Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor
Despite some flaws, this could be a great gaming experience—as long as you understand what you're getting into. Though it looks like it might be a typical open-world RPG, it is not. Yes, there is a main quest and there are side quests, but they are all quite thin excuses for the core of this game: combat and stealth missions, which are usually randomly generated.
The world is stunningly gorgeous and broodingly inviting, but you cannot enter houses and talk to NPCs. There's RPG-like progress where you can get more powerful attacks, but it's weakly tied to the narrative. Actually, there isn't that much narrative at all, nor characters. It's all about grinding through missions, becoming more powerful, and grinding some more. These missions are, in fact, endlessly generated and are, for the most part, glorious. They can take place at various settings, each requiring different tactics for stealth and skill use, and each enemy has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages. There's a lot of opportunity for emergent storytelling. Well, as long as you expect the stories to be about combat.
Unfortunately, after playing many of these endless side-quests they become very repetitive indeed and even the power of random generation can't fix that. I made a mistake, perhaps, in playing too many of these missions up front and maximizing all my skills before finishing the main quest. But, you know what? I think that might be the right way to play the game. The whole idea of a main quest seems like a poor fit here, as actually the main quest missions might be less fun than the random ones. The real goal is to dominate all the biggest bosses and be and feel like a bad ass.
As for flaws, my main complaint is about traversing the environment. You can climb up walls and jump across roofs but the controls are infuriatingly lousy. I wasted so much time trying to climb structures but instead had the character rolling around the ground like an idiot. A tiny little ramp might as well be a mountain. Everything else in the game feels quite smooth, but this aspect is awful. Also, it's difficult to aim properly in a melee and you can often find yourself attacking the wrong enemy. This gets especially frustrating in the "Bright Lord" DLC.
For Tolkien fans like me: keep your expectations very, very low. A lot of effort has gone into using names and lore properly, but the story and tone are ridiculous travesties of the books. Honestly, the "franchise" is not really important here. They could have easily written this into any generic fantasy world and it would have worked just as well. That's what I keep telling myself to stay sane.
As for the DLC: meh. They could have been better if they were integrated into the game as side quests, but instead they are rather short individual campaigns that are less satisfying than the main game.