Shadow of Mordor: How Do You Say "This Game Sucks" in Elvish?

Because I'm weak to impulse buying games on sale, and because it was on my radar, I picked up Shadow of Mordor recently. For less than half its normal retail price, I figured I was getting a bargain. But like the first game I bought for the PS4 - Evil Within - this one has turned into a tedious slog through a drab, ugly landscape with no redeeming features to help me along the way.

What're my problems with the game? Christ, where do I even start?

The AI is nonexistent, for one thing. If you get spotted, just climb to a high place and duck. Turn on Not-Detective-Vision and watch as the enemies run around in one large, Pikmin-esque group for a minute before buggering off to where they were before they spotted you. Hell, you don't even have to do that much. Sometimes ducking, walking through a bush, and veering around back of a small wagon is all it takes to confuse the enemy and get them off you. I had issues with my first real Warchief encounter, but when I actually drew him away from the pack, all I had to do was repeatedly Not-Cape-Stun him and then using the Not-Beatdown move. You may have noticed I've been including a lot of "Not-" things. That's because this game wholesale steals things from the Arkham series, which leads me to my second problem.

They fucked up the Batman combat. As much as I grew to intensely loathe the Arkham games as I worked on perfecting Asylum and City back-to-back, there was a flow to combat. There is no flow in Shadow of Mordor. Mashing the attack button has no feedback, and all of the moves ripped off from Arkham feel weak and ineffective. There's a Not-Shockwave move that basically does nothing, and you'd never ever use it over the Combat Takedown move... except when you're fighting Not-The-Flood from Halo, in which case good luck not taking damage long enough to build to your 8x (or 5x) combo multiplier to pull it off.

The graphics are terrible, and anyone who says they aren't has bad vision. Maybe put your glasses on and sit a little further back from the TV there, gramps. Mordor itself is an ugly, brown wasteland. The second area, which has a little greenery to it, still isn't much better. Characters emote vocally, but you'll never once see that emotion on their faces in even the slightest manner.

Sound design is also not very good, and the voice acting is as lifeless as it possibly could be. Look at the IMDB page for this game. There's a tremendous amount of vocal talent - really good vocal talent - involved in Shadow of Mordor, but it seems every single one of them was doing it to pay their mortgage because you'll never hear a less caring, rushed, and ultimately bored-sounding reading of dialog. I don't know what the person in charge of the voice acting was doing, but I can only assume it involved drinking large amounts of alcohol, because you'll never come across two characters pronounce anything in the game the same. Not places, not people, not anything in between.

The controls are awkward and clunky at best and infuriating and floaty at worst. There's a trophy for freeing 30 slaves in 3 minutes while mounted. Good luck with that. It involves finding enough slavers, then trying to control your mount long well enough to actually do what you want it to do. On foot, Talion feels like he weighs a ton, and he'd fit right in with his Assassin's Creed cousins, as you'll rarely get him to parkour in the way you want him to. Want to climb that thing? He's going to run a few steps up it, then stand there looking stupid until you angle him slightly to the left and try it again. Want to jump off a ledge to land on another? Well, good luck with that. Want to sneak up on a guy before he gets too close to his buddies? Have fun getting hung up on the geometry.

The difficulty is also all over the place. As an open world game, I understand it's hard to balance certain elements. But the way most tend to do it is to either keep things scaled to your level or make the area around your starting position easier, with more difficult challenges lying around the edges of the map. Here, you have neither of these things. One quest, related to your Bow, is located almost on top of your central tower spawn point. I went to it thinking I could get some XP, maybe a Rune or something, and assuming that because it was right there, I wouldn't have any issues.

I was swarmed with named mobs. The quest started innocently enough. Take out all the snipers. They come from the front and the back, you're in a little tent with ammo supplies, and it's not hard to shoot them before they shoot you.

Then a Captain showed up. Then another. Then two more. I tried to run away but two more were in my path. It seemed like every named mob in the entire game was coming for me as I did this innocuous side quest. Needless to say I didn't succeed. Doing the quest seems to spawn at least two Captains in the area, because when I went back to it much later on, the same thing started happening. This time, I got to a better position and quickly sniped down my remaining targets. The quest completed and I was free to run.

This is a running theme - being overpowered and completely out of control. I had an incident in the session I was playing directly before I sat down to write this where I was supposed to trail a Captain as he tried to recruit more Not-Orcs into his ranks. The gist is that you kill a handful of them with arrows, the rest join him, he moves to points two and then three, and the process repeats. Here's how it played out for me.

