BulletPoints: Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor Review

BulletPoints Review of Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor. 

I suppose I’ll open up this review with a few clarifying statements. First, I’m not a Lord of the Rings-universe fan. Don’t mistake this as me hating on Lord of the Rings the same way I hate on things like Final Fantasy or Big Bang Theory. I’ve just never particularly been invested in the LOTR series. I’ll watch it with friends and might enjoy bits and pieces of the whole thing. But long books and long movies aren’t things I typically want to spend my valuable time watching or reading. Especially for the three or four scenes among the lot of them that I actually like to see sandwiched in-between hours of people walking and listening to Frodo bitch and moan about how life sucks.

Going into the game, Shadows of Mordor, I went in with low expectations. I won’t lie, I went into the game legitimately wanting to hate on this game and leave a nasty review on the doorstep of Warner Bros game publishing division. But not because of the origins of the game, that only added to my waning interest. My real reason for wanting to hate on this game is because of Warner Bros’ policy on let’s plays, specifically of this game. LP-gamers can’t show footage of this game without WB permission. To receive permission, you must be sure to only say positive things and talk about the much touted “Nemesis System” or else they’ll flag your content. And this didn’t sit well with me at all and made me hate WB for their stupid copyright bullshit.

But you know what the problem is? While I can admit without bias I wouldn’t call this game “precious,” I begrudgingly have to admit that after many hours of playing it… it is in fact “fun”. There are certainly large areas of the game that are terribly lacking, but there are enough good bits to really balance it out enough where the game doesn’t piss me off in a way that earns a bad review. Just a review I didn’t really want to give. Anyway, here goes.

The plot revolves around a boring white bloke named Talion. He and his family is killed by something called “The Black Hand” which works for Sauron. For reasons not explained for a long time, Talion’s death was not permanent as he returns to his flesh form aided by a ghostly companion who you eventually found out is Celebrimbor. No, I didn’t know who the fuck that was for about ten hours either. Turns out he is the elf who forged the rings of power for Sauron in the first place. But due to a boring amnesia sub-plot, you spend the first act of the game figuring that out. Though give the fact each way-point tower you light up is lit with a forging-animation and Gollum seems obsessed with Celebrimbor, that wasn’t really that hard a guess. Oh, and Sauron killed him which is why he is here now. I guess that wasn’t much of a head-scratcher either.

Oh, did I forget to mention Gollum is in the game for a bit? In case you might have forgotten this was a game set in Middle Earth, WB decided to shove as many references and lore in there as possible and to make sure Gollum was the first big name you really came across. While he does sort of fit into the story, it certainly does come off as a bit forced but perhaps I’m just nitpicking. That being said, you come across later allies in the game such as a blonde warrior-woman and a dwarf-huntsmen. Both of which offer more interesting missions, stories, backstories, and dialogue than really anything else in the main quests of the game. I guess Ratbag does for a bit… but I suppose that is what I’ll have to talk about next.

So the Nemesis System that Monolith hasn’t shut about since that one trailer/demo they did forever ago works as thus: Orcs of Sauron’s army (or Uruks or whatever the fuck they’re called) have special names and rankings within Sauron’s army. You have captains of varying degrees of power and Warchiefs which are basically the closest thing you get to boss-fights. By encountering any of the captains or Warchiefs and letting them live (or you die) you affect the structure of Sauron’s army as certain orcs rise and fall in and out of power. You can also play a role in several side-quest missions to interfere with duels, hunts, recruitments, or ambushes between different captains allowing others to climb the ranks of power over others or to cock-block certain ones from doing anything at all.

My issue with this (for a while) is that all the orcs are completely interchangeable. I mean… yes, that’s the point I suppose. But I mean none of them really stand out or feel all that unique save for the boss-fight-style Warchiefs. They all basically draw their voices from about 3-5 different voice actors and you can tell because after a while they start to share lines of dialogue too. Not that orcs really talk about anything interesting besides killing, fighting, and threatening others to do shit or they’ll fight or kill you. And, for a while, it felt like they put a lot of work into something that just replicated what it’s like to work for a big corporation. Every orc just imitates a cog in a wheel helping one big evil machine operate. Only in this case all the cogs are able to have their throats slit by me.

What made the nemesis system actually interesting was the eventual ability to “dominate” orcs. What this means is you grab them and take over their minds. Then you’re orc is marked (and special) and you can actually work to push that orc to a higher seat of power. This forces a bit of an investment into said orc, but it actually does have a certain charm to it. But the dominate ability is also great for infiltrations. One of the bases I sneaked into had archers posted everywhere. Rather than kill them, I simply dominated all of them so they were now my archers who would defend me from above while I fought off other orcs on the ground below.

