Killing Orcs DOES Get Old | Why I Hated Shadow of Mordor

All right, for those of you who loved this game: I'm sorry, okay? Truly, I am. If you loved this game, then great! Good for you! Congrats even! You were able to derive joy and pleasure out of something that to me was both remedial and contrived. In the end you should be happy you got something out of it that I did not, not angry at me for not sharing in your experience.

Also, in the event this didn't occur to those that haven't played this game yet, this review will consist of spoilers. So, you know, be forewarned and stuff.

First and foremost: This game was lazy. Lazy with a capital L. The mechanical features of this game were a re-skinned lovechild between the Assassin's Creed franchise and the Batman franchise (Also by WB Games) and the stolen attributes from other games are literally the best part about it.

You play as a greasy, broad shouldered Aragorn-like Ranger (Talion) whose family is murdered by a set of Lord of the Rings villains...that never actually existed in Tolkien lore. Talion himself is then murdered, but brought back through the misfirings of a magical rite that was supposed to bind one of these villains with...Celebrimbor? Why this is, I'm not sure. I didn't really pick it up in the games. I think it had something to do with strengthening the hold of the One Ring on the other rings of power, specifically those carried by the elven lords since they remained the least affected by the power of the rings, to help Sauron attempt to take over Middle Earth again? (pro tip: this is an example of bad writing)

Talion is instead the one bound to Celebrimbor, who suffers from amnesia due to his years of being a wraith. As to how Celebrimbor became a wraith, or why he's one, is never mentioned. You'd think someone would have noticed a ghost elf walking around somewhere at some point in time between The Second Age and modern Middle Earth time. There weren't exactly a whole lot of them.

Let's hold this train for a second if we may.

There was only ever one person in Tolkien lore that came back to life (and that was even a mistake by Tolkien who had forgotten to do some name changing while writing out his ever extensive lore). That was the elf Glorfindel. Therefore, in all of the ages that ever existed, recorded and not, throughout Middle Earth, only one person ever came back. Talion should not have done so, and as such this story is very weak proving that the writers over at WB Games had no idea what they were doing.

Then there's the enemies themselves. The...Tower of Sauron? The Hand of Sauron? ... the only bodily themed physical enemy that I recall in The Lord of the Rings was the Mouth of Sauron, so is the Dark Lord's posse some weird personified amalgamation of 'the hand bone's connected to the wrist bone' kind of gang? Why the weird theme? The Hand of Sauron never referred to a physical enemy either, it was simply an expression to refer to the spread of his evil over Middle Earth. So...

I'm not really sure what WB Games was trying to do here, but whatever it was - it was ridiculous. 

That being said, gameplay wise this got tiresome quick. Many friends and colleagues of mine had this to say while playing Shadow of Mordor: "Killing orcs never gets old." Well, yes, frankly it actually does get old. And adding a hunting counterpart to the game didn't enrich its flavor at all either. WB Games literally took two mechanics that should have been intended for side missions and made them streamlined mechanics within the game, and then had the nerve to stretch those two mechanics over thirty hours of gameplay with almost no variation to them, and had the nerve to call this a game. 

What irritated me the absolute most about this game is that I spend countless hours killing orcs and uruks, as well as being killed by them, to finally get rid of the Warlords, and when I opened up Nurn (Don't get me started on how wrong Nurn and its inhabitants were in this game) I now have to do the same thing all over again, the only difference is now I can temporarily possess other ors and uruks? You literally did nothing to change up the game flow on this! I'm doing the same thing with an added mechanic that isn't even necessary! What was the point?

With an IP as rich as The Lord of the Rings the world was their oyster, and they decided to take the laziest approach to this world with a character that would have never existed - and if he had, he never would have been at The Black Gate at that 60 year gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings stories, given that no Rangers were ever stationed there, at least not during the Third Age.

So we have lazy story and lax mechanics. Was there anything about this game that was redeeming?

I liked Celebrimbor and I liked Torvin. In fact, you could have given me a game with just these two pal-ing around and I'd have been twenty times happier. 

You know what also would have made a great cannon game for an elf and dwarf with some fascinating mechanics? The friendship between Eöl the dark elf and Durin? Those two were responsible for many of the greatest of Middle Earth's architecture and likely had some crazy adventures due to it. Or what about Turin and Beleg? Few tales in Tolkien lore were as wonderful and as sad as what happened to them, after all. But no. WB instead gives us this bland pile of fecal matter and dresses it up with some flashy graphics and calls it a game.

I hope you're proud of yourself WB Games. You produced a lackluster piece of crap that was beyond polishing, and proved that you either have an inability to conduct even the slightest bit of research, or didn't care.

THIS TASK WAS APPOINTED TO YOU!!!

I sincerely hope that any and all future Lord of the Rings themed games aim higher than Shadow of Mordor did. Granted, that wouldn't exactly be too difficult now, would it?


Image from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/09/30/shadow-of-mordor-and-the-benefits-of-being-underhyped/