Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Being hesitant with buying Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor during Steam summer sale turned out to mean couple euros saved as Warner Bros. decided to suddenly drop the base price of the game, making the sale price in turn go even lower. The reduction was actually applied incorrectly at first and some people quick enough got the game for mere 2.50 currency. But even at 10 such a well-received title is a rather good deal.

Arkham-style combat

I was interested in Shadow of Mordor due to its setting but the reason I was not sure if I really wanted it was the combat. The game uses the rhythm-based system made popular (or even invented?) by the Batman: Arkham series. My sole experience with such "freeflow" combat previously had been Remember Me. And I did not like that very much.

While the basic idea in this game is the same, its implementation proved to be better. The main reason for that is probably not needing to press attack buttons in certain order to build up a combo.You only need to keep hitting enemies with any attack for your streak to increase and your finishing moves to grow in strength.

Of course you also need to avoid getting hit yourself. But that too is easier than in Remember Me. Albeit early on orc packs attacking you tend to grow huge due to you lacking in power to kill them quickly and it can get pretty damn hectic to keep parrying and dodging everything. My deaths to orcs -- or uruks as they want to be called -- happened only during the first hours. Later on I only died to the damn caragors. Dodging their attacks often did not seem to work. I really should have just used bow to kill them every time.

Plenty of different attacks

Character upgrades really ease the combat: your streak will ignore one interrupt, you get powerful finisher moves, you need fewer attacks for their threshold, and eventually you can even use two finishers for every threshold. My favorite combo was Wraith Flash followed by Wraith Burn to instantly kill all enemies stunned by the first attack. The flurry attack you can use on a single stunned target also felt awesome. It is great for building up your streak quickly, although you can get hit during it.

The throwing knife ability felt pointless. I also did not really use the three abilities that allow endless combat, stealth, and ranged finishers for a short duration. I had access to the first, Storm of Urfael, from the start as Shadow of Mordor is now sold as a game of the year edition which has all the DLC, including a bunch of epic weapon runes to make the game easier. One of these runes gives you early access to the Storm, which is a final tier ability.

Embarrassingly enough I did not figure out how it worked until I had gotten the ability the normal way. Maybe I had tried it before I had even gotten any combat finishers and it thus did nothing.

Controls have minor issues

Gamepad is far from having enough buttons to designate a different one for every attack Shadow of Mordor has. And so the game resorts to using combinations of two. The combat finishers can be bit clumsy in this regard as you have to press the two buttons at the same time (as I eventually figured out). The execute move, for instance, requires B and Y. If you unintentionally press B first, you end up using the stun attack. That is not as bad as Y which is the parry button. If there is no attack to parry, pressing the button will break your streak.

Keyboard is a whole different matter; I think the special moves all have their own keys. That is also one of the reasons I decided to use my controller instead -- I thought it might be easier to memorize fewer buttons. The combat also felt silly with mouse, and the game's many QTEs felt more natural with a controller as well. Bow combat would have been easier with mouse of course. But as you do most shooting with the slowdown from your focus bar, scoring headshots is much easier than in, say for instance, Hunted: The Demon's Forge.

A being jump, dodge, and run caused some trouble, however. It made getting out of combat somewhat tricky at times as the character would roll instead of running. I wonder why they did not implement it like in the Darksiders games where slightly tilting the movement stick makes your character to walk, and fully pressing it to run. Maybe that would have messed with the tightly controlled combat.

Shadow of Mordor also has stealth. Staying hidden is not too difficult as it takes quite a while for the orcs to spot you. You can often even get a stealth kill even if your target has already seen you. Some of the main and side missions where you need to stay completely undetected can be frustrating, however. They are hardly impossible, though. You just need to stay patient.

Procedurally generated foes

One of the game's big selling points (supposedly) is the Nemesis system. Amongst the hundreds of orcs are named captains and warchiefs with many strengths and weaknesses. They often return when killed and remember how they "died" and have an injury related to it. Their levels grow when succeeding at power struggles -- or when killing you. Late into the game you also get an ability to turn orcs to your side by branding them. This comes to a climax at the end, where before the QTE final boss, you get take on five enemy warchiefs at once with your own five in an open battle.

While fairly interesting, I would say the Nemesis system is pretty typical procedurally generated content -- it lacks a soul. The captains and warchiefs have names, different characteristics and colors but they are still of no importance. They are not memorable even if it is somewhat amusing to see some unfortunate captain returning after being killed five times. The lack of a good antagonist hurts the story.

Desperately needs the setting

The use of Middle-earth license is questionable. Without it the world would be utterly without any depth. And Monolith took quite a few liberties with the lore too, coming up with new monsters and twisting some known history of Middle-earth. For instance, Celebrimbor was only involved in the forging of the Three rings, not the Seven or the Nine, nor the One Ring. Caragors are also like wargs and graugs basically trolls. Why did they need their own versions?

The GOTY version also comes with a set of alternate skins for the protagonist, Talion. One of them is actually female, Lithariel (as I learned about halfway through the game). Talion however retains his voice like Rico in Just Cause 2 if you mod another skin to him, though you can mod Rico's voice away too.

Playing "as" Lithariel I started to wonder if they could have made you choose your character between Talion and his wife Ioreth at the start. They would have barely needed to have Laura Bailey record more lines and make her character bit more warrior-like. It would have changed nothing but maybe made the game more appealing for wider audience.

High production values

Shadow of Mordor has a big-name voice cast. In addition to Laura Bailey, there is Troy Baker who basically reprises his Joel (The Last of Us) role as Talion. Jennifer Hale also does a pretty good Cate Blanchett impression as Galadriel during the opening. Claudia Black I again failed to recognize even though Marwen sounded familiar. Probably the best work is done by Alastair Duncan as Celebrimbor, though. He sounds very much like his Turian roles in Mass Effect.

Graphics-wise the game is on par with The Witcher 2, although it looks like it would start looking pretty bad, pretty quickly if you start lowering the settings. The High setting textures are not the sharpest even on the main character. There is also an Ultra level but that requires you to download a large texture pack to have any effect. I did so as some forum comments said their GTX 970s could handle the textures even though the DLC says it requires 6GB VRAM.

My 970 definitely had trouble. The game would come to a halt every time it needed to load more stuff to the GPU. I think the commenters probably had not actually downloaded the pack as you need to separately add the DLC to your game on Steam. It does not do so automatically, at least not on your first installation.

Textures on High, and other settings maxed, the game ran well. However, in the second zone there were places where I got frequent drops to 40 FPS, likely thanks to the increased level of detail from all the vegetation. Vsync option also does nothing. I had to enable it on the Nvidia control panel.


All in all, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was an all right experience. The AAA production values guarantee enjoyable time but the game is still a shallow open world that is focused on one thing -- killing hundreds of orcs.