I can’t imagine that a lot of readers would need an introduction to Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor.  It’s towards the top of a lot of Game of the Year lists for 2014, and with good reason.  What strikes me as odd is the significant crowd of gamers still on the fence about the game; more than anything, this is my attempt to sway them to pick up a copy and join the fight against Sauron’s Army!

Shadow of Mordor is set in the lands of Mordor (not surprisingly) during the period between the end of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, when Sauron is still establishing his army and converting Mordor into a staging area.  Unlike many other Middle Earth-related games, much of the narrative ground is therefore new and untouched.  This makes the barrier to entry, from a “mythology” level, very low.  That said, for Tolkien’s devoted, there are plenty of references to the established lore.  Even the liberties taken by the writers are, in the end, easy to accept.

What makes the game super-accessible is the familiarity of the gameplay.  In essence, the mechanics take the melee and stealth elements of the Batman: Arkham games and mix them with the open-world dynamics of Assassins Creed.  In other words, unlike the Arkham games, where the biggest fights tend to take place in relatively confined spaces/maps, Talion can find himself swarmed just about anywhere, be it the middle of a Uruk stronghold or simply the vast countryside in-between.

Scattered amongst the thousands of orcs and Uruks are Captains and Warchiefs, and it’s not uncommon to start what seems like a simple enough battle for experience and stumble into a fight against a nearly-unbeatable Captain and his 50 closest friends.  Such encounters rarely end well, and worse, whichever enemy strikes the killing blow levels up as a result, becoming a captain that much harder to beat.  Oh, and they remember you, which is a nice touch.

As a result, rushing in with Batman-esque combat skills is typically the last option.  Stealth and intelligence-gathering go a long way, and thus formulating strategy for each new mission and encounter with Captains (necessary to gather the runes to add buffs to your weapons) is the heart of the game.  After all, you are one semi-undead ex-Ranger running around behind enemy lines, with very little in the way of reinforcements; forcing the player to think through each major engagement (and even minor ones) is a great way to put the player into the psychological space of the protagonist.

Those encounters with Captains provide much of the grist for the side missions, but the game design is clever enough to make sure that as the game evolves, those encounters take on new aspects.  Not only that, but for those connected online, one will get missions to eliminate Captains that killed your friends when they were playing!  Talion can even intercede in duels between Captains to ensure that a weaker opponent, perhaps, lives to fight another day, thus letting the enemy weaken itself.

From a graphical point of view, I am playing on the PS4, so this is ostensibly an ideal console experience.  However, the game was also available for the previous-gen consoles, so the final product is not far removed from late-period PS3 fare.  It’s a small step above Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, for example, but not remotely on the level of detail and realism as, say, Assassin’s Creed: Unity or Dragon Age: Inquisition.  It doesn’t really matter in the long run; the gameplay is so addictive, and traversing Mordor is so seamless, that the power is clearly devoted to the right priorities.

WHAT WORKS

Despite the game being open-world and largely available right from the start, the game is designed to increase the challenge as the player moves through the story.  For example, when running around Mordor in the first few hours, the common enemies will consist almost entirely of low-level, easily-killable and countered foes.  Progressively, new enemy types are introduced to those same areas as Talion’s abilities mount; this completely changes the gameplay and shifts the player more and more into a strategic mindset.

This also means that all that time gathering experience to unlock new abilities is hardly wasted; the player soon discovers that sticking with tried-and-true tactics will only work so long.  The combos are largely simple enough to trigger, so when the player is looking for some new way to approach an untenable Captain or boss fight, digging into the arsenal is not only rewarding, but intuitive.  It’s a better scenario than “earning” an ability that is completely unnecessary.

WHAT DIDN’T WORK

It’s hard to pinpoint any specific issue with the game; for the most part, playing through the first half of the game has been nothing but enjoyable.  (The southern areas of Mordor are locked out until roughly halfway through the story campaign.)  There are the occasional glitches that can irritate, of course; the most memorable one was in the middle of a story mission, where the unlocking of a key combo temporarily freezes the game.  However, it’s as simple as waiting a minute or two for the glitch to resolve itself, and then it’s back to the action.

There are also some elements that fall prey to repetition; some of the dialogue following a “death”, for example, or just the color palette of Mordor as a whole.  For example, by the tenth time Talion asks his inner wraith about the forge towers, you really want the wraith to change things up and berate him for not listening.  Also, after you “die”, you get treated to a rundown of all the changes to Sauron’s army and the lineup of Captains, which can take a while.  On the other hand, one could take that as an incentive to avoid dying! 

THE BOTTOM LINE

Now that I’m roughly halfway done with it, I can see why Shadow of Mordor is getting so many votes for Game of the Year.  In fact, I would be so bold as to say that Ubisoft might want to take a page out of this game’s handbook when it comes to future iterations of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  If this level of stealth and combat can be seamlessly applied to future open-world games, then the possibilities are endless.