Shadow of Mordor - Amazing Core Game, Disappointing DLC

Originally released back in September 2014, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor was a great triumph in a world of generally disappointing Lord of the Rings games. Recieved well by critics and fans, Shadows of Mordor, which is set between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings novels, is a game slammed full of action, free-roaming exploration, and excellent Orc AI. With such a well crafted core game, where did the Downloadable Content (DLC) go so wrong? Here's Game Prophet's take on what could have benefitted the game and its two post-release titles, Lord of the Hunt & The Bright Lord.

First of all, we want to commend the combat system in Shadows. You feel powerful, hacking orc heads off with a single blow of your sword, precision aiming with your bow, and assasinating enemies with your stealth dagger. Although very fun for a while, your abilities gain almost too much power in comparision to the difficulty scale of your enemies. Developer Monolith Productions could have done the following to combat:

• Make enemies and bosses universally more challenging.

• Make players choose a specialization instead of filling the entire talent tree.

• Add additional variety to missions.

Lord of the Hunt, Monolith's first DLC release essentially shrunk the world down, and added missions focused on hunting beasts. Yes, this is a new campaign, but it leads away from the plot of the original game instead of adding to the overall story arc. Fighting beasts is fun, but it is short-lived and still too easy. Torvin, who you meet in the original game, provides some fun dialog with his drunken dwarvish antics, but leads Talion (our protagonist) on a wild goose chase completing familiar beast hunting quests.

Shadow of Mordor's newest DLC, The Bright Lord, was intended to fill in some of short-comings of the original game by adding a new playable character, story line and challenges. Although this new protagonist, Celebrimbor, has some new abilities and combat animations, he feels a lot like Talion does to play. Also, he begins his story with all his abilities availible and is by default, over-powered.

The new story in The Bright Lord, which pits you against Sauron, the Lord of the Rings' greatest villian, is still too easy! Many fans complained that the original game wasn't challenging enough, and this DLC was supposed to be the answer. It is also far too short for me to recommend it to anyone other than die-hard LoTR fans. Costing $10, it isn't too bad of a hit to the wallet but I would have stiill expected more out of a game that was so strong upon release. Here's what we recommend:

• Don't limit the size of the world.

• Let players build Cerebrimdor's talent tree themselves.

• Offer missions other than "branding" enemies - almost all of them involve this!

• Give us more time to explore the new wolrd without the story ending so abruptly.

• Don't require a reset upon completion!

• Make it more challenging! How many times can I say this?

Having said all that, Shadow of Mordor is still an excellent game, but is not living up to its potential with these short DLC packs. I would still like to see more characters, upgrades and places to explore - including towns with non-hostile NPC residents. The Lord of the Rings hosts such an expansive realm of lore and localles that there shouldn't be a lack of stories to tell. At the end of the day, it's still very satifying to slay hordes of Orcs, but I would have expected way more in the way of expansions for such an amazing core game.

-Brad

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