One of the best power fantasies ever.
this game truly makes you feel powerful while still being challenging. The combat never gets old, and the open world is very atmospheric and immersive most people criticize it's open world for being too similar to ubisoft's open world games because of some elements like the towers but I think there is nothing wrong with that and I think this game refines that formula and makes it actually fun. The story is pretty okish but it doesn't get in your way too much so it's better than nothing I think you'll like it if you are a lord of the rings fan. The dlcs are great at the start I despised the dlcs because I thought they were just recycled content but after completing both of them I have to say they are the best content of the game.
My final thoughts : you should play it if you are a lord of the rings fan or if you just want to play a solid game with exceptional combat.

Shadow of Mordor notes/review

Editor’s note: found out it thinks I’ve played 51 hrs and 45 minutes when I had played maybe 15 minutes. The rest was standby time. Might be able to spin a decent ballpark of time logged when it’s over. 100% 91 hrs 32 min. So pretty much 40 hours on the nose. With DLC 103 hrs 46 min. So around 52 hrs 30 min total.

Okay. This review is a loosely assembled thing of notes from close to two months of playing. I have a lot of thoughts, but some of them are not positive or negative enough to have warranted a mention. I’ll try to add some connective tissue…

Takes a while to get going. Tripping over itself explaining its myriad systems and menus. Has a habit of flashing text and icons and dialogue on screen all at the same time which is annoying and overwhelming when you’re new and trying to learn. And I don’t just mean from a non-stop explanation point of view, I mean from a “I can’t read three things at once” point of view. Spider-Man and Arkham Knight are like this too, so I guess I’m not too surprised.

Okay side note: why does everyone describe Mordor as “Assassin’s Creed but LOTR”? I don’t see the resemblance. The resemblance starts and ends with the very light parkour elements and some of the movement mechanics, which are implemented just the same way in, to name a few, the Arkham games and Spider-Man, so I don’t think the comparison really holds. Calling it Arkham Mordor, on the other hand…

The combat in this game is a riot. It’s rich with variety and caveats to master. It winds up with slightly less going on than Arkham Knight, but it feels good. I think one trick is there aren’t as many enemy types. But, the progression of unlocking moves is good and by the end, you’ll feel like an absolute madman. The finishers are absolutely brutal and amazing. One throat slit left a corpse gurgling on the ground. I was like…yeah, this ain’t your normal action game.

Interrogation dialogue is amazing. “Do not resist!” “Forfeit your mind!” growling in elvish!” “I see you!” “Suffer me now!” I loved hearing him growl all this stuff.

“By the trail of dead they shall know me.”

One thing that’s kind of goofy about this game is it’s all overland foot travel. No gliding, no flying, no swimming, no vehicles. Which doesn’t immediately jump out to me as weird, except the way the world is populated is not sparse or bare. It’s like everywhere you go you trip over a random pack of Uruks. I’m always down for a fight and the combat is gratifying, but the pacing, for lack of a better word, is wonky. There’s not as much dead space or time as I would expect. Maybe this will change as I go on. (Ed. Once you start fast traveling around, there’s not much running across the landscape, and it stopped feeling goofy to me after a while.)

Runes make sense but they’re oddly technical and the dissonance with the world is a little funny. 49% chance of regaining 20 health on a flurry kill is a funny way of describing something in a game about fantasy and magic and medieval combat.

Feels like Far Cry 2 in the way that things will often happen totally incidental to what you have planned and it rules. The world feels like it’s not revolving around you. You’ll run into a pack of enemies fighting wild creatures, or a branded pack of allies will kill captains in battle without you, and so much more. A lot of smiles and laughs from playing this game came from watching the systems bump into each other in really neat, organic ways.

The writing is good! Funny! Humanizes orcs!

Game is doing its best to suck me in despite logging maybe five hours and still feeling overwhelmed. So many things being introduced and explained, it’s a lot. But I keep wanting to dive back into it and really get my feet wet. (Ed. This was written about…five hours in.)

