Shadow of Mordor is a proverbial melting pot of ideas and feels reassuringly familiar as soon as you start playing. 'Rather than the brainless AI you sometimes find wandering round similar sandbox titles, enemies in Middle Earth actually evolve and grow into really dangerous adversaries during your playthrough.' There’s a little bit of the Batman Arkham games tucked in there and the exceedingly violent executions bring Ryse: Son of Rome to mind, for example. It oozes Assassin’s Creed from every pore, with our hero using his parkour skills to scale tall towers and subsequently swan-dive off them! And with the combat and stealth, the special vision that reveals enemies, and the map and side missions, there are clearly plenty of other influences too. On paper, at least, Monolith’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor appears to be little more than a hybrid of past games wrapped in Tolkienesque packaging.