November 25, 2014

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Date played: November 24th
Platform: PS4
Session fun rating: 8/10

I can smell the end of this game.

I've completed all the stealth challenges and only have 1 sword challenge and a couple of slave rescues. I spent most of my time hunting some beasts to complete the hunting challenges. It started with a Ghul Matron. I had a really hard time finding one. The large Ghul leaders only come out at night and only when their minions summon them. I scoured the two map areas riding a Caragor, checking out every cave I could. Eventually, I found some of the smaller ones, but couldn't get the matrons to spawn. I tried again in a different spot and killed dozens of the smaller ones. To my surprise, 3 Ghul Matrons came out at the same time!!!

Talion brutalizes an orc guard
I ended up using my special bow ability to shoot a bunch of fire arrows at them and took them down without issue. The last hunting challenge was to defeat a horned graug. Those things are very dangerous and hard to defeat normally. I found one roaming around, killing orcs. Thankfully, I have the shadow mount ability which lets me instantly mount graugs, which makes it really easy to kill them.

As I was completing some of the side quests, I took on about 4 captains, though one of them escaped. Killing a captain is very satisfying!