This fan-made remaster of Shadow of Mordor is what fans of The Lord of the Rings have been craving for years.
The Lord of the Rings fans have been blessed with video game adaptations over the years across multiple generations, or at least since 2002’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, arguably one of the best movie-to-video game adaptations of all time.
During the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox generation, especially, it felt like the video game industry was oversaturated with movie adaptations, and it’s fair to say that a large chunk of those games absolutely sucked.
The fact that the likes of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Spider-Man 2 helped break that unfortunate trend is a testament to how great these games are.
Speaking of which, can we get a remaster of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King, please? Powers that be or even Sauron, make that happen!
Two other fantastic The Lord of the Rings games that come to mind are the real-time strategy, The Battle for Middle-earth, and the topic of today’s discussion, 2014’s Shadow of Mordor.
Shadow of Mordor Was Amazing!
“Fight through Mordor and uncover the truth of the spirit that compels you, discover the origins of the Rings of Power, build your legend, and ultimately confront the evil of Sauron in this new chronicle of Middle-earth,” reads the synopsis of Shadow of Mordor.
Other than having fantastic combat and an intriguing story, the standout feature of Shadow of Mordor, as well as its sequel, 2017’s Shadow of War, is its Nemesis system.
In a nutshell, the Nemesis system would create organic rivals depending on who you battle with or kill. For example, if you maimed an Orc and it escaped, it would remember you later in the game and would want its vengeance.
What’s more, if you kill an Orc, another will take its place in the hierarchy and will remember what you did to its predecessor.
Sadly, it looks like we’ll never get another game in this series and considering that Warner Bros. Games patented the Nemesis system, it may have died along with it. That’s unless Netflix, its prospective owner, revives it from the dead.
Thankfully, however, while this fantastic series might be dead for the foreseeable future, at least fans are breathing life into this game, such as this remaster showcased by the YouTube channel, Digital Dreams.
This version of Shadow of Mordor is being played on a beast of a gaming PC in a glorious 8K resolution, powered by an NVIDIA RTX 5090, an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D and beyond-all-limits ray tracing.
Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are out now on PC, PlayStation and Xbox.
