Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

The game is a few years old, but the design looks crisp, detailed and smooth, the voice acting is top notch and the cut scenes are nicely animated. It has a detailed open world, not too large, with many orcs abound. MANY orcs.

There are enjoyable main and side missions in the open world system, a lot of which are very challenging early in the game.

The first couple of hours of gameplay are about as easy as taking part in the battle of Helm's Deep with only Samwise Gamgee and his potatoes for help. For this reason, it's best to get some orc kills and side missions under your alive/undead belt before tackling harder orc captains and main missions. Some of these are solid without upgraded weapons and health, and if you don't have enough points to enhance your Ranger and wraith skills.

A great action-RPG based in the Lord of the Rings universe. Wasn't expecting much from this one but it ended up being one of my favorites of the generation. Great gameplay and story propped up by TREMENDOUS graphics and character and environment design. Stellar game.

MIDDLE EARTH: SHADOW OF MORDOR (2014) was definitely entertaining and as a hardcore, diehard Tokien fan, I'm glad to have a Middle Earth themed game to play. Since this game came out it has been both lauded and criticized, and I can honestly understand why. My opinion is often mixed as well. I tend to try to lean more on the optimistic side however, and remain just grateful to have a decent Tolkien-inspired game and honestly because I did truly enjoy the game, I will rate it accordingly.

As other reviewers have said before, this game had strong similarities to Assassin's Creed series, as well as other similar parkour action styled games with elements of stealth, adventure, fighting, (i.e. Assassins Creed series, Watch Dogs, inFamous, etc.) however the unpredictability of the AI for the Orcs made this game really fun and much more strategic. I enjoyed the premise of the battlefield being the main focal point, recruitment of orcs, building your own army, all the while analyzing and dismantling the enemy army. Uber cool. And the revenge aspect often made it more enjoyable as well.

While it can still be a bit repetitive, (Aren't most games when you think about it?) the graphics are pretty great, cutscenes are visually praisable, and the story is compelling enough to drive the player onwards WITHOUT overstepping too much outside of the Tolkien lore and world. I really appreciated that the writers didn't want to diminish or tarnish an epic masterpiece world by adding too much of their own. Not saying everying here is cannon, per say, but just that it didn't really feel overdone or too butchered. I enjoyed how the many collectables offered room to share lore and background to players that might not know about it. Lastly, while Talion as a character was alright, I really liked the persona and portrayal of Celebrimbor as a main lead far more.

Overall, this game was really fun and offered a decent ammount of play time. While, not perfect, it was still pretty great for a Tolkien / Middle Earth inspired game and I hope to get more sequels in the future, as long as they don't stray too far from the literature or take too many liberties with the source material.

Greetings from Lithuania.

I beat "Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor" (2014) main story (completed ~64%) in about 23 hours. It is very fun game, which has great combat system, interesting enemies ranking system, great graphics, sound design. Story was not bad at all, and i'm not "Lord Of The Rings" series fan although enjoyed every movie. There many said quests, but they are very repetitive, kill someone in some time and etc. (hate missions were there is a time limit). There are two main maps in the game, which aren't very big, but there is enough content to keep you involved, collect that, gather that and etc. During game play i stumbled upon two bugs, which made my to restart missions. But some fight can be helluva frustrating, when there is almost no chance it winning the fight or you hit those last chance buttons but sometimes unsuccessfully but you not by your fault.

Overall, "Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor" is very enjoyable game. It's game play and combat system is very similar to Batman series, which is good. Fights are always very brutal, and i had some fun in crushing some skulls. Game also features very interesting "after dead" enemy ranking system, which isn't very superb as it would like to show itself, but it is a fresh thing. All in all very cool game not without some issues.

I just bought this game a few days ago. and I'm still not getting bored of it. This is possibly the most fun game I've played since The Last Of Us came out for Playstation 3! The graphics are absolutely gorgeous! And don't even get me started on the combat! The combat is so smooth and so fluid, yes I know it's EXACTLY like the Assassin's Creed combat and so is mostly everything to be honest, the sprinting, the sneaking, the climbing. But this game has one thing that no other game has, and this is what makes it special. The Nemesis System! It's absolutely magnificent! That's what makes this game great is that it could go on forever. The Nemesis System is basically a system of a mere twenty captain Uruks, they all have special names and power skills and ranking and weaknesses and strengths, and that's fun! If a Captain kills you, then they rank up and possibly get promoted, if YOU kill them then they obviously die but they can come back to life but they're just demoted to beginner and aren't in the system (nemesis branch of captains) anymore. but when you run into one, you'll know because they'll stare you down and say some rude thing "you weak peasant." some sort of comment. and then you can fight them yet again. Also, when you kill a captain you always get a Rune which you can apply to your sword, bow, or dagger. (depends on the rune because they're each meant for one of the weapons.) So overall, I give this game a solid 10/10 because the replay value is very high in my opinion. The graphics are beautiful! The combat and nemesis system are outstanding! and overall I think it was a well spent $50. I would recommend buying this game. Even if you're not into the middle age type of games like The Elder Scrolls, because in my opinion I hated those type of games until I bought this. So give it a try! Thanks for reading.