Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

The Good
The game is extremely pretty. The textures look great, the models are nicely detailed and the animations and special effects are very well done. The only blemish in the game's looks is in the anti-aliasing: the engine only supports FXAA, barely effective in hiding the jagged lines. One of the options offered is to do anti-aliasing by blur, but that just makes things worse. The menus and UI are all well designed and easy and intuitive to use, with the exception of the rune screen which requires a lot of back and forth to compare equipped and available equipment.

The gameplay revolves around a mix of the style seen in the Batman Arkham series combat and the exploration and free running featured in Assassin's Creed. The combat is equally as flashy as Batman's, but more dynamic: a lot more enemies will get involved in the battle at the same time and tend to wait around much less than what the Joker's minions did. Featured as persistent progression mechanics are two different skills trees, with three types of points that can be earned to unlocked them. The main tree's abilities are unlocked through standard experience points, earned mainly by killing enemies. The tiers in this tree can only be unlocked by power points, which come from completing tasks that directly interfere with Sauron's captains. Lastly, the equipment skills are tied to Mirian, received exclusively through collectibles and side missions. Impressively most of these unlockable skills are interesting and I've looked forward to every single level up. In the matter of abilities, and keeping up the inevitable comparisons with Batman, I've found that all the active attacks that I've unlocked were more than useful, while in the Dark Knight's game I've rarely used several of those. Talion has at his disposal three weapons with which to fight Uruks and the creatures of Mordor: a sword, which delivers the standard attacks; a bow, wielded by the wraith; his son's broken sword, which he uses as a dagger, to deliver stealth attacks. The big difference that sets apart Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor from other games in the genre is the Nemesis system. In both regions there are 20 slots that can be occupied by special Uruks called captains. Uruks who become captains gain a name, a personality and special abilities. If captains are left alone they will gain in power as time goes by or when they successfully complete special events. The Nemesis system creates a very fun depth to the free-form part of the game, and makes it so even going around just fighting random captains takes a long time to become repetitive. The explorable areas are smaller than what we're used to in games of the same genre, but this isn't a bad thing at all: getting side-tracked in this game is easy enough as it is, so not having to travel an empty landscape for a long time helps keeping everything interesting. Lots of collectibles and extra activities are scattered across the landscape: Ithildin, artifacts, slaves to free and challenges that focus on one of the weapons. The artifacts in particular are very interesting because they contain additional flavour to the secondary characters. The weapon challenges are a mixed bag of good and bad: some are fun, others are unimaginative or poorly designed.

Between all the optional missions and items and the Nemesis system the game offers a great longevity. It's very easy to get sidetracked, but even the most simple fighting takes a long time to become repetitive.

Great contextual music is featured all throughout the game. The voice acting for the Uruks is of exceptional quality, while the humans' isn't as remarkable.

The technical aspects of the PC version are fantastic. I've already said how good the game looks, but the price in framerate is very small even with a setup that's mid-range. The loading times when fast travelling are extremely short, and the initial loading is not excessive either. The mouse controls feel quick and responsive and the keyboard bindings are very satisfying, like they were in the Batman series: there are no awkward combinations of keys to hit to perform the special abilities as they all can be mapped on single keys.

The Bad
For some mystifying reason the developers chose to use pre-rendered videos for all the story cutscenes instead of the game engine. As a result, they all look badly compressed and with washed out colours, and in general it seems that they were even recorded with inferior textures and effects compared to those available on the actual game.

The HUD is very clean and functional, but it is constantly ruined by ugly floating markers that can't be removed. In particular the ones that point to targets to kill can be extremely inconvenient because they will cover their heads, making it potentially hard to get headshots from a distance. The only other small problem I had with the HUD was that the North marker on the minimap is constantly hidden by the destination markers, forcing the players to continually open the map if the want to orientate themselves.

The sound effects are largely unsatisfying and the general sound design didn't impress me at all: most blows and special effects never feel as “meaty” as they should've. There are also instances of bad volume levels balance during interactive cutscenes, most noticeably near the start of the game.

Some of the issues that affected the Batman Arkham series are still present. In particular the problems with choosing the target for the next attack are completely unchanged, and it's often possible to lose good combos because of it. It's not felt as heavily as Batman, however, because of the higher numbers of enemies that Talion faces and the better active abilities that enable him to link attacks together more efficiently. The free running mechanics use an extremely simplified sticky system that requires minimal input, but can often feel limiting, because whenever he's nearby surfaces that he can grab Talion will disregard the direction he's given and jump for them. Small movements and adjustments in those situations are impossible. The variety of regular Uruks is very limited and the presence of a few occasional animals doesn't really fill that hole. It doesn't help that they all have the same vulnerability, being vaulted over, and thus there's very little strategy to be applied in combat based on the types of enemy. The short introductions that the captains do when they enter combat with Talion, part of the Nemesis system to help the players familiarise themselves with the enemy, are very nice at first, but after tens of times I just started wishing I could skip them. Moreover, their forced interruption can cause a lot of problems if they happen while fighting against other Uruks, because they'll also cancel out the current combo. The maximum power level that captains and warchiefs can reach is 20. This is a rather disappointing limit, because by the end of the game even those of that level will pose barely any challenge.

I found the story pretty uninteresting, but that didn't affect my enjoyment of the game in any way: it's just the device that makes it all move along. The only real problem is that it ties badly with the gameplay aspects, especially by completely disregarding the fact that Talion can effectively face as many Uruks as Sauron would like to send at him.

The Bottom Line
Shadow of Mordor is a brilliant action game, with fun combat and an ingenious mechanic in the Nemesis system that keeps what would normally be repetitive tasks fresh for a long time. It is very well balanced in both difficulty and length. Great looking graphics and excellent keyboard and mouse controls top up one of the best PC ports I've seen in a long time.