
Review in Brief Game: A third-person open-world beat-’em-up set in Mordor from Lord of the Rings. Good: Arguably the best gameplay of any game I’ve ever played; brilliant gameplay-plot symbiosis; three excellent new systems; faithful to the source material; excellent audio. Bad: Incredibly derivative; weak story, plot, and ending; a few frustrating gameplay moments; lazy upgrade system. Verdict: Excellent gameplay. No plot. Derivative, but incredibly fun. Rating: 8/10 – “Great – fun to play, some minor but no major flaws” Recommendation: A must-play. “Standing on the shoulders of giants. And Batman.” Let’s tackle the elephant in the room. Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor is unbelievably derivative. The battle system is blatantly copied from the more recent Batman: Arkham games, right down to having the exact same finishing moves unlocked after the exact same combinations and activated by the exact same button presses. Given that WB Games developed both Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor and the most recent Batman: Arkham game, and given that Batman: Arkham Origins was little more than a content pack for the Batman: Arkham City engine, I would predict that Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor actually shares a lot of code with the Arkham series. Others have pointed to the similarity to Assassin’s Creed, but to me, most of the shared features with Assassin’s Creed were also present in the Arkham series, so in my eyes it’s fair to point to Batman: Arkham as the source for most of the mechanics in Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor. However, that’s not automatically a bad thing. It’s good to be revolutionary, but it’s not bad to not be revolutionary. Accusations of mimicry and impersonation are not criticisms. No game exists in a vacuum. All games borrow features, ideas, and mechanics from other success games. Most don’t do so as liberally and directly as Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor, but they all do it. If you’re going to do mimic (or rip-off), though, we have to ask: is the game good in other ways? Did the game mimic a good franchise? Did the game improve on the franchise it mimicked? Did the game add new features beyond simply the elements it borrowed from an existing franchise? Fortunately, Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor does all three of these things. It borrows liberally from the Batman: Arkham and Assassin’s Creed, but those are two of the best video game franchises of the seventh console generation. If you’re going to rip someone off, at least rip off the best. Second, Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor executes the features that it borrows much better than even the games from which it borrows them. It doesn’t merely rip-off the features, but rather it improves them in...
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