Game - Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (Xbox One)

Rings of power can be hazardous to your elf

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open-world action-adventure game, developed by Monolith and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, an expanded/alternate continuity to both the film universe of Peter Jackson and the book universe of J.R.R. Tolkien, and perhaps most remarkably, a licensed game that is not only good, but exceptional. Set between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mordor portrays the gradual and insidious return to power of Sauron and the amassing of his orc armies, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.

The Tower of Sauron sports the latest in the Spiky Self-Mutilation
line, from Obviously Evil Combat and Casual Wear™.

The player is dropped into the leather boots and furred cloak of Talion (Troy "Everyone That Isn't Nolan North" Baker), a gruff, macho protagonist with a gravelly-voice and a severely underdeveloped sense of humour, and a dead family, presumably churned out by the same factory that manufactured Marcus Fenix, Booker DeWitt, Batman and Aiden Pearce. A Ranger assigned to watch over the Black Gate after some misdeed resulted in his exile from Minas Tirith, Talion is assigned with making sure no foul creatures arise from the wilderness to threaten the civilised world, along with his fellow brothers of the Night's Watch- No, no, wrong series. After a brief prologue which introduces combat - through Talion's sparring with his son - and stealth - sneaking up on his wife to give her flowers - a raiding party of Uruks surprise-attack, and Talion and his family are slaughtered in a dark ritual designed to summon a long-dead elf wraith (Alastair "Turian Councillor" Duncan) and bind it to the Black Hand of Sauron, who led the attack along with his Cenobite-reject cohorts the Hammer and the Tower of Sauron. Something goes amiss, however, and the wraith is bound to the body of Talion, preventing him from truly dying and giving him an array of special and often sinister abilities. Sort of an own goal for the forces of darkness, there.

Real men don't use scabbards for sword storage.

The game's plot is your standard 'unravel the hero's amnesia and get revenge on his family's killer' bumf, though with a Lord of the Rings flavour that makes cleverly economical use of source characters while using its original characters to tell the bulk of the story. Talion isn't especially compelling but makes a serviceable protagonist, although more interesting is the elvish wraith and his mysterious connection to Gollum (which feels logical and well thought-out as opposed to an attempt to shoehorn in some franchise faces) and his role in the history of Mordor itself, although he carries the usual 'licensed adaptation' problem that anyone familiar with the lore of the source material isn't going to be remotely surprised when his identity is revealed. In any case, Talion and the wraith's quest takes them all over Mordor, from the barren plains of Udûn to the lush greenery of Nurn, as they meet a host of colourful characters. But the best stories Shadow of Mordor has to tell are the ones you make yourself...

Ugruk Flesheater likes walks in the park, reading, thinks Gondor's
foreign policy is "self-destructively partisan and built on short-
term thinking", and enjoys eating the flesh of his enemies.

The game's most notable feature is the much-touted Nemesis System. Randomly-generated Uruk captains with unique names and distinctive armour and accessories, each with their own fears, hates, strengths and weaknesses, exist in a constant and organic state of flux, fighting each other over promotion, food, bragging rights and impressing their Warchiefs. Existing captains will rise in status (or die) as a result of succeeding (or failing) in their personal quests and struggles, whether they're holding a feast, hunting wild animals, or sneakily ambushing a rival, and other captains or unnamed grunts will be promoted to fill the gaps they leave in the hierarchy. The constantly-evolving structure of the Uruk armies keeps you on your toes as a player, and you need to keep an eye on what the more important captains are doing, because if you let them rise too fast in the ranks you may find them a bit stronger than you might have liked when you do finally cross swords.

