Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor borrows a lot of elements from the Arkham / Assassins Creed series especially where the combat is concerned but they sought fit to add more blood and flashier finishers combined with an interesting “Nemesis system” and a feature that allows you to control your own Uruk army, all set in Middle-earth a bit before the books take place. This is a game I’ve been excited about since its announcement. A darker themed LoTR game is something I’ve always wanted but kind of let me down after the cool factor of the combat wore off.

Let me start with the combat and all the elements involved with it since you will be spending a good majority of the game doing that. If you’re not a fan of this type of fighting style (Batman / Assassins Creed), then you’re probably not going to enjoy this game since it takes center stage here and there’s not much else to do but fight Uruks, which is not totally a bad thing. They have a counter system in place but luckily it won’t act like an instant kill. One can be obtained but is only available after a combo of hits so it feels pretty well deserved and doesn’t feel overpowered or out of place given that you have a supernatural force inside you and how easy it is to be overwhelmed by the enemy if you choose not to hide in the shadows like myself. To top that off there’s a good amount of animations for the finishers, I never found myself getting bored with slaying Uruks and seeing different ways their head could leave their neck, also get used to seeing Uruks as there’s not much enemy variations aside from some nasty wildlife.

If you prefer a more stealthy approach, then the counter system doesn’t matter so much. Once you sneak behind an enemy it’s pretty much a guaranteed kill. This feature is going to be the best part of your arsenal as a stealth player for awhile because the developers chose to have the player unlock certain abilities through completing story missions instead of the skill tree, like branding (turning the enemy to your side) and others that make the combat in general more interesting / viable. You won’t get these until about half way through the game which is rather disappointing they chose to go this route as I feel branding such an important part of the game( or at least could have been) it should have been available right from the start.


Now to expand upon the branding mechanic: While interesting, I believe fell short of having purposeful use, aside from advancing the story. There’s not a single enemy you can’t brand, Uruk and beast alike fall to your pimp hand creating your own personal small army. Unfortunately there’s not much you can do with them other than killing and threatening the ones not under your control as well as making sure they aren’t killed by someone else. Instead of making the goal of controlling all the war-chiefs an optional mission, it’s forced on the player to move the story to the final battle and that’s really all there is to it, I was rather disappointed and wish it was more fleshed out.

While branding was a bit of a disappointment, I thought the nemesis system was great and it’s probably the biggest difference between this game and others of the same genre. Essentially the captains / war-chiefs will remember you if you fail to kill them and they may change. For instance if you push them through a fire and they escape the next time you cross their path they will remark on how you burned them while show off their new burnt face. Adding to this is if you were slain by a grunt then he ranks up, gets his own name and it starts a side mission for you to try and get your revenge. This happens every time you die, pretty much making infinite special enemies that will remember you from their past encounters and I honestly hope to see more of this.

You are rewarded for killing the Uruk higher-ups with a special type of currency for your skill tree although the skill tree seems rather pointless considering the gating of certain abilities. There are some nifty things to pick up here and there but I would have preferred if they just chose one way of unlocking new skills rather than making the skill tree feel incomplete due to all the good stuff being hidden away in story missions. Upon killing a captain you are also given a random rune that can be placed in one of your weapons and the harder the fight the better the rune, this can be increased by using one of your branded captains to threaten someone higher up the chain with a warning of your oncoming attack making it all the sweeter when you remove their head from their shoulders leaving behind an epic rune.

WARNING: some story spoilers

I am a pretty big fan of lord of the rings however I must confess that I haven’t read a lot of the extended lore so I can’t truly speak for any potential plot holes (except for someone coming back from the dead, from my understanding it’s damn near impossible in this universe, so it seems bizarre that they made it look so simple). The whole story is pretty much prequel filler to the main event that is the Lord of the Rings novels, however it felt rushed and like it was put together last minute giving it a subpar fan fiction feel to it.

This is a simple tale of revenge, you play as Talian a soldier of Gondor banished to the black wall with his family, who are murdered within the first 10 minutes of game-play as well as Talion for a ritual to bind a wraith to the antagonists’ body but ultimately fails because the wraith ends up within Talion and then sets off to Mordor to get his revenge. No time for mourning. No time for figuring out why there’s a wraith inside him. No time for warning Gondor of a potential threat to the world, only time for revenge! The game seems to remove any type of slow moment in favor of highlighting only the action bits.

The back-story I could find is in the loading screens at least what’s relevant to this story. There are items you can collect that give you a glimpse of what life was like before everything went to shit. Talion doesn’t seem to grow throughout the story and seems very accepting that a wraith is inside his dead body. He just does what he needs to do and is only focused on getting revenge. Now the wraith on the other hand is a bit more of an interesting character given who he is and anyone who has read the Silmarillion will enjoy what could be called a “wrapping up” or a “what if” of his tale, some other iconic characters show up every now and then but they seemed to have kept that rather tasteful by not overusing them.

With just twenty main missions and the side missions only being fluff offering little if any story of their own, I was rather bummed to see so little care given to the story given how rich the lore is in this universe. To me the whole thing just felt like they were impatient and couldn’t wait to show you the action so it skipped right over any meaningful character development. It moves at such a breakneck pace I almost forgot why I’m killing the people that I am and you never really get a chance to stop and smell the roses. I’ve enjoyed the company of side characters and they deserved more screen time then they were given.

End Spoiler

So to summarize, this is a game I really wanted to like but just wound up rather disappointed. The combat is fast, fun and probably one of the best reasons to buy this game because the story is way too short and tells like mediocre fan fiction. It just didn’t feel like a LoTR game to me and I think it could have been better served as a new IP instead of trying to ride on the success of the franchise. The nemesis system is something I hope to see more of, because killing my own personal enemy is very satisfying. The replay value is very low unless you’re into collectibles and side missions with no story attached to them. In the end I think this game worth picking up on a serious discount and I hope they get a second shot to make it better because I love me some LoTR.

Thanks for reading!