Shadow of Mordor is now considered to be one of the best games of 2014 but it was dismissed by many at first because it looked like a generic action game crapping all over the Lord of the Rings IP. I ignored it myself because it looked like a poor clone of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. But after reading reports that it’s closer to WB’s own Batman games, which I’m a big fan of, plus it adds a significant new innovation to the genre, I bought the GOTY edition.
The innovation in question of course is the game’s Nemesis system. In this game, you kill orcs. Lots of them. Most of these are unnamed grunts that you slaughter by the dozen. But some are unique captains with names and sets of abilities and vulnerabilities. These differences are significant. Abilities include everything from being able to use poisoned attacks to being immune to specific moves and attack types. Fortunately these immunities go away when you exposed them to their weaknesses, such as when a specific monster is present or when they’re set on fire.
So far, so ordinary, right? After all, even stuff like Diablo had named bosses with randomized abilities. But things only get more interesting from there. Each time your character dies, the surviving orc captains frequently get promoted and become more powerful. This means losing vulnerabilities and gaining new abilities. They also get involved in randomized events on the map, like recruiting new troops or hunting beasts. If you decline to intervene and they succeed in whatever they’re doing, they become more powerful as well. It’s one of the best ways to impose a cost for player deaths I’ve ever seen. There’s a real cost so deaths are annoying. But it’s not so harsh a penalty that you feel discouraged and it may actually make future battles more interesting.
The icing on the cake is that these captain have some memory of the history of your previous encounters and will therefore issue appropriate insults and threats. If you’ve killed them before and they’ll talk about you must be surprised to see them still alive. If they’ve killed you before, they’ll say that they’ll make sure to finish the job this time. The level of customization here is pretty impressive. They’ll even remember if you exploited one of their vulnerabilities or that you fled from battle in a previous fight. According to forum posts I’ve read, a captain who is a cook will even express delight at you reappearing in a fresh new body. Combined with their special abilities and that you’ll fight them over and over again, this has the potential of procedurally generating some pretty memorable enemies. In my case, I got a real pain in the ass of a spear-throwing orc who had the Combat Master special ability and poisoned attacks. After being killed half a dozen times by this one captain, I actually learned to avoid him until I’d upgraded enough to feel confident about facing him again. This really makes for some amazing gaming experiences.
The rest of the game mechanics are pretty much lifted straight from Batman, except that you can and liberally do use lethal moves on enemies and you can’t grapple all over the place. Instead you can get around by riding the caragor beasts. Much more so than the Batman games, you’re pretty weak at the beginning and will die quite often. But after some upgrades you’ll quickly become impossibly powerful. The ability to vault-stun and combat brand in particular makes you unbeatable even against an endless horde of orcs. Then add the effects of the epic runes you can collect and add to your weapons. In this game at least, one does simply walk into Mordor like a boss.
The story is the usual crap especially since they fridge your family to provide a motivation for your character at the beginning of the game. At least it does plausibly fit in as a prequel to the Lord of the Rings, but the hints of a sequel makes it sound like it’s going in a completely AU direction. The most surprising disappointment is the smallness and blandness of the two maps you get to play around in. I wasn’t too impressed with the graphics as well. Maybe they look better with the high-resolution texture map but that’s too much for my GPU to handle. Still, the main thing I want to point out that all that is easily blown away by how good a game can be simply because its primary gameplay loop is so satisfying. Expect to see the mechanics pioneered here to appear in every open-world game from here on out.
