Seriously, it almost sounds like all of the GS staff took off early for the holidays and Joe Shmoe, the janitor, was left in charge of running the office. He booted a PC in mid-December of 2014 and wrote an editorial for the Shadow of Mordor being the game of the year and signed under a false name.
Joe Shmoe should get fired.
I really really do not understand what this game has going for it aside from a really well fleshed-out combat.
Remember Randal's description of the LOTR trilogy in Clerks 2? Well this is my description of this game in Randal's style:
You play as some typical stock pretty white boy who does nothing but kill orcs throughout the entire game in various flashy and fancy ways. The end....
But honestly, the entire map is open to you from the very beginning so there is little sense of progression in that regard. Towards the middle of the game you start off with a new map and, guess what? You do exactly the same thing you were doing in the first map....There are no buildings to enter and there are barely any caves to explore, there are no towns to visit and there is no downtime in the taverns, there are no people to have a conversation with, there are no hobbits, no wizzards and no elves, there is just orcs and more orcs....there are some big orcs, some small orcs, some four legged orcs....and then some more orcs, well, there is also Gollum for about 10 minutes of the game.
Although you may feel overpowered at first, eventually you will start getting killed when you take on orc captains and war chiefs with their fellow orcs respawning by the dozens; and they won't stop respawning until either you die and respawn or until you kill your target.
If you plan on playing without making bonfires explode, dropping bee hives, and/or riding caragors then think again. You NEED to exploit those things when you get swamped by dozens of orcs while trying to kill an orcs captain. And that is as far as the environmental use goes in this game....
Another thing about respawning. Ever play an MMO? If not, let me break it down, you kill some enemies/animals in an area, you come back there minutes later and the same NPCs have respawned. The result? you get very little, if any, sense of accomplishment. This game operates the same way. It's like a single-player MMO in that regard. You beat up and kill some orcs, you free some slaves. Minutes later the same orcs are again in charge of some slaves at the same location.
WHY? WHY? WHY?
The only way this game could have worked is if it were made into a more linear experience with a better story. Think of Arkham Asylum. The enemies took awhile to respawn, and they did so only in certain areas and that was based on your story progression. The entire map was not accessible to you. You had to really work for your upgrades. Here, upgrades are given away like candy. Realistically, here you could advance to your maximum level if you simply engaged small groups of orcs without advancing the so-called "story" (more, or rather less on that later) and by killing the captains whose power you take; eventually, you would get all the upgrades (but not your weapon runes - those come from killing the captains).
In Arkham games the bosses meant something, they had their stories and peculiarities. Here, the bosses simply want to advance higher in the rank; they are slightly more difficult to kill if you fail to kill them at first and/or if you kill their opponents; AND they have their own strengths and weaknesses. And by strengths and weaknesses I mean being or not being afraid of fire/caragors; being or not being immune to ranged attacks, stealth attacks, and not much else.
The nemesis system is a cool and unique idea on paper. However, when you realize there is an infinite supply of randomly generated orcs to take place of their fallen comrades/rivals and when you realize that you are pretty much immortal then we have a problem here. Although the cool thing is that no replay of the game is ever the same. But I doubt anyone would be replaying this game. We were also told that we would foster these personal vendettas with the arch-nemesis orcs, however these will only extend to the familiar orcs saying things like:
"I enjoy killing you over and over again"
"Why won't you just die?
"You ran away last time but not this time."
"I had to retreat last time but this time I am much stronger!"
"I will make you pay for this scar you gave me!"
Story.... What story? There is no story here. You try to avenge your dead wife and son and you have an ethereal elf living inside you.
As for the positives:
-Fluid combat, maybe even more fluid than in all Arkham Games;
-Satisfying kills ;
-Various ways of killing with new upgrades ;
-Stealth system is decent although most orcs have extremely bad eyesight.... ;
-Fluid climbing system.
-The Graphics and physics
All in all, this was a game that I sort of tried to like but this is also a game that fell flat within the first hour.
I just find it really bizarre that this game won GOTY when there is Alien, Dragon Age 3, Evil Within, Lords of the Fallen, Thief, Dark Souls II, Wolfenstein, Far Cry 4, hell, even Watch Dogs and Arkham Origins that most people hated but could not articulate exactly why.