Every few months or so I give this game another chance. Most recently a couple weeks ago. Don’t get me wrong, I can totally see a good game here, and I really want to love this game. But the difficulty is far too high. I can’t even get through the first area. Every time you are killed by an orc, they rank up. If you die too much while still a low level, they’ll rank up so high that they one hit kill you, and you’re usually surrounded by them. I know I just have to “get good”, which is why I try not to be too hard on this game. As I said, I can see a good game here, I just have trouble with it.

Super fun gameplay, the story was whatever but damn was it satisfying to kind of play it how I wanted. Though I will admit that it abruptly ended fur sure. Nice experience though, like a more brutal Assassin’s Creed.

Score Breakdown

“The Tale”
Story- 4
Pacing- 5
Characters- 5
Originality- 7
Linearity- 9
Length- 10
Epicness- 8

“The Presentation”
Visuals- 9
Display- 8
Music- 8
Sound FX- 10

“The Mechanics”
Ease of Use- 8
Innovation- 6
Replayability- 3

Familiar combat gameplay with a unique nemesis system. The result is very entertaining, albeit unpolished. Combat and movement works for the most part, but malfunctions in frustrating ways from time to time.

The main feature in ME:SOM is its Nemesis System, and it hits it right on the forge. Uruks rise to power and your objective is to liquidate them of their rank. The twist is that when you die, the same Orc that killed you will get promoted, and eventually even become a captain. Then, when you go back to get your revenge kill, you’ll cross blades and he will look you in the eye and say something like, “I killed you… I don’t understand.” Or they will spit in your face and say, “Coming back from the dead won’t phase me, I’ll make sure you stay dead this time!” It was badass and immersive. Each enemy also has their own different motives, personality, and array of strengths and weaknesses that actually add an interesting strategy element that could either help you or hurt you (depending on your environment). There was even a moment where I died, and the same guy that killed me rose up the ranks from a level six, to an ELEVEN. It was ridiculous. You’d best believe that I still made him my b*tch though.

Narrative: The story is a revenge tale in which your family is killed in front of you by some tall pale dude in a hood called The Black Hand and you’re goal is to kill him with the help of a wraith that possesses you. But, the only way to get to him is by killing through the ranks so you can work your way up to him and whoop that ass.

EyeCandy: The first thing I want to talk about are the animations, the executions, combat, stealth, mounts, grappling, all of that! The way that all of the characters move and interact is incredible. Rarely did I ever see a repeat in animations, or two NPCs moving exactly the same when they were side by side. It was very smooth and very awesome. Graphically though, the game isn’t anything special. It does look good, and it does run well. There was a couple times where the frame rate would drop; but, it didn’t happen too often to where it would be a problem. There’s really not much to say about the graphics. To be honest, if you’ve played or seen a LOTR game, then you already know what it looks like, fifty shades of brown, and everything is in ruins.

Sound: The sound really isn’t that robust, but the voice acting is. I don’t even think I came across the same voice when I was fighting the captains because I know for a fact that I didn’t hear a repeat of dialogue. What stuck out the most though was battling the Warchiefs. As you start slaughtering your way up through the chain and you’re battling these Uruks, the Warchief will come out like Ben Stiller in Zoolander and have their own little intro sequence, kind of like in Borderlands. The music will start chanting their name, each with their own unique kind of jingle, and then you get down. Nothing else stuck out that was significant though. The battle music was basically that of Skyrim’s Dovahkiin theme and the SFX were generic, not all that custom, or Hi-Res, and the audio mix during the story’s cinematics sucked.

Gameplay: Now for the important part, the meat and potatoes. Shadow of Mordor’s gameplay is an exact copy pasta of two games, Assassin’s Creed, and the Batman Arkham series. The combat and level system is an EXACT MIRROR of Arkham, and almost everything else tries a little too hard to take from AC. It has the ‘Wraith World,’ which is just Eagle Vision. You scale these towers to hit a forge at the top and it’s SOM’s version of synchronizing. And at times the character will try and stick himself to a wall or ledge, or just not climb at all and it does get frustrating. The combat is good, but at times it was unresponsive, or there was a slight delay and the game wouldn’t register what button you pressed. This was especially bad when fighting a crowd of enemies. It makes the game difficult in a bad way.

