This is an ongoing multi-part review of Monolith's 'Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor.' You can read Part Two here.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor will not escape comparisons to Assassin's Creed. The game borrows heavily on Ubisoft's flagship franchise, and as Talion the Ranger you'll parkour through Mordor, racing across rope bridges and dive-assassinating your enemies with glee. Even some of your wraith powers are reminiscent of the Assassin's Creed games.
But that's not the whole story. Shadow of Mordor is, in many ways, the Assassin's Creed game I always wanted to play. It has much richer systems at play in almost every sense. There's a deep leveling and upgrade system as you gain experience and power, including an impressive skill tree, rune-upgrades for Talion's weapons, and a basic array of stat upgrades such as health and focus (your Ranger ability to go into bullet-time with a bow, basically.)
Meanwhile, the missions are sprinkled about an open map very similar to an Assassin's Creed game or an Arkham title, but I feel much more connected to the Orc/Uruk Captains I'm meant to hunt down than I ever feel to a target in Assassin's Creed. (On the flip-side, none of these characters is as rich as a Bane or a Joker.) You can find intel or interrogate lower-tier orks to learn about a Captain's strengths and weaknesses, for one thing. And each Captain has a distinct personality, combat style, and so forth.
This brings us to the much-talked-about Nemesis system. Any lowly orc that kills you in battle gets a promotion and becomes a low-power Captain. Should they defeat you again, they'll level up gaining new powers and becoming more difficult to defeat. If you take on a really powerful Captain before you're ready and they kill you, they'll become even more daunting. It's a neat system so far, but I haven't gotten far enough along to say for sure whether it works as advertised or not yet.
Beyond these interesting mechanics, Shadow of Mordor includes stealth out-of-the-box, something that Assassin's Creed is only adding after years of making games about assassins. Sure, you could always hide in the bushes in Assassin's Creed, but in Shadow of Mordor you can sneak any time you please. There's even a run-while-sneaking option, which is---to be quite frank---an idea that should always be available in stealth games. Trade a little tedium for a little risk.
Graphics-wise, Shadow of Mordor looks absolutely stunning on PS4. I suspect it looks as good on PC and likely nearly as good on Xbox One, though I haven't played either version. Everything from the animations to the enormous, open world of Mordor is simply gorgeous. Indeed, Mordor is, at times, too beautiful. Talion's cape rustles about him in the breeze.
The final way Shadow of Mordor plays like Assassin's Creed is its combat. It feels similar, but a bit more in-depth.
First off, enemies don't merely attack you one at a time. You'll get mobbed up on pretty quickly at times. And while I find the mobs to be, at this stage at least, incredibly easy once you have the basic controls down, as soon as a harder Captain joins the fray combat becomes more of a challenge. There are some monsters that can spice up a fight, too.
That being said, it's not ever all that challenging. You can challenge yourself to stealth killing and so forth, but there's never a sense that you're in any real peril. You see the triangle icon appear, you click triangle and parry. Then you beat back your enemy and open them up for a killing stroke. You can use special wraith powers to stun or knock-back and all of this changes and evolves as you level up Talion. For instance, you open up skills that change a knock-down from above into a killing take-down, or a series of quick blows into a series of quick blows followed by an execution move, and so forth.
(The game is violent and not intended for small children, but I did let my four-year-old play very briefly as an experiment. He's an avid Mario and Skylanders fan so he has a pretty good handle on basic controls. I explained what the attack button was---square---how to parry---triangle---and how to dodge/run/sneak. He was very quickly performing stealth kills and fighting two or three orcs off at a time, though the first Captain he encountered made short work of him. The early stages of this game are just not that tough, for better or worse. It could get harder as you go along, and I'll be sure to let you know if it does.)
This is all very early impressions of the game, to give you a sense of whether it's worth your time.
So far I'm having fun. I'm seeing lots of things that I hope Ubisoft borrows for its next Assassin's Creed game.
I'm enjoying playing in this absurd version of Middle Earth, killing enemies hither-and-thither. It doesn't really feel like the Lord of the Rings fantasy of the books; it's much more an extension of the Jackson/Warner Bros. vision of that world.
But it's well-acted (the marvelous Troy Baker is, naturally, the man behind Talion's voice, sounding nothing at all like Joel from The Last of Us or, well, any of his other roles...) and well-written, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further.
Of course, I also have that pesky Dark Souls II DLC to conquer...
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor launches today on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Look for further reviews, videos, and more as I dig deeper into the game.
