Shadow of Mordor - That casts long on middle earth

[Dracos]

Get your hambuuuuurgers...  Fresh Hammmmburger meat for the pickings.  What?  You'd like a bun with that?  Some dressing?   Tomatoes?  No no no, we are serving Hamburger Meat Here.  Made of Orc.

So Shadow of Mordor by Warner Brothers was one of those Game of the Year that everyone should play (you know, has 20 of them).  Heard good things, friends enjoyed, and I picked it up.  Months later I actually played it and killed some orcs, and got killed by some orcs.  Anyhow, it is a story of Talion and Kellogs Boobsberry(Celebrimbor) and their journey... The ranger to revenge his family, cruelly slain by a Who's Who lineup of a ton of Mordor baddies who all showed up in the same spot just for the murdering, and the Ghost to get revenge for some reason he won't admit he actually remembers (or does he, it renders that unclear in the late game, but in the early one, he doesn't remember anything).  Together, they fight orcs.  And their horde of Orcs.  Talion is cursed to never die, as we're told.  Which frankly has to be among the more convenient curses when you're one of seven humans that could possibly lift a sword, living in a land that is nothing but enemy fortresses, with no meaningful break from the constant slaughter of things.  "Oh woe is me, they can't kill me.  I can continue my vengeance unending..."

Sometimes the orcs don't stay dead either, which is admittedly really confusing when you cut off an orc's head two or three times and he shows up again to rant at you as your 'rival'.  "Like dude, you were just orc 763.  You have a name?  Really?  Don't share it, I cannot be bothered to remember it."  There's no narrative reason for this, but it's one of the awkward ways the game tries to deliver what is a really good concept: Enemy rivalry.

For me, the concept didn't work.  A lot of times because orcs that would get a kill on me in the early game would have died 1-2 times to me beforehand, rendering it sort of a "Okay...so that's 1 you, 3 me, I'm uh...not feeling the personal threat going on here."  Another because they would often show up with an army and also get 2-3 other captains involved, which again, rendered it very impersonal.  "Okay, you're gloating over my corpse.  Did the other 35 orcs around me do nothing?  Jackass it's not a rivalry if you got the lucky shot among an ARMY."  It also didn't work because the migration would be slow.  In general, folks that killed you didn't get a bunch of protections after that, so a lot of the time, they could just be casually bumped off as they remained a rank 2 or 3 captain as you were doing your normal wander, without planning or consideration (and were even easier if you planned).  It was a neat thought, but the delivery didn't work for me.  I think Orc friendships might've helped here.  Maybe Uruk's sending orc death parties out to get the guy who killed their comrade or something.  Something to avoid the majority situation: The first time I see an orc captain is going to be when his head hits the ground spinning off his shoulders.

So orcs aside, what is the game about?  This is Assassin's Creed in middle-earth, or so they try a bit.  You are a ranger, with the overwhelming majority of quests being kill more orcs and the overwhelming majority of filler being Kill More Orcs.  You do stealth, arrow shooting, and generally have a lot of ways to one shot the majority of things you will face.  Halfway through the game you get Brainwash, which entirely changes the tone of the game (for the significantly better), but for the first half, any time you stop being the Unstoppable Shadowy Assassin... you get 40 orcs showing up on your ass.  They literally come out of everywhere to join in, and will totally do a massive orc party train chasing you across the map if you try and flee (Which you can effectively, but still).  This pretty much transforms the game early on into 'don't make a mistake or horde kills you and then someone laughs about it'.  Later on, you get brainwash, which lets you convert the horde as you fight, and basically makes the whole experience a lot more fun, if pretty onesided outside of One Shot Win abilities showing up on orc captains (Hey, fair play...I guess?)

There are 6 humans and 1 dwarf in the world that look capable of carrying a blade.  Only two of them will ever swing it in a quest.  Everyone outside of these seven (and two NPCs that show up for short bits) are just beaten slaves done to almost farcical levels, with no feeling of progress with rescuing them.  They don't go anywhere (There's nowhere to go), and they generally act like being slaves is such an expected fact of life that even their rebellion plans are kind of wussy.  "Yeah, I took a bite of food.  I was sticking it to the man!"  ...Really, starving wretch tied to a pole among other starving wretches?   This should've been one of the fillers, but it never feels like much is being done about it.  Suffering is rampant and your rescuing of these people is just self satisfaction because their lot never even briefly improves.  It's kind of disheartening and rescuing slaves is 24 of the quests in the game (more than 1/3rd).  Overall, this creates a disconnect and I think they were going for it, what with you being a fighting corpse-man, but there's just no foundation given.  No off-time in this game.  A handful of people imply they are truly rescued and get to escape, but basically the entire game sits in combat space, which makes for a very clear, but almost tiring balance of things.  Unlike some Territory Capture style games, nowhere becomes 'yours', even lategame.  Everywhere is still flooded with orcs and there is always new ones to take in the old.  There's an inevitability of it.

