L.G.C. |Reviews| — Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Your intrepid heroes jump from towers, avenge our friends, and review the precious. Shadow of Mordor faces ze CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Webzone: https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/mac-games/shadowofmordor/
Devel: Monolith Productions / Feral Interactive
Engine: (Heavily modified) Lithtech Jupiter Extended
Price: 49.99 all ‘round

Wazzat: Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Alright, it’s playable’ish on ‘high’ but keep in mind I’m throwing a 980-organ at it.
Performance is a bit shite compared with the Windows version.
Even on low it struggles to maintain 60FERPS @ 1080
However, it never had the herky-jerks; instead the whole game slows down.
It fails to close the game on occasion.
And it will spite crash.

J-

After the SSSE4 Patch, everything is working well, although I’m noticing that the performance is less than what others are reporting. It could be a contributor

P-

You can tell the performance is not all there and sometimes the frames dip so low the input lag becomes rather obvious.
Going from the high 60’s FerPS down to 30 because a little lightning flashed somewhere off-screen is kind of annoying.

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

Is it raining outside? Because I checked more than once.
Yeah, the atmospheric sound is THAT hella amazeballs and it goes double for the voice acting.
The soundtrack ranges from serious sauce to light-hearted fuckery and that’s difficult to pull off.
The background noise for several Ratbag scenes almost feels out of place …but it works.
How does it look? Even on the lowest settings you will not be disappointed.
and on the highest settings, it could very well be the best looking Linux game, in the world.

J-

The Cinematics are really good, but you can thank Weta for that
I can ID almost all of the voice actors in this game
It’s a AAA game,so it certainly has the pedigree
Dat Waterphone

P-

Top-notch voice acting, although, a few hours in you start hearing repeats.
- Wait a second, you sound like that Uruk I just killed!
This is the only game since Counter Strike: Global Offensive that made me want to play it with the headset.
- And I learned the Linux version doesn’t support surround sound when the Windows version seems to have surround 5.1.
- Still, the directional audio is very well done even in stereo and it does an amazing job when it comes to the immersion.
- The music got a little too loud for my taste at times, but I just kicked it down a few notches and it was good.
The graphics look amazing!
This is a AAA game on Linux with amaze-balls graphics that doesn’t take place in a post-apocalyptic russian subway tunnel. I like that!
The second area, which is by the Great Sea shore, looks very green in contrast with the grey/brown of Undun.
All in all, in the Shiny and Sounds it is AAA level and no matter how much love indie people have for their game, this is definitely on a whole new level.

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Control

V-

Initially I tried this with the old keyboard/gerbil combo of PC glory.
After an hour and some learned abilities it was full-metal C-x M-c M-butterfly
Is this a typing instructor? Nay!
For once I wished for a turbo YOLO gerbil with allthebuttons.
In what can only be described as defeat; I picked up the xclone controlla and made /w the button mashing.
and for the most part ………………………………………………………………it worked.
Sorry, did I mention the input lag? That shite is real, son.
I thought P-man was exaggerating but I have been noped (more than once) by pressing the Right Stick and having it respond like so:
What am I?
A printer? Monitor? Web cam?
Oh, that’s right! I’m a controlla!
*moves*
Spider Talion, spider Talion. Sticks to walls, gets you killed.

J-

DS4 Works over blueteeth and USB
The prompts switch correctly based on your controller
It’s the standard sort of layout for this game
The camera get get screwy though, not enough to ding it a chair though
The climbing though. Ugh

P-

I had heard people say how this game was better with the controller and, as you’ve heard, Venn seems to agree.
I on the other hand, have a 7 button mouse and using the Roccat Tools for Linux and can rebind every single one of them to a keyboard key.
25 hours of play with the keyboard and mouse with no complaints, seems to me like this game is perfectly playable with them.
You can rebind keys, adjust mouse sensitivity and the prompts will change accordingly whether you’re using the glorious PC controls or a peasant console controller.

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FUN

V-

I’ve put 12+ hours into this critter.
That’s approaching Wang time.
I guess the only game I can remotely compare this to is Skyrim.
Remember that OH SHITE BALLS moment you had learning the identity of Paarthurnax?
Yeah, this game lacks that.
Well, they try with the whole ring reveal but it’s kinda meh.
If you loathe stealth games the first hour is a FK mothering chore.
30min in I hit the googs and tried to figure out just what the hell I was doing wrong because I was getting killed to death.
Turns out Mr. Ranger pants starts out a bit useless.
Seriously, was Talion in the ranger reserves?
Because I kinda understand why Hallas didn’t want budget Ranger snogging his daughter.
Hell, he was probably just worried about Talions ability to defend his fami…. oh, right.
About four hours in, you finally collect enough abilities to have some proper fun and by ‘proper fun’ I mean the ability to curb-stomp some Uruk.
Now don’t let that fool you. The game does a proper job of ramping up the difficulty.
Just last night (well, this morning) I was a tad overconfident and targeted the wrong FKN war chief and reverted back to OH FK FK FK FK FK RUN RUNNNNN mode.
Speaking of that. I have no clue how to take advantage of the Nemesis system.
I use it as a check list.
Oh, BTW, Mordor has bugs, Brad e.g. captain health glitch.
BUT At the end of the day, it’s a 0s.

J-

It’s certainly entertaining
It’s also not so easy peasy. Specially the wargs
I’ve screwed up a bunch in the main campaign, so now it’s all trying to recover
I’m looking forward to how Batman is going to turn out.
Anyone else notice that it doesn’t quit itself?

P-

It’s very hard to put it down once you start playing.
As far as power fantasy <- show title? fulfilling games go, this one is hands down the best we have for Linux.
There are bugs yes, every now and again the physics engine will lock up and when you kill an uruk they’ll just stiffen up and fall like a statue.
Also happened more than once when I was climbing a wall, Talion would jump to a ledge that was off-screen at the time (and I’m guessing the surrounding bits hadn’t rendered yet), he’d get stuck in a wall.
- Thankfully, the game makes it so you can fast travel to one of the Barad Silme so that’s barely an inconvenience.
- An amusing one at that, too.
I’ve dinged chairs to other games for less, yes but this game put in such a good mood, that I’m going to overlook the 10 times the input lag killed me and the times I wound up inside a wall.

Total-

Final –