The best thing about playing Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is that it makes me feel over-the-top powerful without sacrificing the fear of defeat. It’s got great free-flowing combat and a good-sized, good-looking open world full of Lord of the Rings lore to find, but what makes it special is what’s going on in the background: an intriguing hierarchy of enemies that gives every victory and defeat extra meaning.

A brief and shocking opening scene sets a dark and brutal tone as Talion, a former Ranger of Gondor, is ritually executed along with his family. Talion’s spirit is then bound to an amnesiac elf ghost and returned to Middle-earth for vengeance against Sauron’s forces. It’s a story that doesn’t make total sense for hardcore Tolkien scholars, but it’s well-acted. It makes decent use of Gollum, and there are a couple of memorable new characters - particularly Ratbag the comic-relief uruk, who guides you through the process of infiltrating the enemy army.


My interest in the plot dwindled toward the end, but it does a fair job of explaining why Talion has such sweet supernatural powers with his sword, dagger, and bow. Much like in the Batman: Arkham games, you can choose to stealthily pick off enemies one at a time, or dive head-first into a brawl with dozens of opponents and beat the crap out of them with a smoothly animated series of attacks and counters. Unlike Batman, of course, Mordor’s involve great, gory decapitation and stabbing animations, and outside of the scripted story missions, there are few distinctly separated stealth and combat areas. It’s enticingly freeform.
Acrobatically slaughtering Sauron’s ugly minions feels as easy as it appears to be for Legolas in Peter Jackson’s movies, and it’s more fun to do than to watch. Sword combat feels pretty much just as good here as brawling does in Batman – which is to say it’s amazing. Mordor’s take on building up hit streaks to power up lethal takedowns is a bit more forgiving, in that you’re almost never locked into an animation. If you push the counter button, Talion will drop what he’s doing and counter instantly. It’s extremely responsive. A time-slowing power makes scoring a couple of headshots with the bow easy, whether in stealth or in the heat of battle, though it’s kept in check by ammo constraints and a limited (but upgradable) supply of time-slowing juice. And even though stealth gameplay is pretty basic, it’s great to have the option to thin the herd a bit before they know you’re there.

What really sets the feel of Mordor’s combat apart from the Batman games is that it’s really easy to get into trouble, especially early on. If you let the uruks raise the alarm in one of their strongholds, or just happen across a few large wandering groups on the densely populated map, you can quickly become overwhelmed by more enemies than you can hope to handle. Picking out the shield bearers and ax-wielding berserkers who are immune to frontal attacks and killing them first becomes tough to do when you’re completely surrounded, and it goes downhill from there. Health doesn’t recharge much on its own, and until you can upgrade your health pool, you may find yourself succumbing to death by a thousand pinpricks if you don’t retreat.
Things got a lot easier a few hours in when I’d leveled up and unlocked more of Talion’s skill tree so that I could build up combos quicker, execute two enemies for the price of one, and even fight mounted on a huge, rancor-like graug who pops uruks into his mouth like jellybeans. It feels powerful, but I still don’t feel invincible even with everything nearly maxed out.

In the second act, you transition from the bleak, brown map to a refreshingly greener-looking area of Mordor. There, Talion and his elf-ghost buddy suddenly realize he can mind-control uruks and turn them against each other. (It feels like something might’ve been cut out there.) That’s even more fun, because the ability to “brand” an enemy gives you the choice of either killing a captain for a rune reward or controlling him and siccing him on one of his former allies. Taking an uruk alive can be trickier than lopping off his head, though, so it’s more challenging to accomplish the new goal of mind-controlling five Warchiefs. I love how you have the option to mind-control a Warchief’s lieutenants, then kill the Warchief, to watch your minion become the new Warchief. I did notice that the mind-control visual effect caused some slowdown on the PlayStation 4 version (the Xbox One version has yet to arrive for testing), but it didn’t interfere much with combat.
Charging through the decent but less-exciting story missions would probably take around 12 hours, but the goal of killing or dominating the Warchiefs is much more time-consuming and interesting. I spent around 25 hours to reach the end, and there’s still a lot of challenging side missions based around testing sword, bow, and dagger skills left to do. And, of course, lots of collectables and wildlife-hunting challenges.