This title doesn't receive nearly enough praise for taking many mechanics and features from other games and improving them all to become its own beast.
In the Batman Arkham series you can get through most combat by mashing parry; in Shadow of Mordor that will lead you to get brutalized by grunts.
In Assassin's Creed you have to meticolously and slowly find ledges to climb up a house; in Shadow of Mordor you run up to a 100-meter wall, leap towards it, climb to the top and drop into a cluster of orcs on the other side in a 5 second span.

The story is whatever, with only the intro and a couple of character interactions resembling anything good, but the first orcs you meet and that keep giving you trouble will probably stick with you more, deservingly so.

On my first playthrough the mojave drive-in was the first dlc location i discovered and it stayed at the back of my mind until I reached the reccommended level to approach it. As soon as I did, I started the dlc and immediately felt a major disconnect when the robot doctors spoke. Their never ending ramblings and silly jokes took me out of the base game's atmosphere, so I reloaded a save and got back into the Mojave.

After finishing DM and HH I started OWB and was able to finish it, but still have not been able to find the characters compelling, other than Dala, 8 and Mobius. That said, Borous is a close runner-up for the "Most Punchable Face" Award and only loses beacuse Dean Domino is such a spiteful piece of shit.

Waaaay too many encounters in this one. Thankfully they aren't too terrible. Then there's the nightcrawlers, which I swear must be bugged because i kept fucking missing 95% headshots with them, and they take a fifth of your health in a bite.

Games should have stopped doing the "you keep playing because you like hurting other people" thing after Spec Ops: the Line.

Here it's worse: a pretentious story getting in the way of thrilling mechanics, constantly yanking the player away from the only thing that makes the game worth a damn.

Still you can't deny the game is pretty damn good when you're fully in it

MGR:R is at its best a blood-pumping, adrenaline-fueled ride, with moments that are some of the most spectacular in gaming to this day. When the first boss is more memorable than a lot of its contemporaries's final bosses, you know you're in for a treat.

The combat is great, though I could never get a grip on the combos as I would like, but it seems to be a common complaint of mine for Platinum Games's titles, so I've just come to accept it by now.

Everybody with a cursory knowledge of the game knows the stealth is half-baked, but if you play it you know it's just broken, a vestige of the mainline series this game would have been better without. I also didn't particularly enjoy the basic movement of the characters; walking is slow, but I found running to sometimes be unreliable and jumping feels awkward.

Story-wise, the characters are remarkably fleshed-out for a ~10h game (plus DLCs) and the story has a lot of care put into it, especially with the motivations of its villains and main character.

That said, when a hammy mercenary speaks to a room of harvested brains of children abducted from poor countries about reliving the glory days of post 9/11, I have to wonder if this thrill-ride is a suitable vehicle for commentary on the horrors of war or if it's just struggling to be both a stylish Platinum action title and a Metal Gear Solid game at the same time.