1. If you like games where you climb towers to reveal icons on a map, you will like this Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.
2. You had better believe this is a AAA game, folks. There's like ten million logos when you start up; the voice actors have all had voice acting jobs before; and the sound effects have the basso profundo thunk of a high-budget Hollywood production. Huzzah!
3. This has the entire lore of Lord of the Rings available to it but the main character, Talion, is just Geralt from The Witcher, at least from a functional standpoint. They gave him a different back story to explain his abilities--he's dead, he's got a companion elf spirit, blah, blah, blah--but he's a dude that goes into super power mode to track creatures via little colored trails and caries two swords on his back for some reason. I feel that the influence here is unambiguous.
4. The eschews the standard tower-and-icons open world game type behavior where clearing icons gradually makes the areas of the world you've cleared them from safer to you. No matter what you do, the world remains crawling w/ Uruks, which are identical in all ways to orcs but apparently tougher according to some off-handed remark made in the game.
5. The effect of number 4 is a mixed bag. It makes the entire world seem dangerous and exciting to traverse for the whole game but since the world doesn't improve over the course of the game, the only thing that gives you a sense of progress is the fact that icons disappear from the map as you complete objectives.
6. *sigh*
7. Yeah, fine, there is also an RPG-like character system to give you a sense of progress--and it's a real doozy too. There are three kinds of experience points, skill trees w/o number and several essential combat moves aren't unlocked until a half dozen hours into the game. Nobody is going to accuse these AAA developers of skimping on the character progression, no way.
8. Mercifully, there is no crafting system. Instead, they have both hunt and gather requests which are less annoying but ultimately still just a stupid thing they tacked on that nobody asked for or cares about.
9. There are two open world areas. Neither of them are huge feeling but this actually works in Shadow of Mordor's favor. I found myself eschewing fast travel because it didn't take long to cross the map and I was sure to run into a couple entertaining encounters w/ Uruk that I could tackle in a variety of different ways, spending as much or as little effort as I felt either dispatching them or avoiding them.
10. The combat--esp. once you've unlocked all the various moves in the skill tree--is excellent. It has a similar button mashing flow as an old school beat-em-up. Attack, block and build combos to build up additional combos so you can keep building combos. It also adds a bullet-time type mechanic that you use w/ a bow and arrow, which functions as a sort of get-out-of-jail free card when things get too hairy. It never felt quite right to me to whip out a bow in the midst of a hectic melee fight but, as a game mechanic, it worked. Once you get the swing of things and a few upgrades, taking care of even large groups of enemies is not too much of a challenge but it's all done so stylishly that hacking through enemy waves never feels like a chore.
11. I could not give a hoot or a holler about the story in this game. Some Lord of the Rings stuff goes down and you crush some skulls. The rest felt superfluous, which is honestly fine by me. Gaming is a great storytelling medium but it doesn't have to be.
12. What it does do well is world building. W/ the big budget production and the ability to really lean into some well-known lore, this is a game that really puts you right there. You are in Middle-earth. You are riding on the backs of beasts and slaying evil in slow-mo w/ magic super arrows. Going back to the comparison to The Witcher, this provides the same kind of sense of adventure as those games but does it through gameplay rather than story. In some regards, this actually works better, esp. if you are a bourgeois wage-earner w/ limited free time.
13. The final boss battle is a quick-time event so I am going to half-ass the end of this review too.
No comments:
Post a Comment