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Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a delight. It's also one of the most derivative games I've ever played. And this feels a bit confusing, really. Some of us spend a fair amount of time worrying about the steady convergence of so many big-budget blockbuster games into one hyper-dense open-world singularity of levelling, stealth kills, rhythmic combat and map-unlocking. And then something like Mordor comes along and fits this profile perfectly - something that takes the iterative template laid down by publishers like Ubisoft in particular and cranks it up to the point of parody. And yet somehow, the end result is, well... Somehow, the end result is a delight.I think the whole thing makes a little more sense if you flip the argument around, of course. If you'd told me, four or five years ago, in the midst of all the heavily-scripted, QTE-fetishing, cover-hugging set-piece-fumbling cinema games, that in 2014, your typical triple-A title would be played out across the wild expanse of a huge map and would be driven more by the emergent hilarity that spilled from its environments and its systems than the machinations - the deus ex machinations ha ha! - of its narrative designers, I probably would have been overjoyed. Mordor slots into that way of thinking quite handily. If this is where we've been aiming of late, now that we're actually here, it's not bad at all.
The problem with this theory, though, is that not all of the games converging on this spot are as entertaining as Mordor. The basic template itself is not enough. On paper, for example, there's not so much separating Mordor from something like Watch Dogs (and granted, Eurogamer gave both games pretty similar scores). Personally, though, I find Watch Dogs a bit of a witless chore: all those icons spread over that massive city and it just feels more like tidying up than exploring. Mordor's own locations are pretty big as well, and as the game progresses, they too start to fill with mission markers and side quests and all of the same sorts of things Watch Dogs trades in. Suddenly, though, I'm happy to muddle through, and I'm happy to dawdle and give in to distraction. What marks Mordor out?
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