Or Uruks, or Uruk-hai.  Overall, the game delivers the canon message of different orc types, but doesn't do a good job of communicating or showing a culture where genetic superorcs rule over earlier breeds.  They all just become the effectively faceless flood of orcs in both of the major game zones.

The game also includes hunting and eventually gives you a LOT of ways to deal with and control an orc horde (of which brainwashing vastly outguns everything).  The hunting...was unfortunate.  There were 7 types of huntable 'monsters' and maybe a half dozen other small decorative things.  Decorative things were gameplay irrelevant aside from 'quest says shoot 3 of these now'.  They all died in one shot and basically were 'go to place, shoot arrow'.  The huntable monsters were actual encounters and whatnot...  but over half the interactions you could do with them were sealed off for seventy five percent of the game.  All of a sudden, the hunting expands at the very end to give you answers to the big giant monsters (which are effectively invulnerable and irrelevant occasional terrain features beforehand that can just be walked by) and ways that the large dog-beasts could be more reasonably dealt with.  This...is WAY TOO LATE.  By the time they start unlocking it, I already had basically started just double arrowing the dog things in the face to put them down ignoring the entire rest of the interaction chain as being ineffective.  You can ride the giant monsters...so what about giant monster combat?  It was sadness, with no collision, my giant monster and the other just flailed through each other for 10 minutes until one fell over and turned to dust.  Basically, the entire hunting bit could be dropped and a new player wouldn't notice any lack.  It didn't manage to tie back into the story they were telling.  It didn't inconvenience the endless orc horde.  It basically just was there to tell the story of a short dwarven hunter and his White Whale.  It goes poorly as a hunting story too, since they don't even stay consistent within breed on how you're supposed to hunt things.  The dwarf doesn't help you afterwards or even show up again, immediately exiting the story forever at the end of the hunting arc.  Again, noticeable by the sheer lack of cast that the game has and that they are all living in basically Orc-land.

I'm being pretty down on a game that got a lot of praise, and in its defense, the moment to moment combat can sometimes be pretty awesome and it can feel epic rushing through fortresses murdering everyone stealthy style.  It also gets a LOT better when you get brainwash and the game actually lets you KEEP orc territory effectively by brainwashing an orc.  This transforms things from the killing of orcs being entirely pointless because they will get replaced immediately with another one right away to some of them sticking around for hours being YOUR orcs.  Definitely was a game changer for me and I don't think I could've managed the 'start the entire horde over again' that the second part does without it.  Being able to convert half the army and then start a fight made the fights more satisfying though also very messy and the combat targeting was sometimes unfortunate ("Why are we grabbing our guy instead of the guy right next to him?")  Being able to set up your own orc army was the cake of the game under the combat icing... and had they gotten to that right away, halving the length of the game, it would've been awesome.

Instead, it was like most middle-earth games, following second stringers.  The story reveals Kellogs Boobsberry's memories slowly, with half of them being done through Gollum as a terrible choice of the only known character to show up.  Kellogs, for some reason, also had a wife and son, lost to sauron's hand, just like Talion.  He spends a lot of time basically discouraging any option that isn't stab orcs with some storyline reason for it, but he's basically a giant ass who ends most events with "And badness will happen anyway, we just accomplished nothing".  unless it was orc slaying in which case you are the Light that guides others.  Eventually the big spoilery reveal happens, the bad guys get killed, and the game ends.  No land is saved or protected, and the orcs continue to show up and fight.   Truthfully, I think they pulled the punch they should've thrown of the bad guys just winning.  It being a downer ending.  It was all Press the button on the screen sequence for the end anyway.  It would've fit the hopelessness vibe that the art delivered throughout.  Your story was just one of many...a tale of a blade broken against the darkness.

Instead your tale was even more depressing: The hero wins and nothing is saved.  The orcs continue unabated.  Overall, I think it's a game which had a better foundation than it had a delivery.  A good stealth/stabby game that was overweighted by the amount of 'content' and a lack of positive results for the interactions with the gameworld.  Even killing All The Orcs was banned by the game, as any sufficient number of dead orcs would summon more (I did try).

It was hamburger meat.  The whole way through.

[Kaldrak]

It was hamburger meat.  The whole way through.

That is a great quote and I may steal it from you. From what I've seen of the game, it looks like it's nothing but a bunch of missions where you do nothing but run around assassinating different orc targets in Sauron's army.

I did watch Angry Joe play for a bit. He had managed to die multiple times to the same Orc, elevating him up to almost the highest rank one could achieve in the game and making the orc almost unstoppable and impervious to the vast majority of his attacks. Watching him die against it over and over again amused me.

[Dracos]

Of the 74 quests in the game, I believe only 1 of them does not include orc killing.  A kind soul (which I am not) could say that the 24 outcast missions were not About Orc killing, even though it featured prominently and repeatedly in all of them, and the 3 Torvin Hunter quests also were not about orc killing, but beast killing.

It really drove home the 'if your only way to interacting in a game world is shooting things, all things get shot' critique that sometimes is put against gaming.