Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor it´s a video game that was highly anticipated from the moment it was announced by Monolith Productions, until it had its launch at 2014 on platforms such as PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Playstation 3 and Playstation 4. Its world comes from nothing more and nothing less than the fantastic universe of the Lord of the Rings. The events of the game occur at a midpoint between the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings franchise.
STORY
The story of this Game introduces us to our protagonist Talion, who lived very happily with his beloved wife and his beloved son, but one day Sauron murders them all, including him, but when everything seemed lost, an ancient spirit called Celebrimbor revives our Hero giving him powers and abilities necessary to face Sauron and his entire army, all this happens because they both have a common goal, to take revenge agains´t Sauron.
GAMEPLAY
In this story we will control Talion, we can improve him through two skill trees; The first is the Ranger skill tree, in which we will have purely physical abilities, in which we will have new ways to attack and we will even increase our attack power; among those abilities we have: Execution, Impact, Poison, Subito Finisher, Resistance, Double Charge and more.
Through our whole adventure we will find several towers scattered through the world of this game, these towers will serve as a point of regeneration and transport for our protagonist.
In this world there will be missions in which we will have to kill an orc captain, control an orc, assassinate or tame beasts, kill a number of enemies, rescue prisoners among others, so we´ll play a video game with a number of missions quite varied and entertaining and if that were not enough each mission can be approached in many ways as we want.
I´ve already talked about several points regarding the gameplay but nevertheless the most remarkable thing is its artificial intelligence system which its creators called the Nemesis System, thanks to this system the experience within each game will be unique and that is if we fight with an orc and we do not kill it, it will be able to find us and remember what we did to it last time, so attacking it in the same way will be useless, additionally the wounds that we did to it in the past will remain on its body.
On the other hand, if we make a strong orc feel threatened, it will seek to surround itself to protect itself, facing an orc and not killing it can make them level up within their factions and reach higher ranks, making them even more difficult to defeat. An orc can enter into a rivalry with another and thus kill him and continue to rise.
Continuing with the Nemesis System, we can control the orcs that we want and make them infiltrate into the army of Sauron and cause internal chaos, however the orc that we manage to control at some point if they wish could betray us by turning against us.
Once he betrays us we could try to control him one more time but it is more difficult for us to be able to take control over it, so most of the time we will end up killing them and to make it even more complicated sometimes the orcs whom we have killed they could come back to life with all their memories intact, so they will continue to remember everything we did to them and they will come very strengthened.
VISUAL ASPECTS
In the visual aspects, despite the fact that we are facing an intergenerational game, it could be said that it has a good level of detail in terms of textures and environmental occlusion and as if that were not enough we have climatic changes within the game represented with sun and rain, making Shadow of Mordor feels more and more real and more alive, the shadows have a good level of detail and the antialiasing is able to eliminate most of the saw teeth, making the game look splendid.
The only bad thing that could be said is that the scenarios are not varied enough in terms of how they were conceived, but this is due not only to a graphic aspect but also to geography, since the game limits us to being only within Mordor.
SOUNDTRACK
The soundtrack of Shadows of Mordor make us feel as if we were really inside an adventure belonging to the world of the Lord of the Rings, and it is that there are 47 musical tracks in total that give life to Mordor, with music that makes you feel the tension and danger in the environment, the wonderful musical pieces of this work were composed by Garry Schyman and Nathan Grigg.
PERSONAL THOUGHTS
Shadows of Mordor despite being an intergenrational game has much to contribute, and that is that its artificial intelligence system is too careful to the point that the enemies can really learn from our attacks and by surviving they become stronger, if we control them they can betray us at some point, all these points and some others make the game feel really alive and realistic and all this without resorting only to the graphic section which in my personal opinion at least for the current generation was quite well achieved at the time, since the last generation of consoles did not have enough power for such an ambitious game, that despite all the news that its creators include, they admit that they were a bit limited, this statement was given together with the announcement of its sequel Shadows of War, in which they would not be limited by trying to adapt Talion's adventure to last generation consoles, but this is something I´ll talk next time.
In summary, I recommend you to play Shadows of Mordor, is an open world game, with a good graphic quality for its time and in addition to that it had a new type of artificial intelligence never seen before. It´ll be a really nice experience. Thank you for reading until the end, see you next time!
