NGP Review: Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor
In the past thirteen years since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out the story of Middle Earth has been there and back again. It is amazing to see the work of J.R.R. Tolkien jump off the pages and onto the big screen. In the case of Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor, the video game, the story takes a few familiar names and faces, mixes it in with the desperate setting of Middle Earth, and creates a stand alone story that I believe Tolkien himself would have been proud of.
Graphics
The look and feel of this game right off the bat is 100% authentic LotR trilogy. The landscape of Middle Earth is a mixture of darkness and decay but at the same time is alive with activity and personality. The graphics are truly next gen and is one of the best looking games I have seen out of this generation yet. It’s amazing when you get a feeling out of a video game that makes you believe as if real life is reflected from it. It was raining and dark when I set out on a side mission to free some prisoners form an uruk (the orcish bad guys in the game) camp. I decided to go grab a snack and on the way I opened the blinds of a window only to reveal, to my surprise, that it was calm and sunny. I had to take a second and realize that it was just in the game that it was raining. That is how encompassing the setting of this game becomes.
Story
The story is original to the Lord of the Rings cannon and does a great job of revealing bits and pieces of it to you throughout the course of the game. In the beginning you only know that the main character Talion’s family has been killed, that he himself was killed but denied death, and that somehow through that he was bound to a wraith with great power (later found out to be Celebrimbor, the elvish forger of the Rings of Power). Slowly throughout the development of the story flashes of memory about who each character is and why they are in the situation they are in pop up. The cut scenes before and after each main mission are amazing could probably be watched from start to finish as a stand alone CGI style LotR movie. My only gripe with the story is that there could have been more. It takes on average around 20 hours to complete the main mission of the game and while that is about average for an RPG (Skyrim’s was about 30 hours for comparison) it just feels like it ended too quickly. The meat of the game happens in the side missions and activities spread around Middle Earth’s open environment offering up hundreds of hours of exploring and gameplay.
Gameplay
This is where the game gets really interesting, the gameplay itself. It’s actually really easy to define by comparing it to all the games it borrows from. If you’ve ever played Assassins Creed or Batman Arkham City this game is going to feel really familiar to you. The combat is right out of Batman Arkham City in that it is a free flowing dance of destruction more that it is a repetitive striking of enemies until their health bar goes bye bye. It is also has the timed button presses that you would find in Batman for countering enemy attacks and saving yourself from death with a “last chance” analog and button combo. The stealth gameplay is right out of any Assassins Creed game with the hide in the bushes, lure enemy over, and kill mechanic along with the stealth kill from above and stealth ledge kills as well. It even has towers to climb that unlock sections of the map and activities within those sections just like synchronization points in Assassins Creed. With such heavy borrowing from other games you would think it would be damning for the reputation of this game but that would be an incorrect assumption. It does all those things but injects a fresh feel to all of it along with adding new gameplay mechanics that set it apart from those games.
Innovations
The Nemesis System is one of those new mechanics that makes Middle Earth so unique and fresh. It is essentially the hierarchy of all your enemies within the game. There are all the grunts that you face that can easily be taken out with a couple swings of your sword or a few arrows to the head from your bow but you better be prepared to face the captains of the uruk army and their masters, the warchiefs. At any time during the game you can pull up what is essentially a map of all these high ranking bad guys, see what their names are, what they look like, where you can find them, and what their strengths and weakness are. How much information that is revealed about any one uruk captain or warchief depends on how much intel is collected about them by either dominating the minds of their minions or collecting it during side quests. What is really cool about this mechanic is that this hierarchy is open for you to tamper with and impose you influence on. If you want to brand a captain with your mark they will fight for you. You can then use that captain to challenge other captains to duels effectively moving you puppet captain up the ranks in order to take control of the uruk army. Your being killed also serves a purpose within this hierarchy. Let’s just say you are getting low on health and one of those pesky grunts who have been overwhelming you gets a luck sword strike in and kills you. In other video games this would just load up the previous checkpoint or have you start a mission over but in Shadows of Mordor your death actually serves a purpose. While you can’t actually die (as explained earlier) the ranks of the uruk army change as a result. That pesky grunt receives a promotion and becomes a low level captain. The next time you come across this enemy he will remember your last encounter and usually has some kind of unsavory remark to throw you way about it. The Nemesis System is very dynamic and with all the uruk being killed off and replaced within this hierarchy the game essentially never ends.
Verdict
If you love the world Tolkien created in Lord of the Rings then this is a game you simply cannot miss. It adds to and further explores those stories we have all come to love and lets you explore the world of Middle Earth. It might incorporate heavily from other games where gameplay is concerned but luckily it gets its inspiration from amazing award winning games. Along with what it borrows what it adds to the gaming community in the form of the Nemesis System makes this game one the best games of this year and of this generation.
4.5 out of 5 pieces of toast
-Demo
