, and use mechanics of stealth kills, ranged combat, wraith skills and head-on melee more effective.
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Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor reviews and comments
Final Score: A-
Microsoft from Deutsch
Gameplay
Gameplay-wise, Shadow of Mordor is an exhibition of achievements of game development of the past few years. Roughly speaking, it's 49% Assassin's Creed, 49% Batman Arkham series and 2% of its own.
The Assassin's Creed part is effortless parkour, climbing towers and “synchronizing” for fast-travel and stealth with a few ways to distract and eliminate foes. Although I must admit that stealth here is more inventive than in AC, it's not just whistle, wait, one-button kill, rinse and repeat. At least later in the game you'll be given more tools to assassinate: such as poisoning the beverage and controlling uruks.
If you fail at stealth, here comes the Batman Arkham part. The combat is a shameless copy-paste and works like this: counter every time you see a prompt, attack every time no one is attacking you, perform a special attack every 5 blows, rinse and repeat.
Nevertheless, I must give credit that the combat is actually fun and made me stay with the game for so long. It feels good to chain combos, the killing animations are satisfying and varied and there are quite a few special moves that you are going to like to perform. But when it's the only thing that makes you stay, it starts feeling repetitive after a while too. I can ruin this for you before you play, just watch the 404 hits combo below and you'll know just about everything the combat has to offer.
The 2% come in the Nemesis system, the gimmick that journalists went on and on about and that actually made me play the game. It generates random uruks for each playthrough, bestows unique strengths on them and cripples them with unique weaknesses. These uruks have been fighting for power and will always be, and you act as a disrupting force which shakes up their hierarchy as you please. The problem was that I didn't want to.
I read dozens of nemesis stories on the web before playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and all claimed what a unique experience it was to gain a mortal enemy that kept coming back from the dead to face you once again or to bind with an uruk and stay in this love-hate relationship for hours. Perhaps I was too good at the game, was I? I never had an uruk to live long enough for me to get to know him. They all were just expendables, and I cut through the cannon fodder of Mordor with ease. To be honest, I died more from the deadly fauna of Mordor than uruks. At the same time, bumping up the difficulty seemed strange as I understood that more hit-points would not be likely to breathe in more personality into random-generated uruks.


Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a very stressful game. It has no ups, the music is always tormented strings and dark ambient effects. It makes you paranoid, you scout for safe places when you start playing but soon you realize that the only places where you can rest are forge towers (fast-travel points) and the pause screen.
Does it make you FEEL like you are in Mordor? Yes, and this is a good thing. Does it make a game enjoyable? No.
