Despite being completely mad about fantasy as a child...I never really got into Lord Of The Rings. It's filled with empty characters and Tolkien was such a raging Bible-basher. A man obsessed with a binary good vs evil conflict, with absolutely no attachment to the endeavour of man. I know some people complain about how the movies made Gimli into a drunken idiot, Legolas's fighting ability is ridiculous, and every scene with Frodo and Sam made me scream: "KISS HIM YOU FOOL!!" But at least it gave these characters traits. At least it gave these people something.
As with any other major franchise, there have been a ton of mostly terrible LOTR games. My personal favourite until Shadow Of Mordor was The Third Age, because it almost entirely copied it's turn-based combat from Final Fantasy X - which is a good thing. Plus there was also a game-mode where not only could you play as Orcs, Nazgul, the Witch-king and the Balrog, but you can play as Sauron himself.
But along came one of the most eccentric game companies out there, Monolith, with a really eccentric idea: Let's adapt a movie from over ten years ago, except not really. Oh, and let's do an open world game even though up until now we've almost entirely made linear first person shooters.
Shadow Of Mordor is a third-person open world game where you play as Tallion, who, for a franchise that specialises in dull characters, somehow manages to be even more dull. He's killed by an agent of Sauron, but rather than follow the noble tradition of staying dead, is instead exiled to Mordor and permanently attached to a ghost. Just...go with it.
Actually, that summarises the whole plot nicely: "Just go with it." Your main objective is to kill The Black Hand so both Tallion and his ghost-friend can die. But why would you want to die? Now that you're undead, you're immortal and have ancient powers. Yes, you're bound to Mordor, but as with all open-world games; by the end of it you're an elder god able to blast your way through waves of orcs. Perhaps Tallion wants to be reunited with his dead family, but the LOTR universe never solidly states that there is an afterlife. For all we know, death is death.
Remember how all the elves in LOTR stood around acting infuriatingly melancholic and not doing anything because destroying Sauron would somehow destroy magic itself, meaning the elves would lose their immortality? Well, Tallion is actively on a quest to die. It's not even a heroic self-sacrifice - he wants to stop having the convenient ability to teleport to a checkpoint instead of decomposing. Except he intends to end his 'suffering' by killing The Black Hand, the person who killed him previously. So wait: he wants to take vengeance by making the guy who murdered him finish the job? Are you sure you know what 'vengeance' means, Tallion?
You'd think this would lead to a unique experience. You'd think the game would become like The Seventh Seal, a slow grim march towards death. You're consistently denied the relief of death, forced to walk this land. Yet your quest is also one to end the game. You want to die, and so you're called into question why you're undertaking this quest. Your life has been stripped down to a quest to die, and yet the more you fail then the more you remain within the game. This is a surprisingly meta dimension...but nope. It's clear the plot is just filler for the actual meat of the game.
My favourite part of the LOTR books is the antagonists. Tolkein created some really cool villains. Mordor is a literal hell festering with non-human beings forged by death itself. Even the names sound so metal. Mordor. Sauron. Nazgul. Say those words out loud and your testosterone will double. As a dedicated Bible-basher, Tolkien believed that anyone not white and attractive was obviously born evil. His writing is deeply steeped in the Victorian mindset; that an ugly face means an ugly soul. So all the Orcs are evil because they're ugly and they smell and they drink and gosh they're just so evil. Yet I always rebelled against this. I was fascinated by that one line Saruman says in The Fellowship Of The Ring to the Urk-Hai leader; that Orcs were once Elves cast aside for their ugliness. It's the only time the Orc's are given any kind of characterisation aside from evil death-creatures of evil death.
Whilst the landscape is actually varied and doesn't merely look like the cover to a heavy metal album (awesome as that would be) there are certainly a lot of Orcs. They have quite generic conversation amongst themselves about how much they enjoy drinking and killing. What they like the most however, is killing you. They don't do this because they hate your guts...well, OK, they do a bit - but they mostly want a promotion.
The person who kills you gets immediately promoted to a captain, and then it's personal. They have followers, all of whom can kill you and become captain's themselves. They now have a name, a voice, and abilities. You can either hunt them down and exact vengeance, or you can run into them again during your quest. It's really fun to get yourself into a fight, then lock swords with a captain and think: "Oh, it's the bastard who killed me mid-way through the last mission! I'm gonna shove the flame of Anhor right up your ass!" Or you get sniped by an archer and go: "Right! It's on now! It's on like Jean Valjean!!" before running all the way to the other side of the map to exact vengeance.
Meanwhile, the captains themselves are out for each-others blood. Whilst some hunt in pairs (particularly later in the game) they each have their own conflicts which you can intervene in. They either try to assert their status to gain power, or fight with other captains to weaken their opposition. There are also War Chiefs, very powerful Orc's who other captains with bodyguard whilst also trying to backstab. Behind the surface of the game is a constantly shifiting power-struggle that reminds me pleasantly of Mount & Blade: Warband, where the political climate continues to change regardless of your own actions. Except this is the best kind of politics: where people solve their problems by hitting each-other with metal objects.
