VideoGame Great Game, Mediocre Middle Earth Game
What made Batman: Arkham Asylum incredible was that it was a unique game with engaging mechanics, designed from the ground up to make you feel like you're playing Batman.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor was a unique game with engaging mechincs, designed from the ground up to make you feel like you're playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. Wait, what? Oh and there's more than a touch of Assassin's Creed.
It makes Shadows of Mordor a really hard game to review, because, this game is a fantastic achievement, but what do you say when it achieved something entirely different from what it was meant to? Shadows went into an English lit exam and proved the monotone convergence theorem in calculus. Good job?
In purely terms of being an adaptation, this is probably the worst Lord of the Rings game ever created. It's kind of incredible how every single little detail wasn't designed to capture the feel of Middle Earth. The main characters waking animation is a swagger from Batman Arkham Asylum. He stands like a 2000's Assassin Creed anti-hero. He moves like an Assassins Creed protagonist. The core gameplay loop involves diving from towers and slaughtering orcs in the must detailed and gruesome way possible. You can make orcs heads explode and watch as they run in terror. A comedic side character constantly references self-help books. A major gameplay feature involves collecting 'intel' through torture. The motivation is the most lazy "they killed my family, I want revenge" thing ever and it's frequently nonsensical.
The words they were trying to embed into the games DNA were "visceral" "powerful" and "anti-hero". It feels like a early 2000's comic, just after the Dark Age. There is absolutely nothing "noble" or "epic" or "Middle-Ages" or "chivalrous" or "sincere", "straight-faced".
The gameplay is very fun, if incredibly shallow. It has a difficulty curve where the first hour or so might be fairly difficult and then after that there's no reason why you should ever die. It's trivial to kill 40 orcs in ten seconds. But the assassinations and nemesis system feel organic and incredibly interesting. You really feel like you're hunting down targets and making plans on the fly, all towards meaningful political goals. Shadows of Mordor is a better Assassins Creed game than Assassins Creed. It's just, why did they do that?
VideoGame Very Good
Shadow of Mordor takes the best elements of Assassin's Creed and the Arkham Franchise.
Flying leaps to execute an Uruk, to Combos and Takedowns mark the combat.
The Basic Story revolves around Talion, a Ranger of Gondor hunting down one of Sauron's Lieutenants.
The Combat is great, the combo flows very well, the combat is much more forgiving than that of the Arkham Franchise.
The Story is the game's only weak point. There is little to no character development, and the Story, while short and often disjointed, definitely draws you in.
Over all 8.5/10 A worthy addition to the ranks of games Based on Tolkien's Lore
VideoGame Makes me feel guilty
I really like this game for the most part. You've probably read the review below this and it really covers a lot of the points.
My personal problem with it is...
I feel guilty about killing the orcs.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but there's something about making them actual people that makes me squeamish when I cut down five dozen and watch their friends panic.
And they do seem to have friends. I found a Warchief and his Bodyguard who hated to see each other suffering. The warchief was also terrified of being betrayed, so I of course I mind controlled his mate and then set him against him. If that doesn't make you feel like scum, I don't know what would.
The worst bit was the war-chief actually spoke politely to me for the most part up to that point.
I almost feel that if you want people to enjoy massacring orcs you shouldn't give them more than one dimension.
Edit: I feel I should mention something else, as I've had a long conversation in the comment section about this and now feel I should add it to the review. In fact, I believe this is my real issue with the game, not the issue of feeling guilt for killing, since most games don't even cause me to bat an eyelid.
Talion is an anti-hero in the story for his personal traits. His questionable actions, (mind rape, poisoning, general brutality) however, are treated as non issues from a narrative stand point and largely untouched on and even when they are, only in the weakest terms.
The game rewards some pretty vicious things, something I would have no issue with if it was acknowledged in the writing, even if the other characters or he himself didn't personally care.
I have no issue playing a bad guy. But a man whose questionable actions aren't even of note because the game doesn't care bugs the hell out of me.