The combat is missing something that Arkham Knight has. Rhythm? Impact? Force? Talion’s sword doesn’t feel quite right. It’s almost there!! But it lacks a certain oomf behind it that I can’t put my finger on. (Ed. After having finished the game, I still sort of resonate with this point, but after a while I got used to it.)

Combat is definitely bananas and executions are insane. I cannot get over how creative, brutal, and satisfying the combat animations are, especially the dozens of different executions.

Frame rate stutters during cutscenes, sometimes never to recover. (Fixed on a hard reboot. Never happened again.)

Okay, Shadow, you can stop giving me the same on screen button prompts/tutorials every time I resume a game. I eventually turned off on screen prompts. I like the occasional reminder from the game that I can do a contextual action, but the reminders got SUPER repetitive and I couldn’t handle it anymore.

Stealth system is intelligent and generous. I appreciate how there’s a window between being spotted and still being able to execute a stealth action, instead of the stealth options going away the instant an enemy spots you. I think this has been common in stealth games of the modern era, but I noticed it a lot here because of how important it is for certain objectives to do certain actions without being seen.

The politicking in this game is absolutely wonderful. Turning war chiefs against each other and grooming people to do your bidding is straight craziness. Along with incidental stuff happening without my involvement, this was the other thing that always brought a smile to my face.

The story in Mordor really did it for me. I thought it was well told, and it seemed to me very much at home in the Tolkien canon. I’ve never read any of the books, but at a minimum it seemed to do a great job of slotting into the movie world without being tacky or on the nose about it. They do an incredible job pulling in visual design elements, sound effects, bits of dialogue, and even the flame-based visual effect of the Ring, or in the game, Wraith vision. It feels like it’s part of the team, but stands on its own and doesn’t lean overwhelmingly into “Hey, remember, this is a LOTR movie!” every 30 seconds. Anyway, I got invested in the story and the characters and was very interested to see it play out. Very well done to the team on this one.

I also beat all the DLCs. Wild Hunt was fine, some neat additions, decent little narrative. I liked Bright Lord a bunch. The story was super good, the missions were seriously challenging, and it felt like a lot of thought was put into it, whereas Wild Hunt could’ve been stuck right into the game and been mostly the same.

On the other hand, there are some technical issues, including the camera acting up in combat and also during brief cinematics like captains’ intros. I occasionally had to reboot the console to fix a couple bugs. Nothing out of control though. The game is also pretty long and, like any video game, can be repetitive. I was deadset on beating it all, and I did beat IT ALL, but man it was a slog. I took almost a month off between the DLCs because I was so burned out. Considering I spent (probably) more time playing Spider-Man and I didn’t get burned out or take a hiatus, Mordor is probably a little more drab and a little more repetitive.

I haven’t even touched the Nemesis system….uh…um…I loved it. It was great. Eventually, it gets slightly tiresome, mainly because I JUST NEED TO DO THIS THING, CAN YOU [CAPTAIN] PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE? On the other hand, it’s responsible for some of the greatest moments in the game, as well as one of the most persistent challenges for me in the form of the hardest captain I fought in the first half of the game continuing to come back to life.

Okay this review has gone on far long enough. I leave you with a meme, which may not show up on Backloggd. (Yeah, no luck. Oh well.) Good night.



Como um grande fã de Tolkien, já era de se esperar que eu fosse gostar desse game. A história não tem nada de especial, mas sabe segurar bem as pontas; penso que o que esse jogo tem de melhor está em suas mecânicas de combate, que fluem super bem e são de fácil aprendizado. A nota poderia ser maior, se não fosse por duas coisas: a primeira, achei o final decepcionante; esperava mais. A segunda, passei muita raiva com os controles do jogo; eles não obedeciam os meus comandos em momentos mais tensos, em que eu estava cercado de orcs e caragors e precisava fugir, resultando em muitas mortes desnecessárias.

