Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor Fails at Tone and Gameplay

Shamus Young has written two, to use a euphemism, less-than-kind editorial on Monolith’s Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. According to Young, the game fails both at capturing the tone of the original literary trilogy and at capturing what made the combat compelling in the Batman Arkham games, games that Shadow of Mordor borrows heavily from.

A snippet from the first:

The game starts off in the most ham-fisted and tone-deaf way possible: You play as Talion, a soldier. The bad guys come and murder you and your family during the tutorial. You then come back from the dead to get your revenge. Yes, the writers took the most stale and overused story premise from 80’s action schlock and tried to hide it under a coat of Tolkien paint. The result isn’t just merely sophomoric, but contemptible. No effort is spent filling in the protagonist’s world, establishing his character, or building any sort of narrative tension. The game has just a few lines of dialog before it jumps right into the family-murder, like a porno that’s in a hurry to get past all the stupid talking scenes and get to the boning. That’s what Shadow of Mordor is: Revenge porn. The game starts with a guy killing your family and ends when you kill him back. (And if you needed a spoiler tag for that, then you are new to this planet.)

This is even more infantile when you realize that one of the themes of the books is that revenge — and the lust for it — is poisonous and destructive. In the original work, the forces of good win at the end because nobody had the heart to murder Gollum, even though they all knew he deserved it. The Hobbits were the key to victory not because they were fierce and cunning, but because they were guileless and gentle. Their innocence protected them from the allure of a ring that devoured normal guys just like Talion: Guys who want to solve the world’s problems by stabbing.

And from the second:

If the developer wants to make the game fun and empowering, then I’m all for it: Give the player a massive health bar. Have the foes attack slowly, and give the counter prompts a long duration. Ramp the foe types up slowly. You can absolutely make a deep and skill-based game that is enjoyable for newcomers.

But this is not what Shadow of Mordor does. I don’t need the game to kill the player for making mistakes, I just want it to recognize when you don’t.

The game buries you in mechanics right from the start. It teaches you combat, stealth, and bow attacks within a few minutes of each other. It piles on complexity without making sure you’ve got the basics. I was fine, but I know this is likely to be overwhelming for newcomers. I’m sure they’re just assuming that “everyone” knows the Arkham combat, which isn’t remotely true and not an excuse for having a game with a bad tutorial. How many people will pick up this game because of the Lord of the Rings name and find themselves hopelessly lost?

In any case, the systems of Mordor are broken because they no longer recognize perfection. You can just mash buttons and kill stuff. And if that’s all you want, that’s totally fine. You can play Arkham games that way too. But Arkham tracks and recognizes improvement, while Shadow of Mordor mostly focuses on empowerment. It might seem like a small change, but I find it very unsatisfying to blunder my way through a fight, make mistakes, and still see my combo meter cranked up. The game tells you you’re perfect when you don’t deserve it. It blurs the line between “good enough” play and “exceptional” play, thus taking away a big part of your incentive to improve.