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.
