Driver San Francisco

This is the first of the Driver franchise that I've played.  It has similar free roaming elements to the GTA series, but you are confined to a vehicle and "shift" into other vehicles - effectively taking over the driver.  That said, they did do a fantastic job with car drifting/weight/road texture - it felt great.

However, this shifting mechanic quickly turns you from hero to villain as you begin carreening innocent commuters into oncoming traffic to fuel your own brand of brutal vigilante justice.  This isn't just a matter of innocents being in the crossfire, you are put situations where you must directly sacrifice multiple bystanders to do something as absurd as win a street race.

The story begins with Jericho's prison-break and a car chase, ending with you getting crushed by a giant semi.  This gifts you with increasing power to shift into other vehicles, and as lame as a story mechanic as this may sound, it actually works.  Spoilers below so be careful.  Gradually this shifting starts affecting your mind and you start having more and more strange episodes.  And then ...

Well - you're actually in a coma, and the missions end up helping you figure out the motivation of Jericho's plot so that when you finally awake, you are able to have a final non-shifting car chase to take him out.

I had figured out the coma thing early enough that I thought it was just a stupid vehicle for cost savings of keeping you in the vehicle, but tying it into piecing together Jericho's plot was a bit of brilliance.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

 Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, simply put - is a fantastic game and it looks beautiful on XBone.

The gameplay elements are very similar to Assassin's Creed or Batman Arkham in the open world.- but perhaps over simplified, there were few hiding places so orcs didn't pursue relentlessly and oftentimes gave up after you were out of sight.

Where this game turns into 110% win is with what they termed the "Nemesis System".  Orc captains are given additional skill effects and resistances, and are much more difficult to kill as they are oftentimes escorted or immune to abilities or quick to heal.  If any orc in Sauron's army kills you, even a grunt - they are promoted and given more of these skill effects, creating a virtually unique set of adversaries per game.

Additionally, there is a great deal of fight memory - as you fight a captain, he will remember and taunt you ".. you gonna run away again?"  In my game, I had one poor guy I threw into a fire - I thought I had killed him, but apparently he survived and repeatedly would come back more and more damaged until he only had a sack on his head as 'Soandso the disfigured'.

The game is great, but it is pretty one dimensional and extremely repetitive - you must like fighting orcs.  There is a story backdrop - and beautiful cut-scenes, but nothing more compelling than revenge.  Like Assassin's Creed, I bet the next game using the Nemesis system will be amazing.

Where the game went wrong, IMHO - is when we started being able to dominate these orc captains.  The process was oftentimes even easier than killing your foe, and since there are no limits to how many you can control - eventually I dominated myself out of all my adversaries.  Having this particular gameplay mechanic forced the player to be "super powered" by some other entity, and corrupted a potentially epic long-running story into an episode to be resolved.