Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Original review from ~2020:

Super duper fun. At first.

The nemesis system was one of the most genius designs in a game in a really long time. But eventually every fight turns into the same thing: parry, parry, counter, parry, parry, counter. And it becomes tedious as FUCK.

Those first 20 hours are a ton of fun. Exploring, getting new abilities. Finding cool new orcs. Getting stomped and then getting revenge on the orcs.

In the end though I hit a wall where I didn't give a shit about the story and the gameplay had grown stale so I bailed. I'm hoping to finish the sequel.

Looks like I played it a week after it came out in October 2014 and then again in May 2015.

Updated review after finishing the main story in 2/2022:

The above review is pretty accurate. Starting fresh I actually found the combat to be kind of awful until you unlock certain abilities. They teach you to fight normal enemies you can fight be just attacking and countering. Then they start throwing enemies with shields and enemies you can't just attack. And they're basically invulnerable until you unlock certain moves. It's incredibly frustrating and I almost quit.

What I did with this playthrough is just blitzkrieg the story up to the point where I was with my original save and then switch over to my old save file. Reason being I had spent hours and hours collecting all the collectibles so I had basically maxed out my character. It removed a bunch of a tedium when I switched over to a character that could kind of easily take on huge groups of orcs. Which is pretty cool that there is a solid power curve where you do become unstoppable by the end.

The story is pretty blah. And even coming from someone who's actively reading the LOTR and is about halfway through. It's kind of cool them talking about the story of Celebrimbor and the concept of the Black Hand is very cool. The problem is almost no lore or anything of value is communicated during the quests or in the dialogue. Everything is hidden in little written codex entries I'm not going to read. So that seems like a missed opportunity.

In addition, a lot of the main story missions are boring or even tedious. Forcing you to ride a Caragor or convert all the Warchiefs is kind of lame. It would have been nicer if it was optional to do that because it feels like a nice challenge. But when the game is like "That thing you already thought of on your own is actually a thing you HAVE to do" it suddenly becomes less interesting.

So yeah, it's a very fun game marred by a weak story, weak characters, weak missions, and a difficult early game. But I'd say it's worth it. There's nothing like facing off with the named orcs and I'm really looking forward to playing the sequel.