HERE IS THE REVIEW FOR THE GAME SHADOW OF MORDOR FROM IGN
A brief and shocking opening scene sets a dark and brutal tone as
Talion, a former Ranger of Gondor, is ritually executed along with his
family. Talion’s spirit is then bound to an amnesiac elf ghost and
returned to Middle-earth for vengeance against Sauron’s forces. It’s a
story that doesn’t make total sense for hardcore Tolkien scholars, but
it’s well-acted. It makes decent use of Gollum, and there are a couple
of memorable new characters - particularly Ratbag the comic-relief uruk,
who guides you through the process of infiltrating the enemy army.
My interest in the plot dwindled toward the end, but it does a fair
job of explaining why Talion has such sweet supernatural powers with his
sword, dagger, and bow.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
is an action-packed adventure-RPG inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Much like in the Batman: Arkham games,
you can choose to stealthily pick off enemies one at a time, or dive head-first into a brawl with dozens of opponents and beat the crap out
of them with a smoothly animated series of attacks and counters. Unlike
Batman, of course, Mordor’s involve great, gory decapitation and
stabbing animations, and outside of the scripted story missions, there
are few distinctly separated stealth and combat areas. It’s enticingly
freeform.
Acrobatically slaughtering Sauron’s ugly minions feels as easy as it
appears to be for Legolas in Peter Jackson’s movies, and it’s more fun
to do than to watch. Sword combat feels pretty much just as good here as
brawling does in Batman – which is to say it’s amazing. Mordor’s take
on building up hit streaks to power up lethal takedowns is a bit more
forgiving, in that you’re almost never locked into an animation. If you
push the counter button, Talion will drop what he’s doing and counter
instantly. It’s extremely responsive. A time-slowing power makes scoring
a couple of headshots with the bow easy, whether in stealth or in the
heat of battle, though it’s kept in check by ammo constraints and a
limited (but upgradable) supply of time-slowing juice. And even though
stealth gameplay is pretty basic, it’s great to have the option to thin
the herd a bit before they know you’re there.
What really sets the feel of Mordor’s combat apart from the Batman
games is that it’s really easy to get into trouble, especially early on.
If you let the uruks raise the alarm in one of their strongholds, or
just happen across a few large wandering groups on the densely populated
map, you can quickly become overwhelmed by more enemies than you can
hope to handle. Picking out the shield bearers and ax-wielding
berserkers who are immune to frontal attacks and killing them first
becomes tough to do when you’re completely surrounded, and it goes
downhill from there. Health doesn’t recharge much on its own, and until
you can upgrade your health pool, you may find yourself succumbing to
death by a thousand pinpricks if you don’t retreat.
Things got a lot easier a few hours in when I’d leveled up and
unlocked more of Talion’s skill tree so that I could build up combos
quicker, execute two enemies for the price of one, and even fight
mounted on a huge, rancor-like graug who pops uruks into his mouth like
jellybeans. It feels powerful, but I still don’t feel invincible even
with everything nearly maxed out.
And what’s really cool about Mordor is that whether you win or lose a
fight, something interesting happens. If you kill an uruk captain, he
drops a rune that can be slotted into one of your weapons for bonuses.
Some of them changed the way I played, like the legendary rune that
extended the amount of time I have to score another hit before my combo
count resets by 10 seconds, and one that made me immune to poison
attacks. If any uruk kills you, even if he’s a random grunt, he levels
up and earns new abilities and some cooler armor. Maybe he gets promoted
up the chain of command. You’ll definitely run into him again later to
settle the score, and he’ll have a new introduction taunt about his
victory when you meet. It makes each death feel meaningful.
Most uruk captains do tend to die too quickly to really become
memorable, but some definitely did. (Sometimes they’ll survive being
apparently killed by you and come back with a scarred face.) For that
reason, and to identify the arrival of a significant threat, I never
really got tired of the action-pausing cutscenes that play when a
captain shows up. There are enough different voices and multiple
possible lines that I rarely saw repeats, and the uruk faces are
surprisingly well animated and expressive.
Even though the hierarchy is a pretty simple system when you
understand what it’s doing, and realize that these uruk captains aren’t
actually roaming the map in real time, it’s great to play with. Uruks
have an internal power struggle for rank, and you can interrupt their
duels, feasts, hunts, and more to pick fights and kill off Uruk captains
and ultimately the powerful Warchiefs. Each captain has his own
randomized strengths and vulnerabilities, so every fight is at least a
little different. I ran into a couple of guys who seemed invulnerable to
almost everything, which was a little annoying – one fight took me
about 15 minutes of repeatedly chasing down a captain who was
invulnerable to my sword and dagger and filling him with arrows trying
to damage him faster than his health regenerated. Eventually, though,
they all went down.
In the second act, you transition from the bleak, brown map to a
refreshingly greener-looking area of Mordor. There, Talion and his
elf-ghost buddy suddenly realize he can mind-control uruks and turn them
against each other. (It feels like something might’ve been cut out
there.) That’s even more fun, because the ability to “brand” an enemy
gives you the choice of either killing a captain for a rune reward or
controlling him and siccing him on one of his former allies. Taking an
uruk alive can be trickier than lopping off his head, though, so it’s
more challenging to accomplish the new goal of mind-controlling five
Warchiefs. I love how you have the option to mind-control a Warchief’s
lieutenants, then kill the Warchief, to watch your minion become the new
Warchief. I did notice that the mind-control visual effect caused some
slowdown on the PlayStation 4 version (the Xbox One version has yet to
arrive for testing), but it didn’t interfere much with combat.
Charging through the decent but less-exciting story missions would
probably take around 12 hours, but the goal of killing or dominating the
Warchiefs is much more time-consuming and interesting. I spent around
25 hours to reach the end, and there’s still a lot of challenging side
missions based around testing sword, bow, and dagger skills left to do.
And, of course, lots of collectables and wildlife-hunting challenges.
On the PC side Mordor also compares to the
Batman games, in that it’s of good quality. There are even some enhanced
graphics settings, including an ultra-high texture setting that
requires a full 6GB of video memory. My only issue with it is some
awkward menu controls, but most of those are customizable and those that
aren’t aren’t too inconvenient to get used to.
After a day with Shadow of Mordor on Xbox
One, I can confidently recommend it just as strongly as the PS4 and PC
versions. True, this is probably the worst-looking of the bunch by a
small margin - the PS4 runs at a slightly higher resolution and the PC
has better lighting than either (and all the resolution your hardware
can handle) - but it performs at roughly the same clip as the PS4
version and provides effectively the same experience. That means what
appears to our eyes to be a framerate that fluctuates somewhere between
30 and 60, excluding occasional slowdowns when "combat-branding" an uruk
in the midst of a large group of enemies. If you have an Xbox One,
there's no reason to avoid this version.
The Verdict
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
stands out from other open-world action games by putting a great new
layer on top of the trail that Batman blazed. I was surprised at how
well it integrates its excellent combat with rewarding feedback and
progression not just for me, but also for my enemies. I’ve had many more
memorable and unpredictable battles with its randomized Warchiefs and
captains than I did in the scripted campaign missions, and I expect
those to keep on coming.
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