CREDIT: MONOLITH PRODUCTIONS
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is a game with a storyline that's not overly engaging, but boy is the game fun.

Recently, I completed the story mode of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, a game that ranks among the most pleasant surprises in the gaming industry this year, as Monolith Productions shook off its record of mediocrity, and proved that not all licensed games need to be awful all at once.

Traversing Mordor, killing orcs and creating my own rivalries among the opposing armies turned into one of the most entertaining gameplay experiences of the year, but once I had completed the story mode, I realized one thing: I wasn’t 100 per cent sure exactly what happened.

Sure, I was able to glean the obvious points of the story, it’s primarily a revenge tale interspersed with a hefty dose of Tolkien’s more obscure lore, the type you don’t know after reading Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. If the name Celebrimbor doesn’t immediately result in a stunned, excited reaction – like I saw on the face of a friend when he was playing – then you’d be at about the same level I was at going into the campaign.

As a tremendous advocate for a strong narrative in video games, usually this lack of clear motivation in the protagonist or a weak ending such as the one given here, is something that would have had an effect on my overall opinion of the game, but come the end of Shadow of Mordor, I found that I actually didn’t care all that much, because I had so much fun getting there.

The key to an open world game is the ability to make the game fun when players are not engaged in the main plot, which is where games like Grand Theft Auto succeed heavily. You can spend 20 hours having the absolute time of your life and not engage in a single aspect of the main plot, to the point where even after being out for a year, people still have not completed the story of Grand Theft Auto V. It was this ability to not only distract from the main plot but to almost create an original story through the nemesis system that allowed me to look past the shortcoming of the main plot.

Why would I care about the trials of Mordor when I could follow the military career of Zorgush Meat-Grinder, the plucky spearman who killed me in a skirmish and fought his way up the ranks to captain, only for me to kill him, only for him to cheat death and hunt me down? This rivalry system allowed players to spend their time creating their own mini tales within the game, a feat that so many openworld games have attempted to accomplish, but so few have actually succeeded at.

I may not be able to recommend this game on the merits of narrative, or reverence for the source material, or even the quality of the official side quests that the game offers, but for creativity, and the ability to make your own fun, Shadow of Mordor is a rare triumph that deserves to be played by everybody.