• I started on a roof, in perfect sniping position.
• After sniping five or six enemies, the Captain turns around and spots me, despite me being very far away.
• The Captain then turns his back on me and lumbers off towards spot #2. Meanwhile, every Orc - on both sides of this fight - launch towards me.
• I putter around on rooftops, trying to both lose the Pikmin mob below me while also keeping up with the Captain.
• The Captain sits at spot 2 for awhile, then fucks off to spot 3.
• I finally catch up properly at this point, and again the Captain is alone.
• A bunch of mobs, all hostile towards the Captain, suddenly spawn in on top of him.
• The Captain is killed because there was nowhere to resupply arrows, and I couldn't shoot that many enemies with what I had, nor could I hop down to fight them manually without both alerting the Pikmin swarm, which was still clustered up, or the Captain himself.

What was I supposed to do in that situation? I would've been killed if I had jumped down to fight the swarm, who was much more interested in me than killing the Captain. There's a trophy for helping a Captain survive his Recruitment, then going in to kill both him and all of his new recruits.

Another time, I was sitting on a roof for about 45 minutes trying to figure out how to do a thing. I was trying to lure a Warchief out, which involved letting the Orcs see me, hitting the alarm, and then killing 35 of them. Again, Pikmin swarm mentality. When I found a place they couldn't climb to, I just had to wait and pick guys off. Once the Warchief was out, I was in another problematic spot.

See, he had a Captain with him as a bodyguard. He was a ranged unit. Eventually I killed him via jumping off the roof in a stealth kill a couple times. But that still left the Warchief himself. Captains and Warchiefs have strengths and weaknesses. It's what is apparently supposed to help you decide your plan of attack. In reality, it just makes you go "Oh god, this is going to take ten times longer than it should."

In my case, the Warchief was immune to stealth kills, ranged attacks, and fire/explosions (which wasn't listed, but I blew up a stack of explosive barrels and he took damage from neither the explosion itself or the fire that engulfed him for a full minute solid). He also had a giant shield and could quickly turn around in case I got behind him. Any time I tried attacking, the swarm of Pikmin Orcs would rush in. So how did I overcome the challenge?

The Warchief was a Tracker, meaning he'll slowly mosey over to your general area. I thought maybe I could lure him to the edge of town and away from the swarm. If nothing else, being able to focus on just him in combat would help me work out something. I sat on a small building's roof as the Warchief crept closer, like a dog sniffing out a squirrel...

Then this happened.

All it took to kill him was to flip over him, Not-Cape-Stun him, then Not-Beatdown him about 5, 6 times. And that's basically how every fight goes. Either you one-shot kill an enemy with an arrow to the head, you instantly stealth kill him, or you do that. The hard part is not the Warchiefs (Warchieves?) themselves, it's the swarm of guys they come backed with. There is no challenge involved, it's a paper-rock-scissors game with assholes who pick dynamite.

The trophies haven't been interesting or difficult so far. Only a few look like they'll be annoying to do, and that's down to mostly the controls screwing you over or having an entire zone randomly decide to swarm you on a side quest. Captains can warp around the map as they see fit, as I ran a test where I checked out the location of every Captain I had access to. None were near the side quest area I was about to start, but suddenly, middle of the quest, I hear someone snarl "RANGER!" and oh hey it's two Captains running in. Apparently the crows told them where I was and then they Fast Traveled to me.

It's been a tedious slog, and not one I've enjoyed. There are moments where interesting things happen, but that's true of most games. In general, combat is awful, stealth is awful (there is no toggle. You literally have to hold RT constantly. In a game made in 2014.), and the quests are poorly written and acted.

Also, they manage to fuck up Middle-Earth lore, so if you're a Tolkien fan, you're gonna be grinding your teeth at a lot of the things you come across. A lot of it's to do with Kelly Bimbo, the elf you're stuck with. They tried acting like his name and inclusion was a big surprise... but the marketing and start of game text describes him in detail, so when you finally find out who he is via quest, it's impossible to be interested or surprised, despite the game making a very big deal of naming him. Also, Gollum's fucking in it because of course he is.

This one's definitely getting an article when I'm done with it. I'm aiming for Xmas, because I want to play Far Cry 4 and get the stupid, wedged-in multiplayer trophies out of the way early on that one so I can at least TRY to enjoy the world. I'd imagine the story is just as insultingly bad as Far Cry 3's.

I'm hoping there's at least less racism and rape involved this time around. I couldn't stop cringing in 3 any time something like the sex scenes or the casual racism reared their ugly heads. But it's Ubisoft. Ubisoft doesn't have a very good track record in regards to that. ...Also, just reminded myself that it's Ubisoft, so I'm going to have to sit through another 90 minute unskippable credit sequence.

Fuck.