Shadow of Mordor

What I heard so far sounds really good.
I may be getting this.

Any thoughts about the Game? Did you play it already and want to share?

I wouldnt buy it, looks like its just a generic action game

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VictorDoom wrote:

I wouldnt buy it, looks like its just a generic action game

What's wrong with a generic action game if it is good?

The Nemesis System sounds really intrigueing.

I don't buy full price games other than Bethesda and Firaxis.

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bhavv wrote:

I don't buy full price games other than Bethesda and Firaxis.

and Acti/Blizz

Ewwwwww never.

So, teh missus saw this advertised, and (being a big Skyrim fan), she thought it would be fun. We watched a coupla vids, and it seemed good.

I played it this morning for several hours.

The control scheme for PC is convoluted and not always intuitive, and the tutorials are way too brief. The learning curve (especially for someone new to the "Assassin's Creed/Batman" school of play) is very steep.

Aside from that...

The first several hours convey PERFECTLY what a dreary hell Mordor is, but then, so do all the very same-same missions. This has the potential to get boring very quickly. Gonna play s'more, but the frustration isn't paid off in thrills, yet. ='[.]'=

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Sneakypaw wrote:

What I heard so far sounds really good.
I may be getting this.

Any thoughts about the Game? Did you play it already and want to share?

I know someone who's been testing it for 6+ months. She pre ordered it.. That's saying something.

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Raycheetah wrote:

So, teh missus saw this advertised, and (being a big Skyrim fan), she thought it would be fun. We watched a coupla vids, and it seemed good.

I played it this morning for several hours.

The control scheme for PC is convoluted and not always intuitive, and the tutorials are way too brief. The learning curve (especially for someone new to the "Assassin's Creed/Batman" school of play) is very steep.

Aside from that...

The first several hours convey PERFECTLY what a dreary hell Mordor is, but then, so do all the very same-same missions. This has the potential to get boring very quickly. Gonna play s'more, but the frustration isn't paid off in thrills, yet. ='[.]'=

Finished the game, last night.

It turned out to be more fun than it started out to be, though I'm not sure how well teh missus will enjoy it, though my experience will save her a lotta unnecessary frustration along the way.

It was a compelling set of repetitive tasks which, I must grudgingly admit, was doled out quite effectively. The designers provided an increasing array of potential interactions with the environment, escalating both player power and involvement in the action. That said...

I still find the basic interface clunky. Play became much easier (on PC) after I rebound the Interact key to MMB. This did not overcome another, more annoying issue: The control combos. Yes, I know that each individual skill in the tree had a tutorial animation attached to it. However, hiding the collected Tutorials (along with a lotta other stuff) in the Appendix section, made it less easy to find. Worse than that, I had to learn by accident how to follow what seemed, in my experience, to be a fairly straightforward command. In picking up artifacts, you are instructed to use LMB to access the Memory Point. On my first attempt, I got nothing on the artifact screen, so I backed out to the game, hit LMB, and was rewarded with a rather oblique discussion between Talion and the Wraith about the item. Kludgy, but I thought that was it.

It was only much later, when I realized that I hadn't yet gotten the achievement for collecting the whole set, that I went back and re-examined the artifacts. While trying to suss out what I had gotten wrong, I used the feature which allows you to rotate the images, which revealed a little glowing dot, the Memory Point. Yeah, how about "Use MMB to rotate the artifact to find the little dot" instead?

Another issue which disrupted my enjoyment of the game was the fact that, with an impressive arsenal of skills at my command, some quests simply rendered all of that useless, limiting me to a scripted set of maneuvers to complete a mission. I reached the last Hunting mission accustomed to fighting Graug with some stellar bow skills. Instead, I was forced to "shoot him inna head when he's good and ready to be shot, then roll outta the way, and stab him while he's knackered." Several times. I s'pose it allowed for lower-powered characters to succeed at the mission if they hadn't invested in the skills I had, but, DAMN! I want to know that I can use the skills I have earned, not be stuck inna loop of arcady BS action.

Most egregiously, in the final story fight, the very last strike, I failed repeatedly because I had seen NOWHERE in the game anything to prepare me for the attack prompt required. I was used to moving the cursor inside the circle and mashing the button, but, in this case, I couldn't even SEE my cursor, just the circle with the LMB marked. I hit the LMB, even held it down, and kept dying. Finally, I noticed the barest sliver of blue in the circle from my one button mash, and realized that what the Hand wanted for me to kill him was for me to hit LMB repeatedly.

Not exactly intuititive, and utterly destructive of the mood for the last battle. Come to think of it, pretty sure that same survival prompt got me eaten by caragors more'n once.

Aside from that, an environment in which it is all too easy to get stuck on the geometry, or for the targeting system to select the other orc, instead of the one you thought you were gonna attack, makes for some occasionally frustrating gameplay.

The game was, aside from these occasional spikes of annoyance, entertaining enough to keep me playing for well over 70 hours. Yeah, I play exhaustively, and made sure I had alla side quests and missions done before I went after the Big Bads. I'm still enjoying messing with the Orcs, and I look forward to any DLC which might come out. But anyone coming into this blind is in for a rough stretch of road, before they find their feet. ='[.]'=

I was really into it at first, same with my flat mate. He managed to finish the game in 16 hours however I came to realize that it was the same thing over and over. I even ended up getting into big fights with monsters, then turning my screen off for 5 minutes while just spamming click or shift, turn the screen on 5 - 10 minutes later, and what do you know, I'm alive still..

After this point I realized how unbelievably lame it was and instantly stopped playing and deleted it from my computer.
That's just me though. People are different.