Middle Earth: Shadow of War (2017) by Monolith Productions

Officially licensed games are typically not all that impressive due to publishers making a profit on the name alone if not the substance of the game. Shadow of Mordor was a surprisingly good game in that regard. It was released an underdog and turned out to incorporate some interesting new ideas in its nemesis system, some nice tidbits from Tolkien's legendarium to find, and some nice sound design. It provided me 40ish hours of decent entertainment until I grew bored of the grind towards the end. I still haven't finished the game. There just wasn't enough meat on that bone to keep me playing past the 40 hour mark.

When I first saw it previewed, Shadow of War really interested me in terms of its overarching metagame. But sadly there really isn't much new here despite the efforts at evolving the original game. There's a new system in which you're fighting a literal war between orc armies, but it's so bogged down by an abysmal UI and a grindfest of new orcs constantly flowing into areas that it really doesn't do anything to add fulfilling gameplay on top of the foundations set by the first game. There's a neat system of storming enemy forts but there's so much dry, boring legwork to do ahead of this that it feels like a grind almost immediately despite a lot of it being new to this game. You're supposed to be able to manage your own loyal orcs into attacking others and doing certain more subtle treacherous acts, but it's so difficult to keep track of what your orcs and your enemies traits are that the whole thing is just an obtuse clusterfuck and I ended up just saying screw it and killing the enemy orcs myself, which became tedious after a dozen or so hours. This is in large part due to the bad UI, but also because the core gameplay mechanics here just aren't all that much fun after you've done them 20 or 30 times -- Especially to those of us who've done this stuff in the first game. And this is a game that expects you to repeat them many, many more times than that.

There are some new areas this time around to differentiate the game from the same brown, crappy areas that permeated the first game outside of Nurnen. Minas Ithil, initially, was amazing! It was so cool seeing a city that I'd read about in Tolkiens works come to life. Sadly, there just isn't much substance to the areas outside of the initial feeling of, "hey, this is different!" One of my favorite things to do in open world games such as the Assassin's Creed series or Witcher 3 is to wander the open world, immersing myself in its environments, its denizens, and their daily lives while I collect all of the things listed on the map. The collectibles in this game don't do very much for you at all, and the world itself is unfortunately pretty bare, without much depth past orcs taking dumps in bushes or walking around aimlessly from point A to point B. Sure, there's a human, Gondorian city in the beginning. But beyond the visuals being different, ie. marble buildings and streets instead of muddy ground and wood huts, there isn't anything actually setting it apart from the Mordor areas of the first game. There don't seem to be any civilians, anywhere (where'd they all go? Minas Tirith?), and the soldiers that are present are either fighting, standing around, or behind the gate lying there injured. And that's just a very small portion of the map -- 80% of it is just a ton of orcs running around doing the same orc things they were doing in the first game. It doesn't feel like a real, lived-in space; it feels like a gamey arena in which you're supposed to fight orcs. This game suffers from what old open world games used to suffer from back when they all copying the GTA3 -- It's got a vast, wide open space peppered with absolutely nothing interesting aside from lots of bad guys to fight and some collectibles that, while they give you some interesting tidbits of information, do very little to make you want to chase them down otherwise.

A lot of this is hurt by the fact that the combat and stealth are almost wholly unchanged from the first game. If you loved the gameplay of Shadow of Mordor, you'll like this one. I was always lukewarm on the combat and stealth of the first game and was disappointed not to see it evolved upon in this game.

The story is laughably bad in most cases and forgettable in others. Most of the characters are cliche and there are some plot holes present that make me think any time spent in the writing room here was likely spent trying to finagle Tolkien's legendarium into justifying some of the odd writing moves here. For example, why did Shelob even want the "new ring" (ridiculous in its own right but whatever)? She had it for like a quarter of the game and didn't do a single thing with it but sit in her cave, presumably staring at the wall? Another character has been fighting orcs his entire life and knows the treachery they're capable of, yet still tries to make a deal with them that you can see going wrong from a hundred miles away. The entire thing is ridiculous and the prerendered cutscenes suck you right out of the moment anyway.

They've added some loot and some RPG elements to this one, which was very interesting to me in previews, but they're incredibly basic and don't even really warrant mentioning. The equipment is all very generic looking and the stats make the barest modicum of a difference. There are class tiers of equipment now, and the only stuff different enough to notice is the top tier stuff, but obtaining a full set of legendary gear requires so much grinding that it isn't even worth it. Perhaps if the top tier stuff was interesting in some way it might warrant the grinding in the way that a game like Diablo, Destiny, or Borderlands does, but this stuff doesn't. And all of the lower and middle tiers are not notably different. Sure, the middle tier stuff has some unique perks, but none of them make any real impact on the gameplay.

The loot system seems only to have served to make the balance of this game skew heavily towards grindiness. You've got to accomplish the same tedious stuff over and over but the loot perks and abilities give you very disappointing rewards for doing so. And what you're doing to gain experience and loot is not only uninteresting, but requires you to repeat the same activities so frequently. You can spend 4 hours grinding experience by taking out or recruiting enemy orcs, but they'll be replaced again by fresh orcs once time passes and you'll have to spend another 4 hours doing the same stuff over again with the new guys that have just come in, all while these activities and the setting get old and tiresome, while rewarding you with loot that you never see making an actual difference in gameplay. It loses its fun factor very quickly and this continues ad nauseam throughout the entire game.

It's really the pacing that's a problem here. Some of this stuff is fun initially, but not for the amount of repetitions that you're required to do to progress into conquering an area. Something else aside from this core gameplay loop of kill/recruit, then take fortresses needs to be present to drive you forward -- Whether it's an enticing plot, interesting characters with good dialogue, loot or new abilities that greatly increases your player character's power, a well-crafted game world you can lose yourself in, SOMETHING! And there's nothing here that does that. It's the same repetitive, dry task of killing/recruiting/ambushing orcs that leads to chasing loot that has no impact, upgrading your abilities not far past what they were in the first game, or progressing an unengaging story.

I didn't even notice the much-maligned microtransactions but I can't help wondering if they ruined the balance, because this is just not a fun game to play after a few hours. If you loved Shadow of Mordor, then sure, give this a shot. But after putting 40 hours into the first game I found that I grew tired of this one way before that.

⭐⭐

Playtime: 22 hours