The most impressive thing about Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is just how much like a great game it manages to look. Great games, like great works of art, are originals – they capture something that speaks of their time and place in the world, yet resonate forever. They carry the brush strokes of the master, or, in the case of great video games, the deftness of design that advances the whole medium without causing existing hardware to explode.
As such Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor is not a great game. It looks like a great game, it plays like a great game, but, no. This is not a game for the ages. In the same way that a talented painter might mimic the style of an old master the developers of Shadow of Mordor have borrowed heavily from the Arkham series of Batman games to create a game that answers the question “what if the people who made Arkham City made a game in Middle Earth about a ninja?” The final product is a highly polished exploration of the generic. A fake based on the Rocksteady classic.
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