Conclusion: This game takes what every other game has done and combines it nicely, although imperfectly. Monolith managed to make it their own, and they got pretty creative with it. I was very surprised because with games like Condemned and F.E.A.R., I didn’t know what to expect. The story is engaging (although a little short), the gameplay works well enough, and I did catch myself going back to it to play more. With just a LITTLE BIT more polish it would be nothing short of great.

Reason: The bugs, unresponsiveness, and lack of soundtrack left it just shy of an 8. If the story was longer (and still as engaging), then it would easily be a nine.

Honestly i didn’t like it at all. Played around 8 hours and quit. Mainly because the objectives are confusing, the open world is there but you can’t really use it because if you do you’ll run into stronger enemies who will surround and kill you after 3 hits (where’s the health bar ffs??), this would be normal but it´s not because with your death, the Uruk who kills you is given extra strength. So the game basically discourages exploration. Unless you use stealth all the time, which frankly is not fun at all. Upgrades are confusing and they give you endless button combinations which basically you won’t use in the middle of a fight, trust me you’ll be button mashing in no time. The progression in the story is confusing as well, since there are different narratives which will tie up later conveniently, but story wise this game is pretty much flawed. There’s no obvious objective marker. The map will spawn several objectives at the time differentiating them with colors and basically will let you chose you path, but of course if you chose one different than the main quests timeline, you’ll suffer the consequences. There’s no logic in the sequence in which you explore the place. Apart from telling that you can’t progress in a certain quest if you don’t finished another first. This game basically calls itself open world but then cockblocks you everytime you want to do something different. Combat is ok, the Nemesis system should be in the first tutorials of the game, it should emphasize the importance of the system in game early on, and not let you turn a dozen Uruk captains level up until it gives the information that you must disable them or replace them with Uruk allies. But guess what? They are replaced by other Uruk captains. It’s never ending grind!
I disliked this grinding system. Some grinding is necessary to level up, but man, the absurd quantity of grinding here is just nuts. How many times do i have to kill those damn archers? Not even Borderlands has this kind of grinding!
I know i’m being too harsh here, i had some fun with it, but i can’t help it. After 8 hours i grew bored and tired of this game and put i away.

Really too repetitive to make me play it for more than 4 hours.

So today I finally finished this jewel, this beauty. I haven’t been into some game for very long time. I am at this moment finishing all the collectibles (I know, I am surprised too that I am actually doing it but it’s great fun) and I will be moving on to DLCs so I will update the review later.

This game for me is straight 10/10. I absolutely loved it. I had great fun and enjoyed every moment in it. Music was great, VO is amazing, story is great, graphic is very nice and playability is great. You can do almost everything you wish you could do and maybe even more. This game was definitely created with love, great ideas and coolness in mind. For me this was one of the best playthrough ever.

Best thing about this game is also the Nemesis system which makes the world actually live around you and react to what happens. That’s one of the systems I would from now like to see in every game. For example when you get killed, the orc gets stronger, maybe even promoted and a lot of changes in Sauron’s Army, guys gets promoted, killed, riots etc. Awesome thing. When you die you bet your butt that you are going to hunt that orc who killed you. You will drop everything and make that thing target of yours. Great feature is that you actually like in a normal world, you are getting informations for the orcs like weaknesses and strong points. I can’t wait to see how they will upgrade the system in new one. Also great touch was that you can actually avenge your friends if they were slain. That was great feel. And of course, they can avenge you and you get a message if they were successful.

That all said, there were some things which bothered me little bit. So you have climbing and sometimes it didn’t register I wanna climb it and instead I just jumped. It could be me but I was usually huging the walls. The second thing was that sometimes you had neverending hordes of enemies keeping coming and keeping coming. For some time because I enjoyed the combat especially later when you open many talents it’s awesome, but sometimes I just wanted to just continue, so yeah, it’s not a bad thing but for me sometimes it was too much too often, but hey it could be just me. Third thing was the last boss. The build up for that was great. Really. But the last last boss was eventhough cool, kinda disappointing. Something like the bold guy from FarCry 3. I might have missed something and maybe it’s something in DLC, not sure, but I was mainly surprised how big the build up was for something which ended eventhough very cool, very quick. That was surprise for me.

But still, this was amazing (still is, I am not done) game for me and you can say that I really like it from that I am actually doing all the collectibles, secondary quest and DLCs. I usually don’t do that.

10/10