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.


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.