My notes on: Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Developer: Monolith Productions

Publisher: WB Games

One fact about this game that if I had played this game through before I had made my game of the year list I would have put it a couple of positions lower because that joke of a boss fight. But I feel I am done with this game, but i'll probably go back once I get the Season pass.

-As I mentioned in my Game of the year list, I am a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, watched the trilogy in theater as a kid and recently finished watching the Hobbit trilogy, which was a huge waste of time...

-Oh man the beginning, so tragic Glimpses of his family. They seemed so happy.

-Feeling right at home with the combat, oh how have I missed them Arkham games.

-Those damn captains are everywhere. Right off from the beginnning I saw two captains in the first mission.

-Rat Bag the Orc seems funny, it's just a damn shame that he is in so few missions. In the end it just seems so sad after a certain point they don't even mention him any more. I'm not sure, did he in fact die in that cut scene with that knight of sauron.

-My first captain kill just felt like something else. He killed me when we first encountered but I got him the second time around.

-Looking back at the fact that the captains can show up any time during any mission is a great challenge, but at the time it really annoyed me that during one bow side mission I died like 3-4 times in a row.

-I also didn't like how the missions are structured because it seems like at all times there are two slightly different stories going on.

-The collectibles are very well done. I collected all of the items and those things that form that elven painting. Although they are immediately visible on the map, a couple of them were very well hidden and I really had to look for them. But I didn't complete those hunting or flower gathering challenges.

-When you kill Orc captains you get a random rune for your weapons. But this just felt unnecessary. I don't know why, I guess perhaps I would have liked them more if the effects had been crazier.

-The talents you learn along the way are quite interesting. However close to the end it gets way too overpowered. Examples of the later talents:

1. The first hit you take does not break your combo.
2. A perfectly timed combo gives you x3 towards your combo count.

-Back to the story: It just felt wrong to me to have Smigl in this game. On the other hand I was really impressed how "good" he looked.

-The second map is so much better. It's quite a bit more colorful. And yeah right at the point when it opens up I started to have thoughts that "there has to be more". It felt really similar to Far Cry 3, because I really liked the secod map much in that game too.

-As soon as I heard that there is a way to manipulate the orcs to switch over to your side. It really changes combat and makes it so that you can really change the flow.

-And on that note: the way that I hated the orcs that killed me and thus got promotions, I kind of felt bad when an orc captain which was under my spell died in a fight.

-Ok the final boss fight: Fuck that... seriously. At that point I had played the game for about 20 hours. And that final boss fight lasted like 30 seconds and it's a fucking QTE. I even had thoughts like, fuck was this all a waste of time.