middle earth shadow of mordor goty differences

Middle earth shadow of mordor goty differences upgrade#
Middle earth shadow of mordor goty differences series#

There are enough different voices and multiple possible lines that I rarely saw repeats, and the uruk faces are surprisingly well animated and expressive.Įven though the hierarchy is a pretty simple system when you understand what it’s doing, and realize that these uruk captains aren’t actually roaming the map in real time, it’s great to play with. (Sometimes they’ll survive being apparently killed by you and come back with a scarred face.) For that reason, and to identify the arrival of a significant threat, I never really got tired of the action-pausing cutscenes that play when a captain shows up. Most uruk captains do tend to die too quickly to really become memorable, but some definitely did. You’ll definitely run into him again later to settle the score, and he’ll have a new introduction taunt about his victory when you meet. Maybe he gets promoted up the chain of command.

If any uruk kills you, even if he’s a random grunt, he levels up and earns new abilities and some cooler armor. Some of them changed the way I played, like the legendary rune that extended the amount of time I have to score another hit before my combo count resets by 10 seconds, and one that made me immune to poison attacks. If you kill an uruk captain, he drops a rune that can be slotted into one of your weapons for bonuses. It feels powerful, but I still don’t feel invincible even with everything nearly maxed out.Īnd what’s really cool about Mordor is that whether you win or lose a fight, something interesting happens. Things got a lot easier a few hours in when I’d leveled up and unlocked more of Talion’s skill tree so that I could build up combos quicker, execute two enemies for the price of one, and even fight mounted on a huge, rancor-like graug who pops uruks into his mouth like jellybeans.

Middle earth shadow of mordor goty differences upgrade#

Health doesn’t recharge much on its own, and until you can upgrade your health pool, you may find yourself succumbing to death by a thousand pinpricks if you don’t retreat. Picking out the shield bearers and ax-wielding berserkers who are immune to frontal attacks and killing them first becomes tough to do when you’re completely surrounded, and it goes downhill from there. If you let the uruks raise the alarm in one of their strongholds, or just happen across a few large wandering groups on the densely populated map, you can quickly become overwhelmed by more enemies than you can hope to handle. What really sets the feel of Mordor’s combat apart from the Batman games is that it’s really easy to get into trouble, especially early on. And even though stealth gameplay is pretty basic, it’s great to have the option to thin the herd a bit before they know you’re there. A time-slowing power makes scoring a couple of headshots with the bow easy, whether in stealth or in the heat of battle, though it’s kept in check by ammo constraints and a limited (but upgradable) supply of time-slowing juice. If you push the counter button, Talion will drop what he’s doing and counter instantly. Mordor’s take on building up hit streaks to power up lethal takedowns is a bit more forgiving, in that you’re almost never locked into an animation. Sword combat feels pretty much just as good here as brawling does in Batman – which is to say it’s amazing. It’s enticingly freeform.Īcrobatically slaughtering Sauron’s ugly minions feels as easy as it appears to be for Legolas in Peter Jackson’s movies, and it’s more fun to do than to watch. Unlike Batman, of course, Mordor’s involve great, gory decapitation and stabbing animations, and outside of the scripted story missions, there are few distinctly separated stealth and combat areas.

Middle earth shadow of mordor goty differences series#

Much like in the Batman: Arkham games, you can choose to stealthily pick off enemies one at a time, or dive head-first into a brawl with dozens of opponents and beat the crap out of them with a smoothly animated series of attacks and counters. My interest in the plot dwindled toward the end, but it does a fair job of explaining why Talion has such sweet supernatural powers with his sword, dagger, and bow. It makes decent use of Gollum, and there are a couple of memorable new characters - particularly Ratbag the comic-relief uruk, who guides you through the process of infiltrating the enemy army.

It’s a story that doesn’t make total sense for hardcore Tolkien scholars, but it’s well-acted. Talion’s spirit is then bound to an amnesiac elf ghost and returned to Middle-earth for vengeance against Sauron’s forces. A brief and shocking opening scene sets a dark and brutal tone as Talion, a former Ranger of Gondor, is ritually executed along with his family.