Middle Earth - Shadow of Mordor (2017)

Quickly. Surgeon's knife. No time for the anesthetic.

I don't like this one. Whew!

You may now express yourself with bricks. If you are into that sort of thing.

Lesson learned: A majority opinion or a high favorable percentage on the internet is utter, pure, unadulterated, incomprehensible bullshit. And unreliable to boot.

Monolith, Monolith, what has happened to you. I suspect after the FEAR rights being treated like a ping-pong ball and having a brilliant first entry go to trash in such spectacular fashion, Monolith never really recovered and had to over-compensate with this, this, well, this mess.

Oh, Shadow of Mordor, how you annoy me, let me count (some of) the ways:

• The save system.
  To quote the eminent Donald Duck, "Hey, what's the big idea?" Here is a game in 2017 that is so outstandingly stupid it doesn't bother to inform you when and where progress is saved. On the other hand, maybe it does it so cleverly that my meagre brain failed to notice it after 16 hours of play time.
  
  Once you quit and restart the game, always assuming that at some point there must have been a checkpoint, you always start on one of the towers. Depending on where the tower is from the current main objective, enjoy a long refreshing healthy sprint across the map to get to the mission start point.
  
  There are mid-mission save points but only as long as you don't quit the game. Er, what?
  
  No wonder they didn't include a manual save option. In these conditions that option would have sent all the programmers to hospital with chronic headaches.
  
  
• I am Batman. No, you are not.
  Combat is Batman Arkham-ish but new and improved, or rather, old and quirky and rough edged. Works well in places. In other places, so-so so-so. If you are going to tread the Arkham path, could you do it without succumbing to button mashing? (Detailed rant about button mashing here, new window). The mash problem is not as severe as in say, Spider-Man or Devil May Cry, but it's there. And it's not nice.
  
  
• Enforced stealth.
  How long, how long, how long? How long will it need to be repeated? If you cannot implement stealth properly, just leave it out. Random stealth missions with unfamiliar mechanics are a pain. The odd thing is that if you fail and restart a stealth mission, the enemies previously executed disappear so the bonus objective becomes impossible due to decreased enemy population and you have to hunt for new enemies. Some missions are bound by invisible boundaries and mission aborts if you run too far. Uh? We are still doing this in 2017? Oh, okay.
  
  
• Repetitive missions.
  In so many missions the objective changes but, well, hang it all, nothing else does. Everybody and everything looks the same. There is no feeling that you are doing anything new. It's always a case of "haven't I done this five times already?"
  
  
• Viva quick-time events.
  I quit playing this game at the Hunting Partner (dominate the white dog thing) mission because of horrible QTE. Or perhaps I should say pseudo-QTE. Maybe it is my fault that my reflexes are not as good as 20 years ago but randomizing the button every time the QTE runs is silly. In a near-death situation it is understandable, the game is giving you a chance to keep going. But in routine gameplay? And with such a small time window? And changing the button every time the QTE runs. What the hell, Monolith?

Anyway, the QTE had already happened a few times and that was the proverbial camel-back-breaker.

According to the Steam Client my total play time with Shadow of Mordor is 16.1 hours when I quit on this game. I simply couldn't find the motivation to keep going.

Shadow of Mordor is not something unique in terms of bad design but oftentimes that can be overcome. Sometimes games have an atmosphere, an engaging story, characters you can't abandon halfway through, a sense of achievement no matter how vague.

Unfortunately, Shadow of Mordor creates a peculiar cumulative effect of not having any of those.

Combat, mission structure, characters, world building, story - it's a featureless flat terrain.

If all else fails, I am always ready for even a half-decent story. But, well, this is Lord of the Rings territory and you can introduce as many twists as you want, the big bad goes poof in the end.

Writing is tough. Writing a self-contained interesting story within an established larger story is tougher still. But that's the point, isn't it? We don't expect great literature from games, just something interesting enough to keep things going. Get a good gameplay loop going and even that becomes less important.

For me, the more the gameplay fails, the more the story has to succeed and, of course, the opposite too.

Shadow of Mordor does not do this.

Sigh.

I got Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War together on Steam and such is my experience that so far after so many months I cannot bring myself to install Shadow of War. It just sits there, gathering digital dust.