I'll start with what I liked everything that is good about Shadow of War like the Nemesis System and the amazing kill animations is still there all though one thing that bugged me about the latter is the ablility to blow up an orc's head after completing a stun combo is gone which is kind of disappointing for me since that animation is one of the most satisfying death animations in gaming and it felt odd that it was removed since I never got tired of it, plus depending on where you went in the upgrade tree, it could be a late game a ability, other than that the animations are as great as ever and still provides great feedback whenever you finish off any orc whether it'd be in combat or stealth.
Stealth and combat are both basic but work solid enough as "pillars" that they get the job done, both are too basic for my liking but with the improved Nemesis System, weakness exploiting with the orcs is still as satisfying as ever and speaking of that.
The Nemesis System is still well done and provides just as much entertainment as it did in the original game now much more expanded upon like how orcs are able to betray you, have blood brothers, resist your mind control attempts, have them save you from time to when nearly dead, or defy death and so on. I do love the additions to the Nemesis System and it feels more fleshed out and dynamic than it did in Mordor since you never know when an orc will betray you, a blood blood brother will pop up or they cheat death. It makes the whole system give a layer of unpredictablity not seen in Mordor especially in the 2nd half of the game where outside of the branding ability, you have seen everything the system has to offer.
Another addition I enjoy to varying degrees is the sieges. I like how it gives the regions something to work towards instead of doing the whole branding thing in Mordor and then the game wraps up. The battles do a good job at capturing the large scale fights you'd find in the Lord of the Rings moves and it's a solid enough way to include those kinds of fights since Talion isn't fighting with the warriors of Gondor.
I also like the addition of the double jump while the parkour system with the whole "press x to climb everything" is as flawed as ever, I do like that the double jump gives me slightly more control over how Talion moves and it feels slightly less automated. For example, if I jump high off a ledge, I could potentially grab on to a nearby hand hold or those building roof connectors before I land to the ground, which can be handy when in stealth when I want to jump but don't want to land on to the ground and potentially get seen by a nearby orc. Plus I just like having some degree of control in a game as heavily automated as this one.
Elven speed is also something I like since I do enjoy it when games attempt super speed but at the same time, you could also argue that it makes escaping from orcs even easier. Considering how much bigger the open worlds are to Mordor, I am glad it's here at all. You can also climb a lot faster compared to Mordor and considering how much larger structures are, I am also glad it's there.
Now, on to my compliants, and while I do enjoy the game and I don't dislike it, I do feel like I have a number of complaints with it that actively hinder my enjoyment of it.
First, the automated parkour system where x is dodgerolling, sprint, climb and jump is still as problematic as ever before. I still had issues with telling Talion doing exactly what I wanted when situations got tense, when I would get close to a wall and wanted Talion to climb up, he would either dodge roll endlessly or do it twice and then climb up. I wanted to climb up a wall while orcs were attacking me and I would vault over them instead. It was an issue in Mordor and it's still a problem here too and Monolith Productions has done very little to iron it out. If this infuriated you when playing the first game, then War will do little to change your mind. Considering how much longer and bigger War is to Mordor, this issue certainly started to annoy me to insane degrees at times. I never like major game mechanics that feel unreliable and the Middle Earth games tend to test my patience for this stuff to crazy degrees.
Second, is the game structure since I have mentioned Shadow of War has a bigger is better approach, this also means the number of story missions have doubled too while I didn't outright dislike them in the last game since I argue they do an okay job at breaking up the pace and there weren't an overwhelming amount of them, in War there is even more of them. This leads me to the problem I have, in Act 1, the game is nothing but your typical linear story missions where the Nemesis System doesn't even matter. The game touts a bigger and more expanded Nemesis System and is the thing that defined the series yet, for at least 2-3 hours of the game, it doesn't matter. When you get to Act 2, the Nemesis System finally plays a part but by that point there have been so many story missions that now recruiting orcs can feel like a weird change of pace and can arguably feel like padding. Since now that the story missions are more numerous, this means you can do nothing but story missions for hours and then randomly the game is like, "no find some orcs for your army now". Shadow of War really has a rather disconnected feel in general. You got the dynamic Nemesis System, you got the more scripted story missions, you also have a bigger and more expanded plot which mostly feels episodic at best. As a result, it starts to make me question what if you had a game with just the Nemesis System and no story missions. The game could arguably feel less disconnected and would allow for the systems Monolith has greated to stand out even more. The story missions in War aren't even very good to begin with. So many of the questlines have similar mission types and tropes happening over and over.
For example, Elterial's missions involve a Nazgul fight, the Gondor missions involve resucing Gondorian soldiers, Bruz's missions involve rescusing kidnapped orc captains, Carnan's missions involve fighting a necromancer orc or giant monsters. The story missions are so one note and involve the same ideas being reused. This might've been a problem with Mordor, but with that game the story missions were few and far between to really matter, where with War there are so much more of them and the lack of inventive ideas in them stick out a lot more. This will now lead to the next issue I have.
