One DOES simply walk into Mordor and more when you have fun ghostly wraith powers!
As the shadow of mordor, it has been 35 hours of joy haunting the uruks in lots of creative ways. Time in the real world seems to pass at an alarming rate though as you are sucked into this immersive piece of landscape based on Tolkien lore, and what a beautiful piece of landscape it is. This game's a looker for sure, and it should be if it's going to do a lot of close up zooming on to Uruk faces. I should also mention that it rains in Mordor sometimes, and when your cape looks wet it gets that nice glossy look to it. I've seen a lot of people sit on the fence about this game regarding whether their PC can even run it and how many gigs of GPU they'll need. My PC is sporting an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 (GPU of 3072MB) and I'm running it on high with texture quality set to high instead of medium (3GB+ GPU instead of 2GB+) and it runs fine. I've streamed a couple hours of gameplay here if you want to see how it runs. I did notice some texture pop-in a couple of times though when I do long range shadow strikes to blink in on an archer from afar but considering how much I've played and only noticed it those two times, it's not that big a deal. In fact, this game is really polished for an open world game. I almost wish there were some fun broken glitches that I could have run into.
Aside from the gorgeous view to immerse you into Middle Earth, there's something surreal about running in a field and seeing some uruks struggle with a loose herd of caragors or seeing a bunch of runaway slaves followed by their orcish masters chasing them down. Then late at night they would set up camp to share tales of their close encounters with the ranger. How they would fill him full of arrows if he tried to jump on them. And let me tell you, it's oddly satisfying to leap down on to them as they say that to brutalize them in a horrific display, striking fear into the other uruks and causing them to run away in fear. You can also of course shoot their campfire with a ghostly elf arrow and light them all on fire. Or maybe you would like to stay a voyeur and simply release their caged caragor nearby from a distance and just sit back and watch as their would be dinner turns its appetite against its captors. These are just a few of the myriad of fun ways you can futz around in this Middle Earth sandbox, and the more powers you unlock, the more fun you can have!
The powers are doled out in a rather unique way that's split into ranger powers and wraith powers with additional tiers of skills locked up by power struggle points, you can check out the mechanics of it in the quick look. I'm of two minds about locking up some of the more fun abilities behind story missions. On one hand, it adds to the immersion and lore when you can now blink strike your opponents because your ghost pal has reclaimed his lost memories. On the other, I was hoping to pull an elder scrolls playthrough of going the opposite of where the main story objective was as soon as the world opened up to me so I could screw around in the world. It's especially weird when you've played around a lot with the nemesis system and have multiple tiers opened up to you only to find that you still have skills that haven't opened up yet from a few tiers ago because you haven't done the story missions. But once you get them, boy, does it get fun. I'll admit there were some skills that I pretty much forgot I had like throwing daggers, I pretty much never used them. I also didn't get how to use the shoulder charge but it really didn't matter by the time I got it as you get so many abilities that'll do the trick.
Combat itself is very fun and you're rewarded for paying attention. This game wants you to succeed, it wants you to be the badass that counters the guy behind you, to dodge that defender's spear that you can't counter, and to be aware that the crossbowman above you is about to shoot so that you can dodge out now. You can turn off the combat prompts if you want an added challenge. I've had the prompts on the whole game and while I have died quite a few times, I think it's been very fair. Every time I got hit I either could have done something about it or I took a gamble that didn't pay off. You learn quickly that trying to interrogate someone while surrounded by other uruks is a big no no. Your bad assery climbs up at an exponential rate as you unlock skills, by the end of it you're not even worried about waltzing into a fortress full of uruks with some captains sprinkled in.
You probably can't write a review of this game without discussing the nemesis system. You can again check out the quick look for the basics but I will say one thing about their personality, I wish there was some kind of renown or reputation rating that's persistent. It's kind of cool to brutalize an uruk and have the immediate surrounding uruks run away in fear, I basically want that idea to be global and persistent as I down more and more nemeses. When I've killed dozens of warchiefs and hundreds of captains, it breaks the immersion a bit to have some random schmuck of a captain be so confident in facing me, especially when I see multiple vulnerabilities. Forget fear of caragors or mogul flies, I want a fear of the ranger! I don't care if I'm the biggest uruk, if a ghostly dead ranger just blinked in and killed my entire posse, I wouldn't be feeling so confident!
Anyways, as you progress through the story missions you eventually gain the ability to brand the inhabitants of middle earth to do your bidding. This opens up for some interesting power struggles as you can then begin to play the role of a puppet master and send captains to fight other captains or even set your branded captain up to become a warchief. I of course turned that mechanic into a pet project to catch all the warchiefs and all the captains to fill out my urukdex. If you're crazy like me, you can also obsess about each warchief having the same amount of bodyguards by ordering each of your newly branded captain to do a mission to prove himself to the warchief of your choice! The weird part I find about all this is is that your branded captains will also have power struggle missions of their own and you have to attend those to personally see to it that they live through them. I don't know if they'll automatically survive and gain power if you just forward time/die but I've attended one of my hunter captain's recruitment mission and just watched as a berserker beat him down. Hey, if some regular ol' berserker can beat you down then you're probably not ready to be promoted to captain, just saying. A unique power struggle that stands out is the vendetta mission where you get a chance to avenge your fellow fallen rangers. You'll need to be connected for this as it's tracking which player was killed by which captain. And when someone avenges you by killing a captain that has killed you, you'll be notified on the side of your screen along with some free exp! I thought this was a very neat dark souls'esk idea that could have been taken further.
There's quite a few side content to do besides the nemesis power struggles, the collectibles, for example, are done pretty well. You get your ghost artifacts that you can dig up, I personally have skipped all the spoken lore that comes with each artifact but you can probably add another 30 minutes to your gameplay just listening to all of those! Then you have your elvish runes that's found on walls that you collect to reveal a neat picture. I thought there was just the right amount of them; there's not a ton of them so that you're feeling like you're hunting these things down ad nauseam but there's enough for you to have to climb through some nooks and crannies while you're on some other mission to get them.
If collectibles aren't your thing then there are skill missions that you can do to build up the legend (i.e. change the look) of your sword, dagger and bow. I kind of wish these were repeatable as they presented you with some unique scenarios that the game itself doesn't really offer. One of them positioned you on a bridge and tasked you with defending against waves of Uruks for a set time limit while preventing torchbearers from slipping past you.
There's also another mode that you can engage in aside from the story mode, I almost forgot about this mode when I played. The Trials of War is a score based leaderboards system where you can bring your story mode ghost ranger over to compete for a high score by hunting down warchiefs and captains. I didn't find it to be any more challenging, in fact, all the captains and warchiefs in that mode are already identified along with their strengths and weaknesses so on some level it's easier than story mode but it's another reason to keep on playing to compete with your friends.
All in all, this is a hell of an open world game where you're encouraged to get creative and have some fun with it. There's room for improvement but Monolith has laid such a solid foundation with this one. I highly recommend it!
