Middle Earth: Shadow of War

The Lord of the Rings, a series easy to forget is named after its villain, holds up mercy as an essential virtue. The hobbits, first as Bilbo and later as Frodo and Sam, choose mercy when opting not to kill Gollum. This leads to the destruction of the ring. It’s clear from the get-go that you cannot defeat Sauron with Sauron’s methods. Boromir is not our hero, but our tragic lesson.

This brings us to Shadow of War, the second part of a series all about trying to defeat Sauron using Sauron’s methods. Armies of orcs. Brutal means. Forging your own rings of power. It can be delightful to take a beloved property and stamp your muddy narrative boots all over its pristine sheets. This game does not care one whit for mercy. There’s an air of futility about it all — we’ve known from the start that Talion and Celebrimbor do not succeed in killing Sauron. Yet the game asks us to partake in the killing and gleefully we accept, as you’re supposed to in video games, the majority of which involve mass slaying. Shortly before killing an orc captain, the game paused so he could tell Talion/Me “I’ve killed one hundred and sixty seven orcs and men. How many have you killed? You can’t remember, can you?”

Can you? It put me in mind of getting a “kill 1000 bandits” achievement in Dragon Age.

I don’t want to oversell the narrative here. It’s not all that great, and most of what’s good about it is generously assisted by my own imagination. It has some majorly weak parts, not least of all portraying Shelob the Spider as beautiful woman, and all of the supporting cast that are not blessed with being an orc are dour and forgettable. Still, there’s something about tie-in fiction that’s not aping the original — a futile endeavor at the best of times — that is compelling regardless of quality.

But enough about all that, let’s talk about the real reason to be playing this game: The orcs. Shadow of War has even greater volume of randomly generated orcs than the original. Oscillating from hilarious to frightening to just plain bizarre, you will be monologued, insulted, betrayed, taunted, philisophized at and more by the orcs of Mordor. Then you recruit them to your case. It’s a killer’s game of pokemon. If by catching pokemon, you seared their very soul with your hand-brand rather than capturing them in a ball. And If you somehow had any illusions that what you’re doing is just, the game has a quest line that concludes with Talion acquiring an upgrade to his branding skill termed “Worse than Death”.

The characterization of each orc is the charm that sells the whole game. Little snippets of dialogue well voice-acted, some clever writing, and the dynamism that makes every player encounter a different crew of orcs and events, come together to create something truly unique in gaming. On one occasion, I was stealthily shooting orcs from atop a parapet, only to have Talion thrown on his ass by an orc, who had stealthily snuck up on me. Said orc then chased me across the rooftops, hissing only TASTY, SO TASTY, over an over. At a different point, early in the game when I could still die, a random mook killed me and achieved the title “Tark-Slayer” (Tark being a made up word orcs have started calling humans). Later on, when I hunted down and killed him, he fell to his knees and said “I guess that makes you the tark-slayer… slayer”. Talion promptly chopped off his arms and legs, which led to the appearance of a new orc titled “The Dismemberer”, who claimed I showed promise and he’d be willing to show me a thing or two about dismemberment. I ran for my miserable life.

It’s a strange brew of brutality and humor. Wisest among the creatures of Middle-Earth, orcs learned that life (in video games) is cheap.

The first game was much too easy. For the nemesis system to truly shine, you need a nemesis. It’s hard for this to happen when you’re cutting swathes through entire orc strongholds without breaking a sweat. Shadow of War attempts to correct this by adding harder difficulty modes. Nemesis difficulty is certainly better than the original, but if you’re going to use all the tools you have available like I do — converting orcs into spies set to betray enemy warchiefs, using the terrain to your advantage, recruiting a good ‘ole tough bodyguard  — it’s still pretty easy. This is largely a weakness of the “Batman-style” combat system, which limits combat to a few button presses. It’s stylish but shallow. For the second game in a row, I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of what the game has to offer simply by trying to play well.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor (2014, Monolith)

This game impressed upon me a profound and immutable truth: the average video game player has much in common with with the orcs of Mordor.

This is a video game based on a movie based on a book. Indeed, it’s a fanfictiony tale that takes place in an indifferent time period that is only recognizable to Lord of the Rings nerds because Gollum is hanging out in Mordor. But the overarching narrative — Talion, a ranger of Gondor slain by Sauron’s agents and returning to half-life mysteriously bonded to the wraith of a long dead elf — is not the true narrative at all. Indeed, the real story of Shadow of Mordor lies in the ‘nemesis system’ that Monolith has created, a complex system of orc politics and identity generation.

In other words, an orc might strike you down, gain a name like “Zag the Mighty”, laugh at your misfortune and begin his meteoric rise through orc society, ambushing his contemporaries and engaging in feats of strength, to be promoted from captain to warchief. Later, after interrogating his cronies for intel, you might learn Zag is immune to stealth attacks, really afraid of fire, and has a weakness to archery. You’ll duly shoot the scoundrel in the head with your wraith’s bow and leave his corpse to rot. Hours in the future, when you’re minding your own business (beheading unrelated orcs), you’re jumped by an orc with a bandaged, mummified head, now “Zag Baghead”, truly pissed off you ruined his face and ready to rumble. He clashes swords with you, references your last fight, and laments how all the other orcs make fun of his face now.

These interactions, smartly tied together in a ball of procedurally generated thread, are the real narrative, a truly inventive mix of gameplay and emergent storytelling.

This game is violent. It’s spent almost entirely killing orcs en masse, lopping off their heads, pincushioning them with arrows, stabbing out their eyes or shanking them repeatedly in the kidney. Or otherwise planning your next sojourn to do the same. Orcs, after all, are just really bad humans. They generally have cockney accents which brings a sort of ugly class angle to the whole thing. They get birthed from mud as adults and know only cruelty and competition. I was starting to feel maybe a little uneasy about taking joy in this whole slaughter thing when it came to me. Maybe it was when an orc who had recently killed me yelled “Didn’t I already kill you?” or “Stop haunting me!”. Or maybe when I was sneaking around listening orcs argue who would win in a fight — an elf or a wizard? Maybe when I burst into laughter after Dush the Cannibal, on death’s door, shouted “Don’t let me go to waste! Please eat me!” shortly before I killed him.

These aren’t just orcs. They’re models of video gamers. I, too, when given a weapon and free reign in a video game, am an orc. Butchery and laughter and grog! If the only the game had the balls to straight up make you play as an orc and not a beefy Aragorn analog.