Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Review

Monolith shipped one genuinely new idea in 2014 and it was big enough to carry a whole game. The Nemesis system promotes, demotes and mutates a hierarchy of orc captains based on what actually happened to them, so the archer who killed you gets a promotion, a scar and a speech about it the next time you meet, and the captain who fled a fire is now terrified of flame. None of that is scripted, and it produces attachments no writer could have designed for you in advance.

Around it sits a competent Batman style combat loop and a traversal system with excellent momentum, both borrowed rather than invented, which is fine because they are the delivery mechanism. The plot about Talion and a wraith is forgettable and the Mordor map is grey and functional. Nobody remembers those and everybody remembers their orc. A decade on, almost nobody has replicated the system, which tells you exactly how hard it was to build.