Rate top gamesAfter 20 hours I am so tired of Assassin's Creed: Shadow of Arkham that I am uninstalling it. I have no intention to return to the game and regret the time I spent with it.
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.
What's left from Shadow of Mordor if you remove the “make your own story” gimmick? Not much, I must say. The characters were uninspired, the storyline was hard to follow and slow to progress, and the twists were simply not there. The story is pieces of Tolkien fan service scattered around the dull bloody cursed land. The first major character you meet is, of course, Gollum with the exact voice, moves, and looks of that from the film. I completed more than half of the storyline and Shadow of Mordor was a parody of Tolkien which distorted every stylistic or narrative trope of the source material. It's not necessarily a bad thing and I, in fact, have never been a fan of the Lord of the Rings universe, but it was a weird mix of fan service and negation of Tolkien at the same time.
Atmosphere
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.
This was, perhaps, the main reason I am dropping the game with no intention to play it. I don't mind repetitive and plagiarized gameplay, after all, there are only so many things you can do in action-adventure games targeted at a wide audience. I can tolerate the dull story and even no story at all in an action-adventure game. But I can't play something that is so hostile, unwelcoming and unrewarding. You can't conquer this world, you can only make a dent in the army of Sauron, which will soon be replenished by new random-generated uruks.
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.
Story
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.
«Waste of time»
2 comments
Other reviews17
I expected more from this game, but honestly I felt like I was on any map with touches of the Lord of the Rings. The nemesis and substitution system really tired me out. Yes, there is a challenge and room to improve your skill and strategy, i wish i could recommended to much better games
Hey, Warner Brothers, you got a bunch of properties, right? and a pretty successful track record making games, right? So, let's talk about other games where you could implement the nemesis system.