I remember playing this game back almost 10 years ago and it was a pleasant surprise, I remember how much Monolith Productions was hyping up the Nemesis System and thought it was going to be nothing more than a way to garner hype but to my shock it turned out to be the thing that defined the game and to this day helps makes this and it's sequel Shadow of War stand out from other games.
Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor is that and I dislike to use the term here, "generic" game with high production values and a revolutionary AI and procedural generation system that helps made it standout from the pack.
The best way of describing this Shadow of Mordor is that what if you had a Tolkien licensed game with the parkour of Assassin's Creed and the combat system of the Batman Arkham games and what you get is Shadow of Mordor. I do however prefer this game over AC and the open world Batman games in large part due to the Nemesis System and the high amounts of polish with it's animations in combat and stealth.
I'll start with the good, the animations for combat and stealth are really well done and does a great job at selling you on the power fantasy that you will partake in. Talion tears apart enemies with such savage energy that it's a pleasure to watch him tear orcs to absolute to shreds even if the game can start to wear thin at times watching Talion just viciously destory everything in his path really provides a high level of stimulus when playing the game. The fact that Talion can kill his enemies unlike Batman just makes the combat animations "pop" in a way the Arkham games never did since Batman has to hold himself back constantly. High amounts of polish and production values in animations can carry a game for me and SoM does such a great job with it that I can play the game for hours straight without taking much breaks which is high praise coming from me.
The stealth is an improvement over Assassin's Creed since you can actually crouch, have a last known position system when spotted, lure enemies over to you, a crouch run and even have more options for the stealth kills like "brutalize" where you can build a fast combat while scaring away nearby orcs all though detriments to the stealth is that the lockon for air kills can be very finicky and you can kill enemies you didn't want to kill which is something I recall earlier ACs doing better since locking on was a button press. The orc AI can be dumb too taking advantage of the last known position system and parkour, along with the crouch run ability as well as being able to stealth kill an orc a second after he spotted you and it is a shame that Monolith Productions who were known to make smart moment to moment AI like in Condemned and FEAR, it is a shame but understandable considering both those games were linear action game while this game is open world and more has to be done to make the AI work. Stealth does at the very least feel like a worthwhile option despite how basic it is overall, and I like how it is encouraged since some orcs are weak to it. You could also it somewhat "true" to the lore since orcs are supposed to be a bunch of dumb brutes.
The story missions are decent and does an okay job at breaking up the pace from all the orc stalking and killing even if the actual story accompanying it isn't very good. You will be engaging with the game's base mechanics like stealth, combat and parkour with varied enough objectives like killing a certain number of orcs, doing stealth, riding cargoors, unlocking new abilites, and even riding a graug. They are decent even if the Nemesis System could be interwined with them better but to this game's credit, the fact that open world exploration is more enjoyable than the main story missions is a feat in of itself due to most open world games, the open worlds might as well be mission select menus but here, the Nemesis System makes the act of going through the open world enjoyable. Now on to that.
The Nemesis System of course, the key feature that defines and it is great, usually dying in a game is tedious busywork since you got to load where you last saved and repeat content you already did but now with the added hindsight you got from your previous death and if you are dying too much looking up lots of guides and tips online. SoM manages to make death death an enjoyable part of the game, basically by and turning the trope of the "worf effect" in video game form. When you get killed by an orc and while the monologues they do could annoy some people, they add a sense of attachment towards from the player because after an orc kills you, getting revenge on them can be very satisfying and gaining intel from random orcs on the map can make you feel like a badass predator where you exploit various orc weaknesses to help you get the kill on them even with the easy difficulty taking advantage of orc weakesses as you stalk them makes me feel like the Predator from the movie franchise but in game from. Basically a cross between that Legacy of Kain's Raziel.
This where I become more negative on the game and while this may vary from person to person especially if they played this kind of game before but SoM is a pretty easy game, and this was me playing the game with barely any upgrades and only equipping the occasional rune. I don't like bashing a game for being too easy especially when the gameplay on offer here is highly polished if very derivative but for a game that wants you die a lot and have you get attached to the enemies that kill you and want that victory feel epic and earned dying on occasion feels very counter active to that. You can't raise the difficulty here since there isn't any and a lot of the time, in order for me to even have an orc survive more than one encounter, I often had to be low on health and run away from multiple captains and this was because I didn't know about the upgrade system until the game told me about it towards the end. The game was easy even before that.
Another issue is that the branding system is also very OP and while I don't mind as much as others it is easy to abuse since orcs will never betray and stay loyal to you until they die which makes the game feel less dynamic.
Outside easy difficulty, another big problem I had with the game was it's context sensitive actions. One big reason why I was never big on Assassin's Creed was how everything you do in those games was based on context sensitivity. In this game, with the x button being mapped to so many actions like roll, climb, sprint, jump over enemy, there will be many moments where I want Talion to do something very specific like climb on a wall to escape a group of orcs and he will either, not climb, roll, jump on orc, and there will be a 40% chance he will listen to me and he will in fact climb up the structure. There will be times where I want to sprint and he will climb when next to a wall, or do some specific jump where I want him to jump to a ledge close by but instead he will leap all the way to ground. Talion feels like he will listen to commands and inputs when lots of things are going on maybe 60- 70% of the time and it can lead to some occasional frustration because I am screwing up to the game's context senstive being slower than I can press the x button.
Final issue and this isn't a big one since I don't find it to actively hinder my enjoyment of the game is the story, I am not a big fan of interquels or prequels since they add in needless context to things that are meant to be intentionally vague, have established characters show up for pointless fan service, expand on characters that never needed to be expanded on or pointlessly add in new characters that the original continuity never once acknowledged and SoM pretty much does all of these things, Talion in an original character that the LOTR movies never acknowledge, and on top of that Gollum just has a bunch of cameos at best and doesn't contribute much to the overarching story since well he can't get involved in anything major before LOTR. Saruman gets a mention but of course you can't involve him in anything major since you could potentially contradict LOTR.
Ignoring all that the story itself just isn't very interesting Talion and Celebrimbor hardly get into any arguments or have much tension with each other, most of the other characters are one offs who don't even appear at the end, and most of the games is spent finding Celebrimbor's memories. The overarching plot doesn't really pick up until the end with the whole late game twist of Talion just being used but that point, the game is already wrapped up. I don't even mind the final boss being a quick time event since Arkham combat never really excelled with one on one encounters and like with the interquel problem I mentioned earlier, you can't kill Sauron before LOTR and he already gets beaten in the begginning of Fellowship of the Ring, so having a boss fight with him in this game would give someone the expectation that Sauron in his physical form will do a lot in the LOTR trilogy.
The voice acting did carry me through much of the cutscenes in the story and it is well acted and directed enough to keep me sitting through the cutscenes even if the writing didn't really land at all.
Overall, Shadow of Mordor is a derivative game held together by it's high level of polish with it's kill animations, and it's novelty that is the Nemesis System, both of these things carried me through a game that otherwise borrows it's ideas from other games while surpassing those games it takes inspiration from like Assassin's Creed and the open world Batman Arkham games, it's easy difficulty and it's finicky parkour system and controls prevents me from reccomending the game way above the above mentioned titles rather than midly.
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