Shadow of Mordor Lauren Morton revisits Middle-earth’s nemesis system.
There are few gaming accomplishments more satisfying than the thrill of pulling off kills in stealth action games. The sweetest of feats can be achievements or timed runs or trick shots but there’s something extra special about a grudge kill. Shadow of Mordor, the Warner Bros. action game of 2014, was a factory for satisfying kills with its nemesis system that became the centre of any conversation about the game.
After recently working my way through other stealth romps like
Styx: Master of Shadows and
Hitman 3, I got the itch to return to one of the previous decade’s golden children to see if it’s everything thought.
The way I remember Shadow of
Mordor was as an understudy to
Assassin’s Creed. It has tons of climbing, opportunities for silent kills, kills from above and all the other stabby stealth skills of classic Creed. Coming back to it, I was anticipating plenty of verticality, clutch kills using the environment, and some good melee combat when everything goes wrong.
I was partially right. I don’t think Shadow of Mordor’s world design and structures are all that much to write home about, unless I’m retroactively giving old
Assassin’s Creed games more credit than they’re due too.
Shadow of Mordor’s crumbling Middle-earth infrastructure is largely repetitive and none too intricate.
Climbing up ruins and creeping stealthily across ropes connecting them feels serviceable now, but pretty basic. There’s not too much puzzle or exploration in spidering up the side of the same broken stone arches all over the map. It’s a wide but not high map, structures and strongholds of a couple of stories evenly spaced out across the barren crags in the corner of Middle-earth.
Shadow of itself
The world itself felt grander at the time but doesn’t really inspire awe in this decade – like returning to a childhood playground and realising that I can reach up and touch the monkey bars that once seemed quite intimidating. Even though it doesn’t have the towering structures I’d remembered them