The shifting power relationships and unique personalities of the Uruks give you ample scope to put Sauron's armies in disarray. You could just slash and stab your way through a captain's underlings and then slash and stab him until his position becomes vacant. Or, you could 'dominate' an Uruk with the wraith's mind control, gaining intel about the fears and weaknesses of your target captain. Then you could set him on fire, set a swarm of insects on him, or set free a caged beast, and watch him dissolve into gibbering terror, fleeing for his life and losing face in front of all his buddies. You could infiltrate a feast he's holding in his own honour, and poison the grog barrels and wipe out his entire retinue. You could watch over his duel with a rival captain, and weaken him with arrows from stealth so his competitor can finish him off for you. If you're feeling particularly kind-hearted, you could choose a captain or even a rank-and-file Uruk and, carefully safeguarding them in their power struggles or secretly nobbling their opponents, help them climb all the way to the top, and then finish them off just as they achieve all their orcish dreams. This becomes especially rewarding in the second half of the game, when the wraith gains the ability to 'brand' Uruks, which allows you to give commands to dominated Uruks, inserting sleeper agents into the hierarchy, stealthily shepherding them up into the rank of Warchief's Bodyguard, and then activating them at a crucial moment and watching them butcher their former master and take his place. Then, you can order your pet Warchief to attack another chief. Play your cards right, and every single ranking member of Sauron's army could be in your control.

Gubrat the Foolish's patented "nice doggy" Caragor-taming
technique has yet to catch on throughout Mordor.

As uruks gain in prominence, or kill Talion, they will acquire more Power - the game's measure of Uruk status - and acquire new strengths and resistances while losing weaknesses, so even a lowly, rank-and-file swordsman could be promoted to a nigh-unkillable Warchief if he gets enough lucky hits on Talion in a fight. Warchiefs are always the largest and most heavily-armoured Uruks you can come across, but the sheer number of captains vying for power and trying to backstab their way up the ladder means that Warchiefs have to be drawn out through trickery before Talion can introduce them to his arsenal of sharp things. Avenging yourself and your family on the Black Hand will seem like a mere trifle to finally beheading that bastard Uruk who's let you get mobbed by his buddies and then impaled you with a sneaky thrown spear the last three times you've gone after him, especially because he will remember that the last time you fought, he killed you or you ran away, and he'll taunt you about it. This works both ways, and if you dispatch a captain with an arrow to the face, he may unexpectedly return from the dead with an eyepatch on or a bag over his head, grumbling at you for ruining his good looks and having an axe to grind.

"Stay very still boys. The glowing-eyed deathbeast may
lose interest."

You'll be fighting Uruks for most of the game, but there are also caragors, territorial lion-like beasts that can eventually be mounted; ghuls, vile little goblin-like creatures that live in caves and burrow out of the ground to ambush you; graugs, which are larger than cave trolls and look a bit like rancors; and the three Black Captains of Sauron's army that killed you, and who form the campaign's slightly disappointing boss battles, being no more difficult to fight than a particularly resilient Uruk captain. I would have liked to see more of the Uruks' smaller, runtier cousins - the regular orcs and goblins - to mix up the combat a little, but the Uruks themselves come in so many shapes, sizes and colours that it feels churlish to level too many complaints at enemy variety. They all sport Warhammer 40K style aggressive-Cockney-thug accents, with varying degrees of eloquence and grammar, and can often be heard reminiscing on their latest acts of evil or grumbling about poor promotion prospects, unreliable slaves or how the Captain doesn't notice them. Captains with names like "Lashbag Giggler" will just titter and chuckle maniacally instead of speaking, and one charming and rotund fellow, when I had him on his knees and the execution prompt ready, pathetically asked for a last meal, which I found so endearing I tousled the little scamp's bald, scarred head and sent him on his way. You will almost certainly get more attached to particular, recurring Uruk captains than you will Talion or some of his allies, except for the wraith who has an enjoyable line in tactless honesty.

"No fair! Why Uruk not get ghost friend like Man-swine?!"

