Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is one of the most infuriating games I have ever played. It may also be the most satisfying. It’s a magical, beautiful world featuring a new story, new characters, new controls and the much-awaited Nemesis System. The game takes place in the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, and focuses on Mordor and Sauron’s rise to power. It’s a unique and different story from what most casual Middle-earth fans have read or seen, as it pulls details from some of Tolkien’s other works, such as The Silmarillion. You play as Talion, a Ranger of Gondor, and as Celebrimbor, the wraith that possesses him, both connected by a shared desire for vengeance.
As you journey through Shadow of Mordor, you can’t help but be impressed by the beautiful open world that’s been created, from the grimness of the Black Gate to the more fertile and lush area of Núrn along the southern part of Mordor. Along with the orchestral soundtrack that backs the game, it’s often easy to feel like you’re a part of one of the movies as you fight your way through hordes of orcs. Speaking of orcs, they make this game. The orcs’ acting, their commentary, and of course the new Nemesis System (which we’ll get to later) are the best feature of SOM. Brutalizing an orc right in front of a bunch of others elicits fear and trepidation from the rest, and killing their captain can bring about the same result. Once, after cutting off a captain’s head, one of the other orcs yelled out, “Did you see that? He cut off his head.” My favorite was when, taking out an orc sitting at a campfire with an arrow to the head, one of the other orcs said, “He didn’t even have time to scream.” Add to this the Nemesis System and fighting the orcs becomes incredibly “interesting.”
The Nemesis System in SOM is one of the most interesting game features I have seen in a long time. The first time it came into play for me was when I ran into Akoth the Forsworn, a lowly level-9 captain, who with his crossbow bested me in battle quite quickly. And that’s when everything changed: Akoth leveled up in power, and so did a whole host of other orc captains from various activities. I should have paused and taken a second to think at this point, but I wanted my revenge against Akoth. So I tracked him down and tried to get my revenge, and once again I died, in two shots no less. At this point I needed a change of pace, so I picked up a side mission to infiltrate another captain’s hunt and disrupt it. It seemed simple enough: help the caragors defeat some low-ranking captain before he killed them and leveled up. Then something strange happened: Akoth showed up with another captain, Gorgum the Battle-Hardened, to help out the other captain. Gorgum quickly took me down to near-death health but walked away, as I “wasn’t worth killing.” Akoth, unfortunately, didn’t have those same feelings and eliminated me with an arrow to the chest. At this point I decided to change my strategy, so I rounded up a couple of orcs and interrogated them for information on Akoth and Gorgum. Each had only one weakness, fire for Akoth and stealth kills for Gorgum. For a while, I tried to avoid both captains as much as possible, but it felt like they were hunting me. They started randomly showing up on my missions, or even when I was just out exploring, and all the while they were making a name for themselves as part of the orc army, challenging other captains, having feasts, going on hunts, and leveling up very quickly. Before long, both were legendary captains with a power level of 20, and for a while during the first half of the game they made my gameplay interesting, to say the least. Eventually, I managed to set Akoth on fire with an arrow to a nearby barrel. He came back, though, this time looking like he was recovering from severe burns, but from that point on I had his number, and after his third death to me he stayed dead. Gorgum, on the other hand, was a different story altogether: he hunted me everywhere I went, and by the end of the game we had fought eleven times. I would like to point out that I did manage to kill him three times out of the eleven. This is what makes the Nemesis System in SOM so great; I could have played the game for hours just avoiding or trying to kill Akoth and Gorgum.
If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed or the Batman Arkham series, you’ll be right at home with the combat and controls of SOM. Ground combat revolves around attacking, dodging, parrying and executing, the last three of which are all done via quick-time events. Using your wraith skills also gives you several ranged attack options; your primary ranged option is Elf-Shot, a wraith arrow, and you also have other skills such as shadow strike, which teleports you to the enemy to hit them. Like in the Assassin’s Creed series, rope-walking, hanging, sliding along ledges and stealth-killing enemies from above is a large part of the gameplay at times, but it does have its issues. Camera angles and movement can get a bit switched around and lead to you moving the wrong way several times, or being unable to drop or hop up to the next level of a wall when you want to.