After watching Rings of Power with my girlfriend, I decided I should check out the source material so of course I did the sensible thing and tried out Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. (The actual reason is it was free on Amazon/Twitch Prime like a month or two ago and I figured why not)

First off, a neat thing I truly didn’t expect is that you can kinda-sorta play the game as a woman? It lets you select a skin for Talion and most of them just put him in different types of armor (normal guy armor, evil guy armor, elf guy armor, etc) but then one of them is just a woman named Lithariel? It’s purely cosmetic (no audio/dialogue changes) and only in the gameplay segments (cutscenes switch back to generic Talion), but it’s kinda neat that it’s available at all. Being able to be a cool lady with a sword instead of generic gruff white dude #75 was a big plus for me.

But, uh, other than that I didn’t have a great time? The movement feels mushy (on keyboard and mouse, maybe controller would feel better?) and I felt like I was constantly fighting the camera for control. I also didn’t care much for the combat. I’ve never really been a big fan of the Batman Arkham game style combat and this is pretty directly that with some bits added on. But then this one it feels like I don’t get to decide who I’m actually targeting so I just kind of flailed between targets. I pretty frequently caught myself thinking that I wish this felt more like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey because I love how that game feels for runnin’ around, climbin’ stuff, and stabbin’ dudes. Maybe that’s an unfair comparison since AC:O was several years later but it constantly came to mind for me.

I’m largely ambivalent on Lord of the Rings in general so this game is kind of not targeted towards me but the narrative (as far as I saw in my 3-ish hours of playtime) didn’t really do anything for me. Talion is a kinda boring sad dad, Celebrimbor trying to regain his memories doesn’t do much for me either (maybe because I already know some of his deal and the game seems to assume I wouldn’t know anything), and having missions where I had to go hang out with Gollum felt like fan service aimed at completely different people. It’s not necessarily a bad thing (well, maybe the Talion stuff is, that’s dreadfully dull) but it left me without much to really latch onto here. If the story had been intriguing enough maybe I’d feel compelled to stick through the mushy controls for a while longer to see what’s up with the rest of it.

Highly addictive. Once you start playing and clearing all the icons.. it's really hard to stop.

"Ok now I stop..
- Wait, there's an artifact just over there.
- HEY YOU SCUM! You left me for dead.. you will regret it!"

It just never ends! First thing you know it's 1am.

A perfectly competent open world title grafted from several major AAA franchises at the time (Arkham, Assasins Creed) that's elevated entirely by one really good unique mechanic: the Nemesis System.

The Nemesis System still holds up wonderfully, allowing you to create some compelling stories and relationships with your foes. It's a shame WB's legal dickery prevented anyone else from being able to try their own take on it. Even now it still feels like a truly next gen idea.

Also docking a point for the final boss fight still one of the biggest wet farts of a climax of any game this past decade.

Middle-earth Shadow of Mordor has a poor story, a cliche unlikable lead, poor use of source material, a poor ending, and combat and stealth that are inferior to the Batman Arkham series and locations and climbing inferior to the Assassins Creed series, both of which the game seems to have been built around, however, the nemesis systems helps to improve the game greatly by giving you entertaining enemies that act against you and each other.

The nemesis system creates 20 captains and five war chiefs in both locations of the game for you to fight against. Each one will have a different name, title, strengths, fears, weaknesses, and their own power level based on their starting power and things that they do or that happen to them. Their strengths, weaknesses, and power can increase or decrease depending on if you are killed by them or they fight you and live, if they complete or fail events they start or are involved in, or if you wound them and they return later with scars from the old battle. These characters can be killed by both you and one another and are soon replaced, getting killed by an unnamed soldier can see that character promoted to a captain. Each character might have a different fighting style, be immune or weak to certain damage types, have a group of followers, etc. You gain the ability to dominate and make your enemies fight for you (3/4+ of the way through the main story), you can then order them to go on missions against your other enemies.