Combat is very much in the Arkham series mould (by which I mean it's virtually identical): attacking with X, countering with Y, stunning with B and evading with A, and performing special combos with various combinations thereof. As in the Arkham games, you can switch to a ranged weapon - the elf's wraith bow - with the left trigger, and the ranged view and the left bumper act bring up a Detective Vision-alike, taking out most of the colour and detail of the landscape, making common Uruks blue, Uruks with intel green, and captains red. Finishing moves are plentiful and visceral, and you'll probably never tire of the metallic squelching that comes with sliding your longsword through an Uruk's guts before booting him off of it and turning to your new target. Especially gruesome (in a delightful way) are the beheadings, not just for the way that the Uruk's head sails into the air in slow motion, pained shock or dumb gormlessness written all over their faces, but for the sense of achievement they bring: plenty of Captains you kill by whatever means will not come back, but when you cut their heads off, you know they're gone for good, and if they've been a thorn in your side for a long time, it's all the more satisfying to put them to rest permanently.

Uruks hate their campfire sing-songs of 'Kum Ba Yah' being
interrupted.

Talion is much squishier than the armoured Master Wayne, however, and it's very easy to become overwhelmed in combat with multiple Uruks, especially if there are spearmen and archers outside the melee, who will have no qualms about firing into the crowd to try and take you down, and because it's possible to attract twenty or more Uruks to a single brawl, you may well lose track of who exactly is attacking you and when. You're perfectly capable of taking on legions of Uruks while suffering nary a scratch, but the addition of captains and shielded enemies that are immune to particular attacks or can counter you in return encourage you to mix up your tactics and not charge headlong into prolonged encounters. Getting hit even once can throw you off your rhythm, making it more likely that you'll be hit again and, what's more, cancelling your combo and denying you access to the special moves you can only activate once you reach a certain number of hits. Useful weapon-upgrading runes that are dropped by slain captains can allow you to regain health when using execution takedowns and other little bonuses, which do make a material difference to how you engage in combat and allow you to feel markedly stronger, but never provide so much utility that you become untouchably overpowered.

"Ah yes, 'Ringwraiths'. We have dismissed that claim."

The free-roaming aspect of the game provides the usual glut of collectible objects, sidequests, unlockable abilities and upgradable weapons, as well as slaves to rescue, wild beasts to hunt and herbs to pick for the game's Hunting and Survival challenges. Talion can scale buildings and sheer cliff-faces Ezio-style, meaning there are no real barriers to going wherever you want, and allowing a breadth of tactical options for how to approach a mission or assassination of a troublesome captain. There are special challenges that Talion can undertake that test his swordsmanship, his stealth or his archery, which eventually reforge and upgrade his longsword, dagger and bow respectively. The two maps (Udûn and Nurn) are large enough to allow plenty to do without cramping it all up, but small enough that the commute from one side to the other never becomes tedious. It's all immensely diverting and adds up to plenty of things to do when you've polished off the campaign, although the freeform nature of the game can sometimes work against it. For example, by the time I started the early missions that introduce the concept of the Nemesis System by having you clear the way for the incompetent Uruk Ratbag to become a Warchief, I'd already been doing plenty of exploring on my own for several hours and was intimately familiar with how the system worked, and certainly not in need of a tutorial extended over five missions or so explaining it to me.

Like most free-roaming games, Shadow of Mordor is strongest when it tosses you a bunch of tools, drops you in a sandbox and lets you mess around to your heart's content. Eliminating particularly irritating captains, assembling an army of branded Uruks and generally playing around with the Nemesis System is far more involving than the main amnesiac revenge-by-numbers campaign, though this is bolstered by pleasing and context-appropriate cameos from characters like Gollum and Saruman the White, and piecing together the wraith's history and his wider role in Middle-Earth lore is significantly more interesting than main character Talion's tired motivations. With excellent replayability, fun and diverse side activities, simple but satisfying and elegant combat, impressive visuals and a brilliant innovation in the Nemesis System, Monolith's Shadow of Mordor uses a familiar license to break new ground while remaining faithful to the source material and being tremendous fun to boot.

8.5/10 - Fine combat, fun enemies, great adventure, and MY AXE! Er, sorry.