I am so damn addicted to Shadow of Mordor right now.
Even though it has few gameplay pillars aside from massacring Orcs, the "Nemesis System" makes it endless fun, because it's always creating the craziest emergent non-scripted gameplay scenarios.
Even though the combat is ripped straight from the Arkham games, the different enemy types and the different weaknesses/resistances of captains and warchiefs makes it so you have to strategize more and always be on your toes. Such a slight change makes a big difference. Plus, I think the counter windows are a lot shorter than they are in Batman, so I find it a lot more difficult.
The stealth is fun, but the Orc AI is pretty damn dumb, so stealth in this game is much easier than in the Arkham games. In Arkham, the enemy thugs will detect you if you cross their line of sight almost instantly (there is a small window of grace, but it's so short it's almost non-existent). In this game, you can run around in front of an Orc's face and it will take him ages to catch on. The stealth is closer to Assassin's Creed in AI dumbness, but the sheer number of ways to dispatch enemies still makes it more fun (I've never been able to get into Assassin's Creed, anyway). The traversal is also pretty AC-inspired, and even though it's still buggy and Talion sometimes just stands still when I'm trying to jump off a ledge or something, I find the controls more intuitive than in AC, where I would constantly be jumping off of buildings while trying to scale them.
I guess Shadow of Mordor being a Batman/Assassin's Creed mashup makes sense, because the developers working on it were originally supposed to work on a Batman game, and then moved a lot of their work over to the LOTR IP when they didn't get the go-ahead to continue work on Batman. And some of the people on the team worked on AC for Ubisoft.
Speaking of Assassin's Creed, I hear that the newer ones are a bit of a break from the old ones I never really cared for, and are a lot better. I should probably check them out when the prices come down. However, I'm not in a huge hurry, because most of the innovations seem like shit that Witcher 3 has already done, and probably does better. And I'm not even finished that game yet.
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