Shadow of Mordor PS3 Review

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

PS4 / Xbox one Release Date: October 3, 2014
PS3 / Xbox 360 Release Date: November 21st, 2014

Summary: An action role-playing video game set in an off-canon version of The Lord of the Rings universe, developed by Monolith Productions and released by Warner Bros.

This is the game of the year for me, its not often i feel like giving something 5 stars but Shadow of Mordor definitely grabs the top rating.

The story line is pretty standard but decent enough: Talion is brought back from the dead after being sacrificed by the Black Hand. He is connected to a Wraith which gives him powers to avenge his family who were also sacrificed.

The attention to detail is high quality and the controls are crisp and satisfying.

The fighting system is perfectly suited to the game. It allows you to defeat multiple enemies when surrounded with a number of combination moves similar to the Batman system. I’ll admit I haven’t done a lot of manipulation within the Uruks power structure – I spent most of my first play running around the areas stealth killing. Good times were had! – but the concept is smart and adds a second dimension to the game. The nemesis is a stroke of genius and i hope more games include this.

Talion himself is a pretty sexy character, all rugged and manly. He’s voiced by Troy Baker who has voiced characters in Bioshock, The Last of Us and Batman. Would i have liked to design my own character? Of course but I’m not convinced it would have made it any better, it would have only caused more work for the development. There is a free download (for Next Gen and Stream users only?? Pfft) that lets you play as a female character if you feel inclined to.

I liked developing the abilities, it is slow progress but the you do get to choose the order which is ideal for someone like me who likes to focus more on stealth and archery rather than brute force.

I do have to say that the game is pretty hard to start with, i’m not an adept game player and i got my ass handed to me a few times (okay a lot) before i got the hang of it. The difficulty put me off to start with but suddenly it clicked and i didn’t want to stop playing. My first session ran for over 9 hours, i actually didn’t want to stop playing but there’s only so much time i can afford to sit gaming before my hands give up.

The one downside for me was the release date, I’m a PS3 user so i had to wait over a month longer than the next gen users to get my hands on this. That’s not an issue with the game but it irked me.

Overall as you can tell I’m a happy girl with this game, it fills the void left by Skyrim nicely.

Have you played this? Let me know how you got on in the comments.

You can watch the trailer here
You can also pop over to the official page here

NoisyGeek Rating: 5 out of 5