Before you take on a war chief, you'll torture dozens of soldiers and even captains to learn how to best assassinate him. This process is repeated on increasingly high-ranking Uruks: you learn their locations but also their strengths, weaknesses, and fears. With the soldier vulnerable, you torture him for information to the point of death (read: enter his mind with deadly elf powers) and learn the identity and general location of a higher ranking Uruk leader. The publisher calls the feature "the Nemesis System." Essentially, from the earliest moments of the game, the player has the option to defer the game's scripted story, and instead hunt and kill Uruk leaders.įirst, you must dwindle a small tribe of low-ranking Uruks to a sole survivor. Fear is the heart of the Shadow of Mordor, the crux of the feature most praised in the game's many glowing reviews. I think that's because there's something dangerous and appealing about fear - a weapon of politicians, terrorists, and guerrilla soldiers alike. I'm the Jack Bauer of Mordor.Īnd like watching Jack Bauer wreak havoc on the threats against America at all cost, I perversely enjoyed almost every moment of it - until a graphic beheading broke whatever mental barrier I have that says, "What the hell is happening here?" The usual.īut as I watched my character revenge the death of his wife and son by furiously lunging a blade in and out and into a lifeless Uruk corpse, scaring away the few Uruks that survived his wrath, it hit me: I'm pretending to be a murderer and a torturer, a man who dabbles in terrorism and slavery to somehow right a personal wrongdoing. I was just killing Uruks, defeating bad guys, making my way through the game's story. I've played hundreds of graphically violent video games, and Shadow of Mordor felt initially like another member in a line that will continue into infinity.
I'm embarrassed how little the violence affected me at first.
A button is assigned to "Brutalize," a lethal and grotesque flurry of cuts and stabs meant to kill one enemy but more importantly horrify nearby survivors, dispersing them like a herd of spooked deer. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, the new video game that serves as connective tissue between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, isn't shy about violence or the purpose it serves. I'd cleaved apart 200 or so bad guys before I had the grim epiphany that a video game had turned me into an expert in insurgency.
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