You can make it your quest to elimate all the captains and cleanse the land of their filth. But ultimately this is futile, because captain's also recruit new captain's. You can interrupt these recruitment drives, but I made the mistake of going through every single radiant mission to ambush Captain's and either weaken their power or just kill them. It was a mistake because these mission's all repeat themselves and are sooo dullll. Plus you're almost certainly going to die eventually because there's no difficulty setting and the challenge ramps up surprisingly quickly. So no matter how much you go out of your way to kill captains, there will always be an endless influx of them. And whilst I was impressed how many different personalities each captain has, eventually they repeated themselves too.
The most creative part in the end feels like another pointless sidequest. At first I used to take revenge against captain's who had previously killed me, as well as the captain's who previously killed my dear friend (which is actually a neat multiplayer aspect). But these too became repetitive. There was initially satisfaction in watching the captain who previously impaled me with a spear fall to his knees begging for mercy, or run away in fear only to have me shadow-strike him and watch his head roll away from his body in slow motion. But it just became hollow because, again, these people just keep coming back. It's pointless to take captain's killing you personally because they're just clones repeated endlessly. It's like having a grudge against an iPhone...or a Conservative politician.
You might be wondering why I haven't discussed the actual gameplay yet, and the reason why is because it's exactly the same gameplay as any other open world game. You run around a flat environment, occasionally climbing structures, sometimes breaking into enemy strongholds, collecting pointless objects that only serve to add to a 100% completion progress bar. The map screen even looks identical to the Just Cause games...which looks exactly like the Assassin's Creed game. There is absolutely nothing I can say about the gameplay that cannot be said about any open world game made in the past five years.
Oh, except the combat. I hate this kind of combat. It's precisely the same combat as the Arkham games. You hit the same button, a prompt comes up to counter, you counter, then you continue hitting the same button. Sometimes once you get a hit-streak you can press another button. But ultimately you can just shut your eyes and mash two buttons endlessly. The odd thing is that despite the combat being so mindless, this is actually a really hard game. If it wasn't for PS4 controllers being so expensive, I would've thrown it out of frustration (though, the battery life disgusts me).
It's hard because as the game goes on, the fights start throwing more enemies at you. This means you'll be constantly mashing the 'block' button just as much as the 'attack' button. But you'll never be able to block all the attacks, and your sword just isn't powerful enough to take down large groups swiftly enough. Eventually these fights go on for so long that my mind begins to wander. I think about how much damage this is doing to my PS4 controller, despite the fact I hardly use the console. I then start to wonder if my PS4 was a valid purchase. Yes, I can play The Last Of Us, Journey, and The Last Guardian...but that's it. All the other good games are also available on PC. My gaming PC is beginning to slow down already because technology moves so damn quickly. Maybe I should've saved the £200 I spent on a PS4 and instead bought a new graphics card, or a new power supply so my PC stops crashing whenever I reboot it after an update. Also my monitor gets a lot of screen-tearing. Maybe I could've got a new one. I could then have two monitor's, which I've always wanted because then I can pretend I'm hacking into The Matrix.
Oh, the fight's over. Did I win? No...because there were a load of archers who you can't dodge and can't shoot back because there are so many damn enemies. Well, I guess I should try again and - oh for gods sakes! The guy who killed me is now an elder god, and the two other captain's who were milling about are now even more powerful! Sod this! I'm not going to play a game that cheaply ramps up the difficulty then punishes me so much for failing.
I haven't finished the story to Shadow Of Mordor, and despite having fun with the game, I'm not sure I ever will. The narrative really writes itself into a corner with the whole 'undead' aspect. I don't want to finish the game because I don't want Tallion to die and end the experience, but I'm not motivated to complete the game because you're an undead soul bound to Mordor. Aside from improving your abilities, there's not really much reason to progress through the game. I don't think I've ever invested so much time in such a joyless experience.
You know what this game should have been: an Orc simulator. Instead of merely helping Ratbag and others to ascend in power, you should play as Ratbag. He's by far the most interesting character. Everyone else is just an AI to serve the plot. Tallion is a blank slate, but Ratbag has an actual personality. He's a weakling in a world where weaklings are eaten for breakfast. He shouldn't survive here, yet he does so by being sneaky. He survives in a world of scum by being the scummiest of them all. Wouldn't it be fascinating to play as this guy, working your way up the ranks whilst forming allies to surround yourself with. But nope. We can only dream.
Overall, Shadow Of Mordor is a surprising open world game that manages to inject life into the stale genre...but still not enough life. Tallion is a metaphor for current open world games: he's a bland, undead being only being kept alive by a much cooler person I'd rather be playing as. Maybe in a few years, once this genre finally dies, I'll look back more fondly on this for at least trying something new. But for now, just like how I said I don't want to review another pseudo-indie game, I don't want to review another open world game. You know: the kind with unlock-able checkpoints, pointless collectibles, and button-mashing combat. No more. Please.