With the story missions being as bad as they are, what's worse is that some of the aspects that bothered some people in Mordor bother me now and that is that there are unskippable character monologues in story missions. This never bothered me in Mordor since the monologues were only reserved for the open world and when the Nemesis System was in play, now with story missions being more plentiful, this means you have to hear unskippable monologues in missions where you have traditional fail states. So if you die, you have to hear them all again, which is one major reason why I didn't up the difficulty this time around since I didn't want to die and hear constant unskippable monologues. This also means when I hear the monologues outside of story missions, I want the orcs to shut the hell up which is a shame since they were the thing that made the Nemesis System stand out to begin with. It would've been nice if during some of the monologues, the player is given a prompt to throw a dagger at their face interrupting them which could've helped break up the pace from the endless boasting the enemies do.
Another big issue with story missions is that the boss fights are terrible. While I get it, free flow combat has never worked well with one on one encounters which is something the Batman Arkham series has struggled with, however Middle Earth Shadow of War has done very little to rectify this and there is more boss fights in SoW than there are in Batman Arkham which makes the situation worse. The boss fights mainly involve taking out the fodder enemies until the boss is alone, working with the finicky dodge command since there is no dedicated button to do it and struggling with the camera where it will be position in a way where Talion is facing them and the boss will be too out of camera to see the prompts to reliably dodge. Plus, the Nazgul and Necromancer fights revolve around the same objectives, the former is just killing orcs or other enemies and then fighting him, or the latter involves undead totems, it gets one note super fast.
An issue with the Nemesis System I have is the "shaming system" and this is connected to the story missions issue I have. Early in Act 2, you will be too low levelled to recruit orcs into your army, and many them of them you have to make them your level to recruit, however story missions will have your level be considerably higher upon completetion and reward you with a lot of XP, so the fact that story missions are numerous and heavily reward the player only add insult to injury to how weak they are. You need to do them just effciently make the certain aspects of the Nemesis System less tedious.
Now that I have discussed the structure, I want to talk about another aspect of the game I am not big on and that is the story. I am not a diehard Tolkien fan and I don't care for "lore violations" that these games make since I am familar with the LOTR movies and they are movies I am just now learning to appreciate. So you won't see me complaining about Shelob being an attractive woman or Isildur being a ring wraith. However with that said, I consdier the game's story to be wasted potential more than anything.
Act 1 has some pretty solid writing and is already a step up from Mordor with Talion and Celebrimbor getting into disagreements and having their own viewpoints on how to handle situations, the former is an idealist while the latter is a realist. The voice acting and direction carried Mordor's story and it's nice that the actors have geniunely decent material to work with...at first. Act 1 does a good job at establishing that the situation is hopeless and it's only a matter of time that Minas Ithil will fall, some of the writing with Idril and Kastamir is okay too.
Then Act 2 happens and the plot derails hard, while the game is technically about building an army sure, the story quests you partake is basically a bunch of episodic stories that don't contribute much to the overarching plot of building an army. The only questlines that matter are Eltariel and Bruz and the latter is debatable since he is basically just a Shadow Wars tutorial at best. Gondor subplot gets anticlimatically resolved and the true ending is through DLC along with the fate of Eltariel, Carnan subplot doesn't do amount to much outside of some enviromentalism themes.
With Act 2 being a bunch episodic stories, then Act 3 is where the main plot of stopping Sauron comes back and it comes back to feeling like the anime filler story that all interquels have and it ultimatly has Celebrimbor and Sauron combining with the former never getting mentioned again later and Talion having somewhat of a "read the manga" style ending where you need to watch the LOTR movies to learn how the epilogue plays out the way it did.
The story on paper could've been better on paper but everything is too lose and lacks focus for it to be impactful.
Now the final thing I want to talk about and that is the Shadow Wars, when I first played the game, I turned off the game right away since I heard the whole mode was basically pay to win, and years later it got "nerfed" and became beatable without microtransactions. Honestly, at first when I did the Shadow Wars, I wanted to give up and look the true ending up on Youtube, at the same time, I wanted to give it a chance since it got "fixed".
The biggest issue right away with the Shadow Wars is that it is delibrately designed to have the player lose right away since your orcs are way too low levelled to successfully defend the fortresses, and you won't have enough fund to raise your defense points higher. I managed to get past the early stages of the Shadow Wars by recruiting the high level orcs during the sieges to fight for me but then it eventually reached a point where I would have to "shame" them to have makeshift orcs to fight on my side.
On Stage 3, it was basically a game of, "lose the fortress, have higher level orcs spawn in the open world, recruit them and then take back the fortress". If the game had to make me take back a fortress, and then do another defense afterwards, I would've quit the Shadow Wars and looked up the ending on Youtube but the fact that you taking back the fortress means you complete the defense for that region played a big part in me even able to beat the Shadow Wars at all.
Overall, while I like Middle Earth Shadow of War and I like some of the aspects of it's, "bigger is better" approach like the expanded upon Nemesis System, there is too many issues I have with the game to make me prefer it over Shadow of Mordor. The structure of the game, the lack of mechanical improvements, the lack of geniune focus with the story and how the Shadow Wars is designed to have the player fail and spend a lengthy amount of time getting an ending that lasts less than 5 minutes makes it a game while worth checking out just isn't going to win over people who never liked Shadow of Mordor. It's more of that game for better and for worse.
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