Life On The Grid

Many reviewers are touting this as a potential game of the year candidate.  Sadly, I was not quite as impressed with it as they were.  Read on to find out why.

The combat is excellent being quite similar to the Batman Arkham games combo, counter, dodge, take-down system.  It’s a good system but you are quite unequipped for larger and prolonged battles in that you are not able to take much damage before going down.  High priority targets such as Warchiefs also often come surrounded by dozens of lower and middle tier enemies making actually getting to them quite tricky and trying to combat them specifically in a huge crowd even trickier.

“You know how to fight six men. I can teach you how to engage six hundred.”

There are not a lot of main missions but quite annoyingly, they are regularly padded out by other objectives which at first seem optional but then later become mandatory for you to complete before you can move on to the next main mission.  There are also a huge number of systems to get used to such as at multiple different ways to unlock abilities, upgrades, equippable weapon skills, focus (bullet time), context sensitive actions, etc.  These are all introduced at a blindingly fast pace with little explanation or time to get used to using them so many may go unnoticed making your life harder.

“One does not simply walk into Mordor”

The much lauded Nemesis system where the power hierarchy of the Orcs is interesting, but  doesn’t really add a lot to the game unless you want to get heavily invested in it which I didn’t want to really.  The Orc Warchief, Bodyguards and Captains can be killed off making some more vulnerable or allowing some to be usurped but they can never all be killed permanently as they just endlessly replace each other.  Kill one and another takes his place.  It also breaks the flow of combat every time you get meet a noteworthy foe in combat for him to say his piece and tell you his name.  While novel the first few times, this gets old quick as it even does it in the middle of combat totally breaking the flow.  Also should you die and go back to fight the same Orc again, you are reintroduced in the same manner each and every time which can get very very tiresome.

It feels like this game is trying to aspire to be a true next-gen open-world game by adding in so many extra systems and concepts and optional side-quests.  But all these optional events turn out to not be optional at all and if you try to do the main missions without buffing yourself up through “optional” side-quests first, you’re going to have a bad time.  And seeing as the whole point of an open-world game is that it should allow you to play it your own way, I think it has failed quite badly in this aspect because it forces you down one path and to play it “the proper way” or else face an insurmountable difficulty wall.

 “Mandatory side-quests”

I didn’t end up finishing Shadow of Mordor because about 9 hours in, quite close to the end when I was reaching the end of the SECOND optional-but-not-optional Warchief culling, it ate my save and put me back to the start.  I decided to call it there and never touch it again as it had already irritated me quite enough.

Summary

Shadow of Mordor provides some excellent combat, stealth and free-running mechanics which work very well when they do.  But sadly, they are buried behind myriads of side quests that you are forced to do to be equipped to survive through the main campaign.  This is a major let down for me as I just wanted to play through the story of the campaign and not 100% all side-quests.  If you are the type of player who loves doing absolutely every last thing in a game, this will probably work better for you.   But if you prefer just to do main missions, you will have a hard time.  Due to me falling into the latter camp, I cannot personally recommend this one.

Overall Score: 2/5