Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a great looking action RPG game that does some justice to its great franchise. It's a game that uses some very clever game mechanics to keep the challenge fresh. Even now, one and a half years after its release, very few games have used artificial intelligence as effectively as this game has.
The story is original (not borrowed from the books or movies) but the world contains numerous elements that fans of the franchise will immediately feel familiar with. The story is not epic by any means and mostly plays second-fiddle to the gameplay. But it's good enough for its purpose and the two main characters slowly grow on you.
The gameplay is superb. The fast paced up-close combat is very exciting and makes you feel very powerful, but these fights can also get out of hand very quickly, resulting in your death. This encourages you to use stealth as often as you can, and SoM generally gives you a lot of freedom over how you wish to accomplish something. The incredible AI makes sure that identical scenarios rarely play out, and you are often treated to both good and bad surprises. There are some points in the game when you'll probably feel you're having to grind but the ever changing scenarios make them much more bearable than they typically are for other games. Gameplay is easily SoM's biggest selling point.
Overall, the game doesn't really have any noticeable weak points and it has some very impressive strong points. It can easily keep you occupied for 50+ hours. Anyone interested in RPG games should definitely pick up a copy.