Middle-earth: Shadow of War

The game begins quite breathtaking, as it introduces impressive features like the nemesis system, and the army menu where you can build your army (fairly intricately too), but soon after you learn of these things, the game becomes repetitive and boring and involves WAY too much pointless dialogue by orc captains. It just becomes your average open world 3rd person action game with interesting missions few and far between. Best part of the game though: balrog fight.

Abandoned after a little over twenty hours. The gameplay is your average open-world action RPG that has you move from one point of interest to another and complete missions. Building your orc army is fun at first, but gets quite repetitive over time especially when you are asked to grind for hours. Not to mention that every time you bump into a captain you have to listen to them babble about themselves, which is not exactly fun when you run into 5 or 6 orcs at once.

I am not a big Lord of the Rings fan, but the story was quite easy to follow despite being a little fragmentary and full of hard-to-remember names.

Shadow of War, just like its predecessor, is scarcely-reverent Tolkien fanfiction stretched over highly repetitive missions and open-world tasks that often bear no real sense of dynamics. So why in Eä have I been playing it for three hours straight?

I can't conceive of any warranted criticism of the game's adherence to Tolkien's legendarium. I could not care less that Talion is apparently the only human in all of Middle-earth's history to not die when he dies—which is precisely the gift that Eru the One (or Ilúvatar, if you're nasty) gave to the race of [humans]. Nor do I really care that a giant fucking spider suddenly has a sexy human form. It's a silly actiony hack-and-slashy video game about killing as many orcs as possible, but you're not Aragorn.

The first game was just as addicting to me, but of War took the same system and made it better. For one, your domination of an orc isn't necessarily set in stone. I was actually pretty thrilled the first time someone I recruited showed up and said, 'No, you know what? Actually fuck you, man-swine, I'm not your servant after all.' For two, you have more control over what your dominated orcs do and where they go. You can manually level them up (giving more to do with the game's money system), you can throw them into fight pits, you can transfer them from region to region, you can recruit one as a bodyguard, and so forth.

So what was barely addicting in the first game is doubly so in this one. Good thing it's 2020 and I have shit-else to do with my life. Might as well slash my way through a not-horribly-written but video-game-level hacky storyline while thoroughly murdering thousands of orcs.

Before the update this game was pretty much the definition of the gaming industries greed and wanting to nickel and dime gamers, but with the update it is just an average LOTR games, the story does a lot to change the LOTR lore, and pretty much is just an alternate reality. The missions are pretty repetitive and don't stand out and often have you doing the same things over and over, and the only interesting thing are the orc missions and using them to recruit your army and build a team to attack and control the fortresses. It was cool they had Sauron and the Ringwraiths in this, even if the fights with them were underwhelming. But at the same time I found this game too streamlined, I didn't enjoy the 5 areas in this as much as the 2 in Mordor, and I really had little difficulty fighting the captains and had no nemesis in this game. I even was able to take over fortresses with underleveled teams. Plus before the update the endgame to this was a massive slog and you had to defend 20 fortresses of overpowered enemies and if you lost you had to retake the fortress, and all that for a 2 minute cutscene with a vague ending. Shadow of War is an alright game and worth playing if you already played Mordor, but I found Mordor far more interesting, with a better World and it had more interesting quests. The story for this game is alright but the lore is so different than the actual canon that I really don't care too much for the characters in this or the World. Plus the 5 areas in this were smaller in size than the 2 bigger areas in the first game and weren't as fun to explore.

Its very very similar to Shadow of Mordor, which was to me one of the most disappointing games of 2014. This one sells the same formula except with more collectathon bs, more open world, more loot, a few new refined combat mechanics. At its core its still arkham-like combat against enemies that are too dumb and predictable. I wont deny that its well animated, but it feels like the game practically plays itself, even more because you have much more backing of friendly allies in this game.

All of the loot and exploration boil down to damage improvements for your weapons and better armor. Its very boring, and at times it feels like an offline MMO because of the way it is designed.

The story is boring as hell, i dont know how monolith managed to suck out all of the fun of such a vibrant universe that is the Middle Earth. Not too mention how much they change so much of the Lord of the Rings lore, and the majority of times for the worst.

I managed to beat shadow of mordor by sheer will, but i cant continue this one without letting go of my sanity.