shadow of mordor killing captains permanently

And since I’m really not interested in this year’s Assassin’s Creed title 1, I thought I’d let Shadow of Mordor try its hand at being a stand-in. Either SoM was doing something right, or the entire games journalism establishment had gotten it horribly, horribly wrong. This is why I was a little surprised to see Shadow of Mordor drawing glowing praise from pretty much every outlet that reviewed it, not to mention some improbably high scores for a mere Assassin’s Creed clone (9.5 from Polygon? I know Polygon is Polygon, but the actual AC series doesn’t get scores that high, let alone a knockoff). Shadow of Mordor does it all, and if that were all it did it would likely have been consigned to the “soulless cash-in” dustbin roughly three microseconds after it launched. The similarities are more than superficial, from the free-running to the climbing of high structures to picking out your target in glowy-infra-vision to hurling yourself down on top of them to skewer them through the brain with something sharp. This is not a million miles away from the truth if you think of a mechanic that’s in Assassin’s Creed (aside from the recent innovation of the boats) chances are you can find either an analogue or a direct replica in Shadows of Mordor. You see, up until a couple of weeks ago Shadow of Mordor had barely registered on my gaming radar – and when it had, it had been as a straight Assassin’s Creed ripoff with the Lord of the Rings IP pasted over the top of it.

Is a clone really a clone when it does more to push the genre forward than the clone-ee ever has? I have a backup post in the process of being written but it likely won’t appear until Tuesday (21/10) or Wednesday. I tried to blast through Grimrock 2 so I could review it this week, but it’s quite a bit larger than I was expecting and I have as a result bitten off more than I can chew.

Shadow of mordor killing captains permanently