Typically, when I play DLC for a game not called Destiny, it’s usually a short and sweet affair that is nothing more than a reminder of how much I loved the original game. One specific DLC that comes to mind is the original DLC for Dragon Age (the first one) that was an additional piece, though small, to the large puzzle. It was short, sweet and fun. Shadow of Mordor – The Bright Lord is fun, frustrating and a large piece that I didn’t know was missing from the original game.
A welcomed piece no doubt, though.
The Bright Lord follows the adventures of our favorite ghostly elf Celebrimbor. While his time in the original Shadow of Mordor is intriguing, he was never the focus of the game (well, not specifically). In the Bright Lord, we see his plight to take down Sauron with the Ring of Power and ultimately take control of Mordor. Let me just add before we get into the beef of the gameplay that the acting and story setup for The Bright Lord is actually impressive for a DLC. Honestly speaking, they probably could have made an entire game out of Celebrimbor’s adventures and sold it during the holiday season as a stand alone. It would have been entertaining as hell, though incredibly more difficult than the original adventure. Having said this, let’s get into it.
The gameplay is geared with the story, where Celebrimbor must go around and defeat Sauron’s warchiefs to take control of certain parts of Mordor. He must capture areas and build towers, which sounds pretty simple if you look at it 100 miles away. Sadly, the good folks at Monolith and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment don’t make the adventure easy. Each capture point has its own set of rules. Some of it is ‘kill-kill-kill!’, while others are multi-tiered goals that require you to develop a strategy before diving head first into the fray. For example, the first tower you capture involves you ‘branding’ (or possessing) a certain number of orcs. You do this a few ways. You can knock them senseless, grab them while their weary and brand them (not as easy as it sounds). You can fire an arrow into them and brand them that way (not as easy as it sounds). Or you can use the Ring of Power and run up to them and brand them invisibly (not as easy as it sounds). There is also a ground-pound branding option (fill in the blank). Sounds tedious, right? It is and it isn’t. The rewards for branding are fantastic. After you brand a certain amount of followers, they can attack other orcs at will and/or gather around you during battle.
The con in the branding process is that if you’re in the heat of battle, it’s difficult to brand orcs in a scrum. At times there can be so much going on that you’re losing more orcs than you’re branding because you’re fending off attacks. In addition, if you’re out of arrows or you simply cannot get to enough orcs to brand, sometimes it can get enormously frustrating. Even worse, and the biggest problem I personally had with the game — again, ‘I’ is the word there — is that I accidentally killed my own branded orcs during battle because there was such much going on. I have cursed myself so many times during this review process for my own mistakes. It’s sad.
Anyway, branding and building an army is the centralized theme to most of the major missions on this DLC. You have to understand how to do it and do it well. One of the harder missions I ran into, one that is a part of the story, is having to brand 15 orcs during a scrum and then keep at least 10 alive for two minutes. It sounds easy on paper, but sweet-baby-jesus it is not easy. I spent the most time dying on this one, simply because I couldn’t keep my guys alive for two minutes due to the waves and waves of orcs that they throw at you in the game.
Prior to this mission, I had another mission where I had to brand orcs, protect two pieces of equipment from invading orcs and then take down a general. It was a beautiful, multi-tier juggling act that drove me nuts. I would have appreciated it more if I had known the previously mentioned mission was next on the list.
The most frustrating part of all this is that if you should die, then you have to start the mission over from scratch. You could invest an hour into one of these missions and then die, only to have to start again. It’s a bit cruel to do that to gamers, but hey! This isn’t Dark Souls, so we’ve got that going for us. Right? RIGHT?
In the end, expect some high level difficulty from the Bright Lord DLC, but also expect some fantastic controls and quickness from our main elf, Celebrimbor. He is a fun, angry character to go through this amount of frustration and fury with and he makes you forget at times that you want to delete this DLC and forget it exists (only because of the frustration factor). His upgrades on both the sword and bow side of things makes him a delight to use, even if it’s over and over again on missions. So there is a huge plus to going through the countless number of challenges you’re going to run into.
Now, with that said, the game is a blast to play. Yes, it’s difficult, but part of being a great gamer is elevating your skills up to the challenge. I have cursed this game since Saturday evening, but also appreciated that this wasn’t a 45-minute addition to the bigger body of work. As I mentioned before, Dragon Age’s first DLC on their first game took about 45-minutes to complete. Yes it was fun, but not $14.99 worth of fun. The Bright Lord DLC, as I stated above, is like an entirely new game. The description in the press release says ‘expansion’, though it does have the DLC moniker beside it. It’s very much an expanded portion of the game that adds a lot of value to an already valued experience with Shadow of Mordor. Even though it’s geared to be difficult and frustrating at times, it’s enough of a difference maker in the gameplay department to add another great experience to the Mordor family. Plus, if you get too frustrated, just go kill tons and tons of orcs until you’re ready to go back to the mission. Mordor would be caked with orc heads everywhere if the PlayStation 4 had enough RAM to handle it. I took a lot of breaks between missions.
