Game review: Shadow of Mordor for PS4

Shadow of Mordor intrigued me after I watched several videos of people fighting against uruk captains and building rivalries through the nemesis system, but at the same time, I was worried about the difficulty level given how many times I watched other players dying. I was surprised to find the game isn’t nearly as hard as I’d been led to believe and also happy to find it was as fun as the reviews had made it out to be.

First, let’s just get out of the way that the main story sucks. Talion is just another stubble-face white dude seeking revenge after his wife and child are murdered by bad guys, a trope that video games can’t seem to move beyond. There are several other ways the same story could have been handled without the ubiquitous wife and child murdered cliche, and yet, we’re stuck in this rut. And I have to say, I saw several articles talking about WB paying reviewers to give good reviews with the specific stipulation not to make comparisons to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But really, if they wanted to avoid direct comparisons, maybe they shouldn’t have shoehorned Gollum and Saruman into the plot, and they shouldn’t have lifted a similar subplot from The Two Towers. This game is constantly humping the trilogy for fan service, so why wouldn’t comparisons be fair?

Let’s set that aside because you don’t really play this game for the plot. No, you play it to slay orcs. I’m very much a pacifist, but just a few minutes into the game, watching the orcs and uruks attack human slaves cast them as evil bullies that made it very easy to want to kick their asses. This is also helped with their random, repetitive chatter about how fun it is to torture, murder, and eat their human slaves. The only way they could come across as more evil is if they started declaring, “Baby flesh is the best flesh!”

I expected that, though, as orcs and uruks are basically the condescending cousins of elves, with all of the snooty attitude plus extra aggression. (Someone in the game even makes that comparison, which made me laugh and nod.)

What I wasn’t expecting was how much I’d feel like a total badass right at the start of the game. Like I said before, I’d watched other people playing and getting their asses handed to them time and again by the same captains, so I expected that I’d be in a similar position until I unlocked some of the better powers. But no, I was wiping the walls with the captains pretty much right from the start, and adding new abilities only made that sense of awesomeness more satisfying. I think the main reason why I had it so easy is a difference in play styles. Most of these guys would dive berserker-like into their fights, which quickly led to them being overwhelmed and boxed in by lower ranking baddies. From the start, my approach was to pick off many of the guards around the captains, giving me breathing room before reinforcements could arrive. So the few times I did get killed, it was in a stronghold where help arrived too quickly for me to plan an exit strategy. Or, put in Gollum speak, I found great success by sssssneakin’.

There’s a lot to praise about the nemesis system and its procedurally generated power structure. It helps keep the fights interesting, so much so that I spent a good 20 hours of my 60 hour run hunting down captains in a vain effort to completely void the power structure. Then I finally got tired of that and did the story missions to go after the war chiefs. Most of these were easy, with one exception, an uruk who was invulnerable to everything except explosions. Figuring out how to beat him in a stronghold was much trickier because I might kill 10-15 minions, only to watch as another wave of 40 ran into the stronghold. But once I realized only explosions would work, I led my prey around to various flammable object to light them, and him, up.

The game moves over to a new section of Mordor after defeating all the war chiefs and their commander, The Hammer, and then Talion is given the ability to brand orcs and make them fight with him. Then the missions change from killing the war chiefs to converting them to your side, and this feature changed my playing style and added a new layer of challenge to the game. It was much easier to pick off minions from a distance with a bow and separate the captains and chiefs from their support. But sneaking around a stronghold and trying to brand orcs without setting off alarms required a more measured and cautious approach. Additionally, when attacking the captains and chiefs that I wanted to convert, I sometimes ended up blocked by my rushing orc army, and they would kill my target before I could get anywhere near them.

There’s various missions and power struggles that you can break up to get extra power rankings, which helps unlock the various tiers of abilities. All missions give a certain amount of XP, and leveling up grants ability points to buy upgrades. That said, several remain locked until you get them in story missions. Additionally, there is a currency system called Mirian that unlocks other abilities in a separate upgrade menu. These are things like more hit points for Talion, more arrows, more focus (which is what you use to slow down time while unleashing ranged attacks), and more rune slots for your weapons. Runes grant additional bonuses to weapons, and it was fun to play around with various combinations until I found a setup that was just right for me. I did not, however, unlock all the rune slots, because I never really needed them. For that matter, I didn’t even bother upgrading hit points until after I’d maxed out arrows and focus and unlocked the upper tier attacks for the sword and bow. Why bother with more hit points when the enemy rarely gets a chance to scratch your character, right?

There’s also a nifty Vendetta mission where uruk captains who killed other players will show up in your game. If you kill them, you break their kill streak, and everyone they killed will get a message the next time they play: “Your death has been avenged.” If you fail, that uruk will disappear from your game, but will show up in someone else’s with a higher power rating up to their level cap of twenty. I only failed one of these missions, and that was because another captain showed up with reinforcements in the middle of my fight, leading to my messy and violent death.

There are some complaints I have that keep this from being a 5 star game, and I’m not talking about the story. I could have overlooked that and still given this 5 stars, but there’s a problem with Talion frequently sticking to stuff and getting frozen in place. This is much like a problem I encountered in Borderlands 2, and while it rarely put me in a bad position, it happened frequently enough that I found it aggravating.

Many of the side missions are timed, and this is something I hate with a passion. They are side missions, so they’re optional. But I’d like to meet whoever decided on missions like “kill X number of orcs in X seconds” and explain to them in vulgar detail their mistakes.

Complaint three is that the controls are a bit sloppy at times. I had several encounters where I was chasing a fleeing captain, and right as I was on top of him, my button press meant to make Talion jump onto his back would instead send me to the nearest wall to cling there like an idiot, allowing the captain time to make an escape. In a lot of places, the game stops recognizing buttons prompts, so Talion is just standing there like a dumb ass in broad daylight. Again, this was rarely in a dire situation that got me killed, but it was still irritating no matter when it happened.

And then there’s the ghul matron, a random boss encounter that I swear to God makes the rest of the fights with uruk captains and chiefs look like helpless kittens in comparison. I died maybe thirty times trying to play this one side mission, Nameless Things, and I got so mad after a while that I just said fuck it and walked off. (After tossing my controller. Maybe not a mature response, but like I said, I was pissed.)

And finally, there’s the boss fights with the black captains, the human/sorcerer leaders of Mordor. Not a one of them wasn’t annoying. Boss one has a crap ton of cheap tactics that made me mad, and boss two required a ridiculous stealth approach because actually just shooting him with arrows or bashing his face in would be…fun? And then there’s the final boss fight, which is all quick time events. Because despite players talking about how much they despise QTEs, game makers still like to stick these stinky middle fingers right up our nostrils.

Even with these problems, I can still give Shadow of Mordor 4 stars, and I can see myself playing this over from the start even knowing I have to do those annoying boss fights again. In between those small pains in the ass are many, many hours of wandering around feeling like a total badass, feelings that are only heightened because the orcs and uruks are cast so effectively as big stupid bullies. Every single one I beat made me go “Ha, take that, asshole!” And ultimately, the game is a metric fuck ton of fun. So, if you were on the fence about getting this game, please, consider picking up a copy and giving it a spin. Even with a few ugly orcish warts, it’s still worth your time and money.