The biggest issue I had with this, however, was that my mind-slaves could still be hurt by me via friendly fire. And while this isn’t a big deal for, say, archers. If I’m trying to fight off someone myself and I dominated other characters to help or take over a position (and thus I need said target alive) I’m liable to hit my own assassins. But friendly fire never takes place when you have other allies. So I wonder why they didn’t bother clearing this issue with orcs you control. Because it makes those take-over missions frustrating to accidentally kill your teammate when you have no control over them beyond attack and not-attack. But once they attack, they continue until the thing is dead.

Aside from these few gripes, the game is functionally more-or-less sound. Gameplay wise, it combines aspects of Prince of Persia / Assassin’s Creed and the Batman Arkham games. What makes it better than Assassin’s Creed however is that the game really is more about killing than faffing about for hours. The game also has a reasonable pace to it whereas I’ve generally felt the Assassin’s Creed games (for the most part) had a slower pace that killed the rush that free-running and murder gave. The stealth, for the most part, also feels really good, again, to the Arkham games level. I’ve spent loads of time sneaking into bases to take out targets as efficiently and quickly as possible before having to start a single one-on-one fight.

There are also various side missions but aside from collecting plants that you use for healing, the bulk of them are just different variations of killing waves of orcs. One variant is stealth-kills only. Another is only using your spirit-bow. The third variant is focuses more on using your sword. And the last one is liberating slaves… by liberating an orc’s-head from its body. While I get having various side missions that focus on platforming or other goofy things you’d see in a sandbox wouldn’t quite fit the tone of the game, it would vary up what you’re doing a bit. You can only kill orcs for many times before you ask where the fuck the orcs keep coming from. It's not like any of them mention their female orc counterparts back home nor do you see any on the battlefield. Leading one to suggest all orcs are male and that makes me wonder how they even reproduce. 

And that’s a legitimate question, actually. You’ll clear an area and then leave for a while only to see it’s been repopulated sometime later. And no one ever asks what happened to the orcs that were here before or why there are corpses on the ground with slits in their throats. I get that killing, say, 1000 orcs and asking how they’re not all dead yet is almost equivalent of killing 1000 Hispanics in the US and asking how they’re all not dead yet, but this loops me back to my whole “orcs are completely interchangeable” thing which breaks the reason to even have a nemesis system in the first place.

You do get to kill other things (thank Christ). There are beasts you can kill (and a couple you can tame) on your quest to overtake Mordor and stop the return of Sauron (which we know how that goes). These provide amusing distractions and fun encounters to break up the tediousness of fighting the same dozen or so interchangeable dudes. Which is why I very much liked all my missions with the dwarf character because not only was he a refreshingly positive change in tone for the story, but all his missions involved these other creatures and that was just loads of fun.

But before I conclude, I want to get back to the story for a moment. The plot of the game takes place between the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and the main goal about partway through is a mix of finding the Black Hand to get revenge and stop the return of Sauron. But we know how this has to go, right? The Black Hand (to my knowledge) never appears in the books or movies, so they have to die and not have a presence in either of those. Likewise, Sauron does reappear in Lord of the Rings (though not in his physical form) so, yes, we obviously fail on that part in this game. This is why I hate prequels, because all the tension is killed when you already know the results of what happens. And that’s particularly bad for this game when the main plot of the game isn’t interesting and we already know how it ends.

Can I ask game creators something for future Lord of the Rings games? Can we either have them set post-Lord of the Rings where we can establish new villains and even whole new sets of characters instead of constantly recycling and reusing the same few every time? If not that, can we maybe set them LONG before The Hobbit so that it doesn’t lead straight into The Hobbit but still has all the lore and maybe can establish some Middle Earth history to flesh out the world more? This is my same problem I’m already having with the Star Wars remakes and how they look to be centering or continuing the Skywalker plot. But I don’t want that when you have a big universe (or all of Middle Earth) to do stories in and we’re still following the same boring bastards AGAIN. It really shows a lack of creativity or desire to branch off from the existing franchise with something more unique.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on Shadows of Mordor. It’s an okay game that you’ll likely have fun with, but it isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before and certainly won’t revolutionize gaming as we know it. It’s publisher comes off as a lot of pretentious fucks, but they at least have a solidly made game to back up their bullshit when I call them out on it which I guess is a first for me to come across. So if you have the money and time, give it a try. But if you don’t I really can’t blame you when there are likely more impressive and fun things coming out you’re just as likely (if not more so) to enjoy. Like Smash Bros… or Bayonetta 2… or Evil Within… or a load of other things. See ya next time.