Runes can be added to your three weapons to give you bonuses that fit your style, they are obtained by killing captains and war chiefs and you can get better ones based on how strong the enemy you defeated was and if you exploited a weakness or not. You can gain an ability to force enemy soldiers and Captains to issue death threats on other Captains or Warchiefs which increases their power level, gives them guards, but makes it more likely for them to drop rare and powerful runes. There are 10 missions to complete for your sword, dagger, and bow with every five changing the look of your weapon and adding engravings on it, I assume this made them do more damage (I couldn't tell, no idea how it would effect the knife which is just for stealth kills).

I would love to see a game make use of the nemesis system in the future and I'd want to see some kind of system for allies, to have unique people fighting on both sides, possible with you leading a force. Fighting varied and entertaining opponents as one boring guy who keeps coming back from the dead kind of hurts the system, and seems like an odd choice when it could have been him leading the group of rangers he started with or the other two groups of people (one in each area) fighting the orcs. Talion even mentions that his son, who was killed at the start of the game, was about to become a ranger. Having your son as one of your Captains that could live or die based on your actions could have been interesting.


Combat and climbing don't feel as fluid as they do in Batman or Assassins Creed, I would frequently hit the wrong enemy or jump to the wrong location, and you don't have as many options as you would have in those games, though you do still get some fun abilities. While the core gameplay has been done better, the game is still enjoyable and the nemesis system helps to make the game an easy recommendation. The GOTY edition includes some nice additions such as additional game modes and a new character to play as, new enemy types, and it allows you to start the game with some very powerful runes for your weapons if you choose to use them (I didn't). Playing as Celebrimbor gives you some different abilities during his campaign but your combat animations are the same.

The nemesis system does make me kind of wish I was worse at video games, as I never really bothered to remember any of my enemies because I killed them all so easily (unless I was screwed over by the poor targeting system, that I became convinced tries to make you hit your allies instead of enemies). I never got those stories others had where they had multiple encounters with one person where they got killed, fled, where they made him flee, or where they "killed" him and he came back wounded later. Also, part of the reason why I would have preferred actual allies working with you that could live or die. During the second to last level the orc that was supposed to have given you the most trouble shows up leading a force against your controlled groups. For some that would have been cool, for me it had me thinking, "Oh yeah, you're that guy who killed me once when my character froze and refused to move or attack, and then I came back and killed you easily (I didn't decapitate him so he survived his "death" and now had a metal plate in his head)."

Main missions are very strangely organized with many of them serving as tutorial missions or giving you access to new abilities. You have five tiers of upgrades and by the time I gained one of story abilities in the third tier I had already started to unlock abilities in the fifth, and I could have done other main missions instead of that one. More than halfway through the game you are given a tutorial on how to ride a mount even though you were likely doing that early on in the first area of the game. Once I moved to the second area of the game there was also no reason to return to the first as I had done everything I wanted to there, even with another orc army still in the original area was no story reason to go back.

Having to constantly get information on new captain names, strengths, and weaknesses is tedious and pointless since you should be able to get information from the orcs already under your control, no idea why they make you waste your time with the longer animation once you are able to control them.

I'm not sure if the game is bad commentary or if the writers just weren't thinking with the things Talion does and says or complains about.

Talion: He hides in darkness
...So do you
Talion: Climbing like
...You
Talion: Enslaving people, this is awful
...You have an enslaved army

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVmW8DXBlik

Fantastic experience but let down by two of the three boss fights being half-assed QTEs, the other being a more boring version of the standard combat, and the controls fighting you at every turn with delayed or dropped inputs and Talion either locking onto the wrong thing or nothing at all causing him to either suddenly rocket in a different direction or just stand there aimlessly; again though a fantastic game to play and replay regardless of the controls.

DLCs:
Lord of The Hunt is fun though really short and easy.
Bright Lord is garbage and removes abilities and increases enemy health to create a more tedious challenge exacebated by it swarming you with followers even without request that Talion locks onto instead and wastes the few abilities that actually do meaningful damage.