Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

I've noticed a recent trend on every forum I've been to and the people whose opinions I trust: a knee-jerk reaction to mainstream gaming companies, AAA titles, sequels/reboots, et al in gaming and the Lord of the Rings series. Of course this is hardly a new attitude but the sheer increase is hard to ignore, it's so quick that things are written off the second they are announced. Of course the Hobbit films and Game of Thrones's super-popularity definitely have something to do with the later, personally I try my best to go into something with an open mind. I hate my share of games, both ten million unit selling blockbusters and critically acclaimed indie 'gems' equally, only after I've played them, and I definitely don't hate The Lord of the Rings. I feel I need to make these points clear to counteract the following one: Shadow of Mordor exists just to try and prove those people's opinions right. Middle Earth: Dark Batman's Creed is one of the laziest games I've played in years. The gameplay is ripped straight from the most recent trend of stealth action and high fantasy and misses the point of everything it ripped off from was inspired by, most of which were got real old real fast when done 'right' by the original games. Even worse is how poorly the license was handled making the Hobbit look like Return of the King.

The universe of Middle Earth has so much to pull from. Not only is there the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, there's the Hobbit, the posthumously published somewhat popular Silmarillion and Tolkein's Unfinished Tales, and if you want to get unnecessarily deep, the Children of Hurin and a thirteen volume long History of Middle-Earth. Of course it's pretty unrealistic to expect every single thing to be adapted from an official work, especially one as vast as Middle Earth, I mean don't you just want Tom Bombadill as a major character? I've barely even read about half of the Silmarillion and I sure as hell don't have the time to read thirteen five hundred page books about genealogy of dwarves who may or may not have even been in the books to begin with, and I'm sure the game designers don't either. When it is a problem is when anything is just made up for whatever reason with no context to the original series or changing the essential mythos. I can look past a wraith being bound to a ranger for no apparent reason, but what just boggles my mind is Mordor itself, or changing the essential mythos. It's one part Game of Thrones villages and one part Dark Souls dungeons, and one part actual Mordor. People peacefully populating Mordor before Sauron coming along and making it his base of operations goes against what Mordor is to the Lord of the Rings: desolation and despair, a hellhole hidden from the rest of the land which made it the perfect stronghold. People just deciding to make it in Mordor, instead of literally anywhere else, just seemed shoehorned in there to justify not having to explore more of the land. This is probably for the best, because when you do, it doesn't even look like Lord of the Rings. The iconic look is no easy task, but Dark Souls is just easier and the sequel just came out, maybe you can convince some people to crossover and by your game too. The upside is how fast the game moves, this is something I hope Assassin's Creed rip offs itself as long as it gets rid of the training wheels that is the wraith protecting you from any mistake and taking no damage from falling off cliffs and everything.

Now I nitpicked presentation because that matters for me in every game, amazing presentation can forgive gameplay if it's not the best. Unfortunately the gameplay is barely better. As mentioned before I have no problem with how the game moves and how it feels to explore, but that gets broken apart by some of the worst braindead combat in years. Taking its cue from the Arkham series, pressing one button is apparently the future of character action games and beat em ups in an attempt to make them less like genre games and fit into the barely descriptive 'action' umbrella genre. Can you do other stuff than just press two buttons over and over? Sure, you can use the Wraith, aka Detective Mode visuals combined with bullet time for some reason. But why should you? That's up for the game to tell you, but it doesn't. In Arkham, or at least Asylum, there's a rhythm in combat where just mashing will not always give you to optimized fight, in fact, you may actually fail. In Mordor, however, mashing will make Talion look like you were doing SSS Devil May Cry combos. When there is no challenge, there is no satisfaction, and as far as I'm concerned, that means there is no game. I literally closed my eyes and opened when I stopped hearing things die and opened to a 33 hit combo and no damage. When hell froze over, the planets aligned and Bill Waterson licensed Calvin and Hobbes merchandise all at the same time and I actually did get knocked down, the slow-mo instant comeback quicktime event happened. Above everything else this is the most insulting aspect of gameplay. Forget the wraith being training wheels, this is a big wheels tricycle with your parents holding you to make sure you never get hurt. It's the biggest mechanic rewarding players for being bad at an easy game outside of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse's option to skip a level after failing too many times. The shinning pillar is the Nemesis system which creates rivals out of how fights go down with unique enemies. Unlike the generic enemies the rivals built in Nemesis have unique models, dialogue, and depending on how easily or difficult you defeated them will have new dialogue when you encounter them later in the game. Everything I've seen about the game said that it also affected actions on the game later, but because they're barely harder that generic enemies, being the fight I died on a few sentences ago, I sadly can't say I noticed anything major. I hope that this makes a comeback in the future as the main focus of a story driven Dark Souls like RPG (because I doubt they'll stop ripping off what's popular anytime soon).

Being mediocre is one thing, the sum of all parts not even reaching the potential is another. Both of these are forgive able in any game. Being worse than mediocre and being the result of a bunch of parts that weren't even added up properly in the first place? At least it's still better than Guardians of Middle-earth. Monolith made one of the best licensed games of all time with Aliens vs. Predator 2, which followed a really bad first game, so hopefully Shadow of Mordor follows the same pattern and deservedly lives up to any and all hype it gets.