Episodes
Sunday Jan 11, 2015
A Spoilerific Look At Shadow of Mordor
Sunday Jan 11, 2015
Sunday Jan 11, 2015
Author: Anthony Fallucco
Twitter: @Killroycantkill
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Since Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor has been out for a while and everyone knows it’s a pretty solid game at this point I didn’t think that writing a review would be useful to anyone (except maybe for me to practice writing reviews) so instead I want to freely talk about the game. That means everything below this paragraph will contain HEAVY SPOILERS! You have been warned. Also you should know what I have only played this game on the Playstation 4, and I don’t what it runs like on the Xbox One.
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The game begins with an surprisingly awesome tutorial mode where you’re training with your son to learn different moves and then sneaking up on your wife with a flower to learn stealth. Those two sequences I thought gave a great insight to what kind of person your character is. It’s too bad that it’s pretty much the best part of the whole story. I found the rest of the story to be kind of bland and sporadic. You’re constantly jumping around from faction to faction, and I found most of the story-lines were pretty boring except for one or two. The hunting missions with Torvin the Dwarf are really fun mainly because of the back and forth banter between the two characters. It probably helps that dwarves in the LOTR universe are always fun to travel with. Another part of the story I liked is when they reveal the ghost within you is Celebrimbor, the elven ring maker who made the rings of power. It made me do a bunch of research on the character and delve even deeper into the LOTR universe than I expected to go. He himself is also a great character and his perspective on things is so much different from Talion at certain times. The ending of the game was especially disappointing since in the majority of the game you’re able to do everything by yourself, and by that I mean the player has control over killing enemies and doing objectives rather than it being up to quick-time events. The part that was supposed to so amazing, defeating Sauron with your own hands, ends up being a quick-time event which is insanely disappointing. Though, the last line of the game, Talion says “It’s time for a new ring”, made me say “oh shit!” out loud to myself and almost made me forget about that terrible final “battle”. As if this game wasn’t enough of a power fantasy already, just the concept of being able to make a new ring of power, of maybe even a new “One Ring” has me excited for the sequel. I don’t know if these games are considered canon within the LOTR universe though.
Gameplay is very addicting but that’s not really surprising since they have taken the best parts of Assassins Creed and Batman fighting mechanics and put them into one game. You can manage fighting groups of enemies since you are able to strike at anyone around you with ease, and the countering system makes it so the combat doesn’t get boring, just like Batman. For god sake it even has the exact same combo counter mechanics from the Batman games. Building up combos is fun and all, but it’s the execution options you have the really bring is over the top in terms of making this game the ultimate power fantasy. Regular sword executions are just satisfying in a certain way since you’re just mercilessly decapitating and disembowelling orcs. It’s like with every orc decapitation or every stealth kill your really feel the hatred that Talion has for the orcs and the organization that killed his family. It’s such a visceral feeling, and in a way, I wanted to keep doing it to help him get his revenge. It’s like I could feel Talion’s anger through his fighting, and that’s really something to applaud the motion capture team for. My favourite move was probably a teleporting strike you get for you bow, it was effective at taking out enemies and traveling across the world since the draw distance is so far.
The war-chief/rivals system within the game is something I didn’t think that I would care about but I ended up trying to exploit the crap out of it and trying everything that it has to offer. Orcs who kill you end up getting promotions, there are power struggles within the system with orcs trying to get promotions. It’s a very in depth system that plays into the story a little bit but is mainly there for you to have a reason progress the story. One of my favourite things to do is to take a low level orc and raise him all the way to war-chief status, then murder him. It’s a crazy in depth system, but just like almost everything else in this game is feels like it was something they’re just testing the waters with and they’re going to go all out in the second game.
Like mentioned above I feel that this game was mostly used as a testing ground. Warner Brothers and Monolith are taking a step into territory that’s not familiar to them but it seems to have paid off greatly. The story overall is crazy weak but the promises it seems to be making for a sequel has me very excited. I want to see all these concepts fully fleshed out along with a proper story that doesn’t feel so disconnected. Also, AGAIN, I just want to reiterate, if we’re doing something as cool as single-handedly taking down Sauron and his whole orc army, I want to be able to deliver the finishing blow or fight the final baddy myself, not just taking him down through a video and quick-time events! We know you can make a game look amazing while controlling the camera and taking action away from the player, but this is a videogame and not a movie. People come to videogames to have control, so just chill a bit on the QTE’s. That’s more of a general videogame complaint and not aimed exclusively as Shadow of Mordor, but it just really stuck out in the ending sequence of this game.
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But yeah, the game is good, you should probably play it.
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