Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™

I like the game. Better than the first part. It's a shame that the developers decided not to add achievements for the DRM-Free version. I'm still glad I bought the game here and not on other sites. If you want to play an improved Assassin's Creed, then this game is perfect.

Is it worth buying at full price? NO! Is it worth buyong on sale? If you liked the last game, sure give it a shot! First off the good stuff is all still there: Control enemy captains and send them against each other, betray overlords, etc. You get powers Everything looks nice and sounds nice. The captains are still a-holes.... though with more variety this time! Ever wanted an orc bard from D&D to be your ass kicking companion? You can do it in this game! This one has a lot of little changes to the mechanics; not really improvements, so much as seemingly random try-this spagetti sort of thing to see if it sticks. Some things you'd expect are straight up removed. For example, in the previous game you could mount a caragor by skillfully timing a dodge/throw and jumping on it's back while it's on the ground. That's gone... no reason given, it's just straight up gone. There's a bunch of abilities this time too, only now we have sub-perks for them and you can only have one active at a time. No worries about trying them out though, because you can switch them for free anytime after you buy them. The problem is that many of these perks were things we _already had_ in the previous game and you'd expect to have at the start of a sequel! Now you have to re-earn most abilities, such as mind controlling an enemy in the middle of combat, etc. Speaking of mind control, this game WILL NOT let you use the ability on normal enemies at a speed of less then 3 full seconds. This makes no sense and is contrasted by being able to take a perk that lets you mind control broken captains, beasts, etc in half a second! It is infuriating! A lot of the mechanics seem to be purposefully made to make the game harder, for no reason. It's like someone was trying to go for the whole hard-but-fair thing and forgot the entire point of the game was fun as most of the mechanical changes are irritating! NPC losing combat to npc gains them nothing; npc losing to player gains them 10 levels!

This game has a lot to offer you, IF you are willing to patiently grind tyhrough the missions and story. But hands down the BEST feature this game has on it, is the Nemesis System! Its sad that more games dont implement more of something along the lines of this Nemesis system because it does add a very rich undertone to the story that is basically all up to the player to fill in relationships, and encounters with enemies and allies. its truly awe inspiring!!!

Playing through this game, it feels like every few seconds you are losing control of your character. Whether it be from the intros of orc captains you don't care about shouting in your face for upwards of 20 seconds or the battles with these captains stripping away all of your ability to fight them, I felt like the game was telling me to stop playing it at every turn. As some points you'll come across 3 or more enemy captains, all introducing themself to each other at the start of a mission, then when you get in combat with them they'll do it again, completely wasting the player's time and destroying the flow of gameplay. There are also other missions you'll do that are copies of one another, just in different regions that all will have multiple cutscenes that can't be skipped. Or there is also the story cinematics that *can* be skipped followed by others that can not. None of it makes sense. I do not care about the cinematics, I don't want to watch them, there was no reason to disallow skipping. For combat, it took what Shadow of Mordor did well and destroyed it. The combat itself is... fine but now (and even at release) pretty trite with all the Arkham clones. The real problems are that captains will have specific abilities that disallow parts of your moveset, and sometimes they'll completely take away your specific counter for them. For instance, there is a type of enemy that you can not damage from the front, so you have to vault over them and attack them from behind, but some captains will just not let you, or there's the captains you can not attack without stunning first, that will eventually become immune to stuns. There was an idea here to flesh out Shadow of Mordor and make it grander in every way, and unfortunately that also included the jank and poor design.

Always loved lord of the rings and this one pays tribute to it