I’m not a huge LOTR fan so the lore didn’t really grab hold of me and make me want to run out and buy Shadow of Mordor. I thought the movies were decent but nothing more. When my buddy described to me the “nemesis” system that the game uses now that did make me take notice and buy the game when I could. That is a system in the game that helps to give you more of a personal connection to the game that many open world games lack. Throughout the game you hunt down and kill Uruk Captains to help hinder their war effort. If you fail to kill them and they run away they will remember that and mention it the next time you meet along with wounds and scars you inflicted on them. If you get killed by a Captain they grow stronger because of it and are harder to kill next time. This made the game a lot more fun for me, made things less grindy and gave more personality to characters that would have been duller otherwise.
The combat in the game is a great take on the Arkham combat from the Batman games. It is all based around timing and chaining together attacks and combos. There are a lot of different finishers you can use depending on whether you are in stealth, hanging from a ledge, or using your sword or bow. You can upgrade your sword, bow and dagger with a variety of runes that will add special abilities and chances of events happening such as setting an enemy on fire or regaining health from a kill. You can find more of these by killing warchiefs or captains. You may get extra special ones if you use enemies weaknesses against them. You can gather intel on captains by finding documents and interrogating other Uruk. You can find out what attacks won’t work on them as well as what they fear and are weak to. There is so much that, while optional, can add such depth to the game as a whole. The game could get very hectic with a couple dozen enemies attacking at once. It got difficult when you had ranged attackers shooting stuff at you that you may not even notice. There are a lot of environmental attacks you can use such as using your bow to ignite a camp fire or to shoot a flies nest that will scare off enemies.
The story to the game was decent overall. You play a Ranger named Talion who is killed along with his wife and son when the Uruks assault the Black Gate where they are stationed. He doesn’t totally die as his body and soul are tied to that of an Elf who needs to remember his past and helps Talion in getting his revenge as well as recover his past memories. You uncover much of the story through side missions, finding relics and artifacts and completing main missions. The voice acting was great and and the story had a nice flow to it. My only complaints would be that the end of the game fight was basically a QTE event which felt like a cop out. Also many of the missions either force you into playing a certain way, such as riding a mount during, or had a time limit. I don’t like to be pigeon holed and like to figure out my own strategy to finish a mission. The graphics are awesome. The detail on a characters face is fantastic and the game area has some great vistas.
I played Shadow of Mordor on Linux. I played version 1.3 of the game and used the Vulkan beta. The game did have one crash when loading the game but no other issues at all. The Game has nine graphics settings as well as FXAA, four settings for AO and the ability to scale resolution to 200% of your monitor. I had all settings on highest with motion blur turned off and my resolution at 1080P. The framerate was usually 70 or above but could dip to the mid 50’s or go as high as 100 depending on my location and what was going on. The game used at most 8.5GB of RAM, 25% of my CPU, 100% of my GPU and 5.2GB of VRAM. The Vulkan beta ran much better than the OpenGL version. I got about 30FPS higher on average than on OpenGL.
Overall this was a great game. The combat is fantastic; the story is worth a playthrough even if you’re not an LTOR fan; the graphics are gorgeous; and it runs great. It has a few things I wish were different but nothing that made me angry or soured my fun. I paid $14.14 for the game and would say it was easily worth $40. I finished the main story; about half of the side missions and all of the collectables hunt in about 27 hours.
My Score: 8/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.2.7 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.1.4 | Mate 1.22.2 | Kernel 5.4.2-1-MANJARO