With a pretty horrifying number of orcs burned, exploded, decaptitated, or stabbed, my playthrough of Shadows of Mordor has reached its conclusion.
I enjoyed the game, overall, and would recommend it, especially now that it's gone down in price - though I'd recommend playing it on a gaming PC or next-gen console, as the old 360 sometimes had a bit of huffing and puffing to do (textures especially would sometimes go super-low resolution until the game could catch its breath.)
One of the things that's a little odd about the game is that it feels fairly short. Now, that could very well be a result of my having been playing Skyrim just before starting in on Mordor. Shadows of Mordor is sort of an open-world game, but almost more in an old-fashioned, Metroid kind of way. I think the main reason for this is that there really isn't any "safe" area. You're in Mordor the entire game, and while there are certainly places to run around with relative freedom, the whole game map is basically swarming with Orcs.
This is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you've always got Uruks somewhere nearby that you can mess with. But it also kind of flattens the game world. You will encounter new, tougher classes of grunt orcs as you go, but once you figure out the combat system (or level up enough to have a nice complement of stat boosts, abilities, and weapon runes) you're basically not going to have to worry about any big surprises in your travels.
The nemesis system, with named enemy Captains and Warchiefs, is pretty cool, but it feels like it could be more central and dynamic within the game.
One problem is that there's basically only three ranks - Grunt, Captain, and Warchief. You'll see Captains getting promoted from one of the three tiers in the Captains' ranks to the next constantly, but if there's any value to that promotion, I don't really know what it is. Warchiefs will only come out when certain conditions are met, and it doesn't seem like you ever see Orcs who aren't under your influence back-stabbing their Warchiefs. I think the promise of the nemesis system is that the politics of the Orcs give you a constant need to readjust your strategy, but in practice, with a bit of intel, you can just zero in on the Orcs you need to take down.
That said, intel is actually fairly rare. While you can, with diligence, get the skinny on every captain and warchief out there, chances are you're going to be running into Captains you've never heard of, and you'll have to rely on your standard combat to beat them - but the thing is, once you get the hang of said combat, most of these guys won't feel like much of a threat, even if they do have certain immunities.
Another problem with the system that could be dealt with in a sequel or something, is that the orc officers actually get less interesting and unique as their power levels increase. When you're dealing with officers in the lower levels, you'll find that some can be killed instantly with stealth attacks, or ranged attacks. Now, yes, instant kills would make them a little dull, but when you start to deal with high-level opponents, you often find ones that are totally immune to ranged attacks, stealth attacks, and beast attacks. And what that means is that you've just got to go fight them the old fashioned way.
Occasionally, an orc you've "killed" will come back to life, and awesomely, they'll usually have some scar or metal prosthetic to indicate how you defeated them the first time. The thing is, this doesn't happen very often. Usually, if they do come back, you'll have - for example - already killed their Warchief, making them just a nuisance. I'd have liked for there to be a bit more of a real rivalry built up between Talion and these orcs.
Orcs will permanently die if you behead them, but this is kind of determined randomly as far as I can tell - sometimes your "Execute" attack will take their heads off, and sometimes you'll just super-stab them.
Still, it's a really cool feature that I think could use some refinement.
The game world has some great positives and some great negatives. On the positive side, the game does a good job recapturing the dirty aesthetic of the LOTR movies. This definitely feels like the version of Tolkien brought to us by Peter Jackson. The voice acting is also quite good. Storywise, it's... tantalyzing. There's tons of backstory (the Elf-Wraith who is bonded to Talion is a pretty important figure in Middle-Earth's history,) but the characters we deal with are a little thin. There is a human refugee kingdom that has for some reason decided Mordor would be a good place to live (in fairness, they were there before the Orcs came back,) but their story doesn't really go that far beyond "we need to get the hell out of Mordor."
There's also something weirdly unsatisfying about the fact that there are two large game areas, rather than three. As I played through the Udun section of the game, I actually began to suspect I might spend the entire time there. But upon entering the Sea of Nurnen area, the game seemed like it was going to open up into a much larger expanse. However, in the end, other than a couple of areas you only go to when dealing with the major bosses, that's it. Now, each of these areas has districts that vary somewhat. You'll get to know the various towns and fortresses with larger populations of orcs and contrast those with the open spaces.
The major "boss fights" are also not really that. The Hammer is the only one that you fight in open combat, and he's definitely a challenge (especially with a constant stream of Orc grunts joining him.) The Tower, however, is an attempt at a "Stealth Boss." Obviously, SoM is a game that allows you to do things stealthily, and thus it would be weird for every major enemy to be fought in open combat. The problem is that adjusting difficulty in stealth gameplay is always tricky, as it tends to operate on a scale of "do I see you or not?" (Actually, there's an idea for game developers - is there a way to make a type of stealth gameplay with more variation.) The final boss, rather than involving the Bow, as you might guess, is actually just an old-school "Quick Time Event," where you have to press the buttons that pop up on the screen.
Before summing up, let's talk combat. Stealth really works just like in a game like Assassin's Creed, though you have other options than just killing an enemy if you can nab them. The psychology of the orcs plays a role here - in the second half of the game you can "brand" orcs so that they'll fight for you (and obey your commands without resisting.) You can also "brutalize" enemies from stealth, which is actually a pretty clever alternative to the old "pick them off one at a time" style of stealth from similar games. Brutalizing will have you stab the target multiple times. This is useful when attacking a group of orcs, as it will cause at least one of them to run away screaming, and it will also charge up your hit-streak before you engage the remaining orcs.
Melee combat is pretty fun when you get the hang of it. Each time you strike an enemy (with any weapon,) your hit counter will go up by one, and will continue to climb as long as you don't miss, get hit by an attack, or go for a long enough time without hitting anything. When you get up to eight, the counter will turn red, allowing you to use a powerful finisher (such as Execute, which instant-kills grunts and does significant damage to captains and warchiefs.) There are plenty of abilities you can unlock as you go that will make it easier to rack up this counter and pull off more of those moves. Oddly, though this might be just me, and potentially a result of the default control scheme, but parrying can be tough to pull off. When an enemy tries to strike you, you'll have a brief moment to respond, and it can be difficult to pull this off when trying to keep on the offensive. There aren't really any "counter-kills" like in Assassin's Creed, and enemies will often attack at the same time, so you'll need to be quick to respond - though thankfully, if you strike a guy while they're winding up for an attack, you will interrupt them (except the shield-carrying guardians, I believe.)
Ranged combat has cleverly been designed so that you can fight like Legolas pretty effectively. Unlike the sword and dagger (the latter actually being the remains of a broken sword,) the Bow is an ethereal extension of the Elf Wraith. This means you'll go into Wraith mode automatically when firing the bow. Additionally, by default you'll also start using Focus (a regenerating resource) to slow down time while firing. This allows you to get off multiple charged headshots before the orcs you're fighting can react, or allowing you to shoot an orc in the head right in the middle of a grand melee. Arrows, or "Elf-Shot" can be recovered either by finding the ghostly projectiles in the walls and floors of the many ruins in the area, or by "draining" poor orcs who get in your way (this attack cleverly employs a dutch angle for the camera to sell how unsettling it is.)
There is a story through which to progress here, and there's a structure to the game's quests, but I think the main selling point is that it's truly fun to get in there and mess it up with some Uruks. Some gameplay features could definitely have been more emphasized, particularly the nemesis system (I'm still not entirely sure how useful it is to "terrify" my targets,) and while the two main game areas did feel relatively different, I think they could have done more to vary the environment. But any of the problems I might have had with the game could be fixed in a sequel, and given that it ends with an utterly shameless sequel hook, I expect we'll see one before too long.
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