Middle-earth™: Shadow of Mordor™ Game of the Year Edition

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I really wanted to like Shadow of Mordor but after 6 hours I couldn't stand the gameplay loop anymore. There's too many mechanics: I know, it should be a pro, but it's not when you get swarmed by 5 different types of enemies that you should fight in completely different ways, at the same time. The Nemesis system is useless. Controversial opinion maybe, but I don't really see an emergent storytelling from the system like you could have tracking dynasties in Crusader Kings 2, or the Order members in AC:Odyssey. Enemies gets replaced, some just return in an infinite loop (in my last session I had a low power captain return 4 times in a row and every time he became invulnerable to the mechanic I used to kill him), and if you fail they upgrade their rank... but then what? Maybe in the sequel they have more personality and the possibility of collecting them makes the task more fun, but here? You just watch an excel table of Orc names move. The plot is just not a plot. It doesn't move, it's mostly a showcase for the setting and the Nemesis system itself. The game is grindy. There's dozens and dozens of side missions to grind to earn "money" to power up your character and unlock another button combinations for an ability that the swarm of enemies won't let you use, being most of them perfect for dueling NPCs but you're either going stealth or playing a musou game with a single underpowered AoE attack.

The mechanics are great for a beaat-em-up game. Replayablity suffers from repetition.

The game is fun, the battles are massive and it's great fun to slaughter your way through hordes of orcs. I played the game with mouse + keyboard and with a controller (Xbox) and in my opinion it plays better with the controller. Nevertheless, the controls are sometimes really stupid. I understand why you put “run, jump, climb” on one button (A). But why not run again when pressing the left stick? It's really fiddly when you're trying to run while turning the camera with the right stick. In addition, the camera movement is sometimes really strange, so that you quickly lose the overview in a fight with lots of orcs. However, these are my only points of criticism. Otherwise, the game still plays well today. The graphics are getting on in years, but are still “good”. The story: is a matter of taste, but I like it, even if it never gets really deep.

GRAN JEUGO DADDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD