Shadow of Mordor

[Ornette]

This game showed up from gamefly the other day, didn't even know it was in my queue, but it's actually not bad. Like with a lot of games based on another franchise, it could have nothing to do with Lord of the Rings at all, it's only just some names and a familiar character kind of shoehorned into the game. Best thing is you can skip all the talking and the bits of the backstory are told through some ghost voice after you find artifacts so that you can continue playing the game and can simply ignore the droning voice.

The combat system isn't very interesting but the who system of captains and war chiefs are pretty cool, randomly generated bosses with a whole set of different weaknesses and strengths. Though, because I was playing kind of all the side missions all the time (they are way more fun than the missions that advance the story) that I pretty much maxed all my abilities (sans ones unlocked via progression) and upgrades before the game was a quarter into the progression so the strength/weakness thing was not that important. By the end of the first map, I just blindly went after all the war chiefs without killing body guards first and fight 2 or 3 vs 1 blind fights all the time without much of a challenge. Doing the same now on the second map.

So halfway through, there's nothing I can open up or upgrade or ability I can buy through doing any side missions, so the side stuff is pretty much only for fun now and I only died recently when three captains unexpectedly show up in the middle of a fight (I think I went something like 40% progression without dying) with 2 other captains + war chief (could have just ran away, thought I could take them). And the only knock I have with the game is the progression can allow you to get too powerful and make the game feel way too easy, the progression missions are kind of dull (I mean, follow some dude around for 15 minutes picking flowers?), and the occasional glitch that requires me to restart the game (one glitch made it so I could only move my camera around, couldn't even hit "start" to quit).

[Lu-Cuss]

Personally I got bored of it around 50% of the way through (or around when you meet the dwarf in the second map area). The combat was cool at first just for the animations if nothing else (they're a lot better than the ones from the Arkham games, which its kind of a knockoff of), but after a while it starts to lose its novelty and gets really tedious. This is why a one button fighting system doesn't work, in my opinion. Without getting entertained by that, there's really not much else to do in the game, either. At least in the Arkham games you have puzzles and stuff, which keeps things interesting.

Also, the voice acting and the story are both really bad.

[Stillborn]

I enjoyed it. somewhat like Batman Arkham series and like Assasin Creed, but with less absurd plot than the latter.

Cool skill and the sensation of POWER the system gives you. True it may feel repetetive, but I enjoyed it immensly.

[IronEvangelion]

Bought it with my PS4 recently, and I'm honestly not sure how I feel about it. Sure it has some cool game mechanics, but... that's about it. The story started off good and strong, but it nearly evaporated by the time I was 25% through the game. Basically every story mission right now feels like, as Nadia would put it, "Just another excuse to murder."

I'm at the point where I have to kill 4 warchiefs, and the game is getting frustratingly difficult. Generally I'm dying 4 times for every successful captain kill I make. Every time I try to kill a captain or warchief, about 3 or 4 revenge targets show up out of nowhere and hand my ass to me (and of course they ALL have to do their intro speeches right in the middle of the damn fight).

They just HAD to shoehorn Gollum into the plot as well, didn't they? Of all the characters in LOTR, he's at the bottom of my list of cameos I'd like to see. It's funny because right before he shows up I was thinking, "This game might be pretty cool if Gollum doesn't show up for no reason." Then he crept onto the screen and I went, "Aaw, fuck!"

That actually brings me to another point: All the LOTR references feel so ham-fisted. Back in the day I was enough of a LOTR nerd that I actually learned to speak some Mordorian, and it gets damn irritating to hear the same lines recycled over and over throughout the game. Case in point: the chanting you hear at the title screen is just part of the Poem of the One Ring being recited in the language of Mordor. A portion of it gets re-used constantly to lure Uruks in for ambush: "Ash nazg, Ash nazg, Ash nazg..." It might sound pretty cool if you don't know the language, but they're really just saying 'One Ring' over and over. I wish the developers had sat down with a copy of the Silmarillion, learned the language, and came up with some new lines.

I will say that the game is not bad, and the gameplay itself is enjoyable in short bursts, but I just don't know if I'm going to keep it. I'm very tempted to trade it in towards Final Fantasy Type-0 this March.

[Ornette]

Story definitely felt it could have come from anywhere, but I gladly skip through every cut-scene without a second thought. The combat system is pretty vanilla and nothing remarkable, the little missions where you have to kill X number of things a certain way in order to get to another guy to kill was much more fun, and like I said, the captain system is pretty neat.

As for the actual combat, I think the stuns abilities just makes the game too easy. Even when I had to fight that black captain guy, was absolutely no sweat just stunning him then a combo (then stop so that he stays stunned), then rinse and repeat, and occasionally killing the dozen or so jobbers that keep showing up. They can't hurt you when you're in a middle of an animated sequence (like a jump over the guy stun) so just keep stunning everyone.

By the time I realized the game was more than killing the captains, I had amassed a huge collection of runes, so one of the perks of having a ton of high level runs is you can combine them in such a way so you essentially never run out of arrows or focus as long as every shot is a head shot kill. This means, like when fighting that black captain, if I need to take out 10-15 guys in the middle of a fight, just break out the bow and take them all out in the span of essentially no time at all, so they're all dead before the black captain can take 2 steps toward me, and then we can continue dancing.

That brings me to those runs that give you focus + arrows, that;s also pretty unfair. There were so many captains that I killed where I'd waltz into a strong hold, climb up somewhere high, scan and find 3 captains, then start shooting. Shooting the captains won't replenish focus and arrows, but there's usually enough enemy around where you can go back and forth: shoot captain a few times, headshot kill a bunch of guys, shoot captain a few times, headshot kill a few more guys. All this happens while you're focused so the captain has zero shot of doing anything.

I remember thinking how dumb the Gollum stuff was, and that first mission was kind of annoying because those four-legged things are actually kind of annoying to kill and I died a couple of times before I figured out what to do. Those guys actually still kill me every once in a while when I'm just minding my own business.