Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor GOTY Edition ~ My review.

LokiFire · March 18, 2016

For starters my potato specs.

AMD Phenom II x4 B55 @ 4.04GHZ

8GB DDR3 Kingston Fury 1708mhz

EVGA FTW HC2 GTX 580 905 core /2106 memory.

Game installed 2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drives in RAID-0 Array.

ACER H223HQ 20.5" 1920x1080 75hz display

Wired XBOX 360 S controller

Game settings used for a visually impressive and smooth experience with my hardware.

A note, the game found instability with my GPU which other stress tests and games never did! so i turned up the voltage a notch, it did raise temperatures a bit but it's perfectly fine for a 580 at 83c maximum, and this is in a warm room of 27c ambient.

So the game...

I have played similar style games such as Assassin's Creed where you will do set missions, find a new area, go to a tower and get that placed on the map enabling you to fast travel to and from previously found towers.

I AM NOT a fan of Assassin's Creed games at all, in fact the only one i mildly enjoyed was IV Black Flag.

Shadow of Mordor does what the creed games just cannot (you can argue they are very different games, yeah visually you are correct), it gives me visuals and performance that are undeniably amazing, the game is so well optimized it leaves others wanting, however the graphical requirements are higher than actually needed for unknown reasons. AKA High textures wanting 3GB Vram nonsense, but a small blunder compared to the achievement that this game is on a technical level.

There is no pop in with the game world, everything seems to just live and you do feel like you are a part of this game and are fighting the creatures of Mordor, it feels believable and often times i just cannot stop playing.

The sound is excellent and more than fit's what the game is capturing, there is also a lot of great detail added to characters, the voice acting is superb and some of the best i have ever seen.

The graphics menu is excellent, you can tweak this game up or down to suit a vast array of hardware no problem at all, however just ignore the Vram suggestions on the right side with textures unless you wish to try running the HD texture pack on Ultra, that will possibly eat most cards Vram.

Ambient Occlusion is one of those things you either love or hate, games that have used it like Battlefield 4 for me i just did not care as it barely added anything other than an unrealistic black outline to everything, however in Shadow of Mordor it is implemented greatly and really gives everything a fantastic look, NPC's pop out of the 3D world, i don't know AO just seems at home in Shadow of Mordor, it greatly enhances the visual experience.

Motion Blur and FXAA are really well done, it adds to the immersion (motion blur) and FXAA is a shader based method to help deal with those annoying jaggies, it's not over the top and barely hit's the visual clarity of the game.

The combat is excellent and uses a simlar system to the Batman games, it is so satisfying being able to deal a deadly kill sheering your enemies head off! can't get enough of that

I have 4 hours into the game so far and just don't want to stop playing.

If you wish to purchase this game yourself, here are two links to epic deals for the game, it really is an unmissable experience in my honest opinion.

https://www.g2a.com/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-the-game-of-the-year-editionedition-steam-cd-key-global-1.html

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/middle-earth-shadow-of-mordor-bundle

A small picture gallery of the game below.

This game is outstanding 10/10