If you’re into the Lord of the Rings lore. This might be the game for you. This time we’re here to explore the land of Middle Earth: Shadow of War, a continuation of the Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. This third-person action RPG invites players to step back into the boots of Talion, a Gondorian ranger bound to the wraith Celebrimbor, as they forge a new Power to challenge the Darklord’s dominion. Packed with hack-and-slash combat against orcs, conquering regions, and uncovering middle earth’s lore overall. Developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive in 2017 on PC and 8th gen consoles, Shadow of War expands its predecessor’s mechanics in a way that will surprise you. So, are you ready to dominate Middle Earth? Let’s dive into it!

Side Activities

First up for Shadow of War is their side activities. However, you might be surprised that the game does things a little differently when it comes to side activities. You have what the game calls the Nemesis System. You’ll be spending most of your time here because in the system you’ll be indulging in activities such as eliminating Orc captains, recruiting them, commanding them to fight against other Orc captains, and basically do anything Orc related. Do note that you can get some pretty sweet gear from killing Orc captains though. So you’ll have to make a choice whether to recruit them or end them. You’ll also have a variety of actual side quests that are under the Nemesis system, which mostly involves you engaging with the leader of the outpost by drawing them out. It doesn’t stop there though, you also have Orc Captain fight pits and Tribal showdowns between you and Orc Captains.

Orc Captains | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

You also have a separate set of side quests, putting you in the shoes of Celebrimbor, reliving his past battles. These “shadows of the past” side quests gives you multiple challenges with one main objective to follow. You do all this while your trusty friend tells you his tragic past, just don’t expect any cutscenes during these side quests, because it has more of a challenge type of activity.

Next up, are Fortress sieges and defenses. Although this activity is needed to complete the main story line at first, you can freely indulge yourself in defending your fortress or the be at the other end, the attacking end, after you finish the main storyline. It’s exactly what it sounds like, the game puts your Orc army to the test by putting it up against an opposing Orc army. You’ll have to pick the captains you want as your main army, and the extra troops you want supporting your trusty captains.

Fortress Siege | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Lastly, you have the game’s collectibles. You have a few types of collectibles in this game. You can first spot the collectible locations by purifying the Haedir Towers. After that it’s just a matter of collecting them. Now the biggest question is are they worth it? The answer is, they could be. Most of the collectible types, like the artifacts and memories, reward you with a skill point. On the other hand, collecting Ithildin fragments does reward you with unique gear after you solve the puzzle with them.

Overall, shadow of war definitely gives you just enough side activities than one might expect.

Area of Freedom

When you step into the open world of Shadow of War, you’re locked in 1 region, Minas Ithil, but you’ll have 5 major regions in total to roam and explore as the story unfolds. That is without the extra 1 region from the DLC. The world does feel segmented, as you’ll probably spend a decent equal amount of time in each of them attempting to conquer the region and hopping to other regions every now and then.

Cirith Ungol | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

On the topic of hopping to other regions, when you’re bored of trying to conquer the region you’re in, you can only jump to another region by fast traveling there, putting you through a loading screen. So, there’s no end of the map approach to going between regions, even when the 2 regions are side by side, which adds to the feeling of the world being even less connected. On top of that, 1 region like Minas Ithil is actually just a small area within a bigger region with the side note that you can’t access the other areas in the bigger region.

However, when it comes to the regions themselves, you’ve got a seamless open world ahead of you. One that is just big enough to explore. The only limitation here is that the some regions seem to have more than a noticeable amount of invisible walls when it comes to hills and cliffs, both at the edge of the region and within the region itself, heavily decreasing the sense of openness in the region.

To sum up, it is clear that the area of freedom in Shadow of War is very limited, hindering the sense of openness in the world.

Liveliness

Speaking of regions, when it comes to the liveliness of each of them, they do somewhat of a good job. Each region has a different atmosphere from the next, with distinct colors and surroundings to differentiate one from another. Each region also has just enough detail to match the landscape like the nature filled jungles in 1 of the regions called Nurnen. One region might give you a lush green jungle landscape, the next? dark eerie wasteland that reeks of death. The soundtrack and ambient sounds however, are nothing special, at least nothing that makes you notice a big difference.

Minas Ithil | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

But what about the NPCs filling up each of these regions? Well, you only have 1 region that is filled friendly NPCs and a lot of them at that. There’ll be troops training on one side of the region, and then there’ll be nobles having a chat with each other on another side, but this quickly changes later on in the story. However, even then these NPCs are more like accessories. They don’t react to you whatsoever, unless you run through them. So although you can see what it seems like an endless amount of NPCs, all of them having a pretty static routine too, they don’t seem believable at all. Also don’t expect any exclamation marks in this game from NPCs because there aren’t any. You do also have fortresses that you conquer throughout your playtime, but these areas only have Orcs that you’ve recruited.

Outside of that, you can expect that there aren’t any NPCs. Only enemies await. You’ve also got the minimum when it comes to wildlife. So the only creatures roaming the wild are ones that are going to make your life miserable, in other words, they will attack you. These are mostly tiger like creatures called Caragors, and also the very occasional Graug in the more deeper parts of the world. But keep an eye out cause those guys are a bit more of a challenge to take out.

Overall, the game only offers a hint of liveliness, and that… is just simply far from enough.

Customizations

On to customizations, first on the not so long list is gear. You can obtain different kinds gear through Orc captain drops, ranging from common to legendary rarity. You might’ve guessed it already but you have 3 types of weapons and 3 types of armor to equip in the game. Just like any RPG out there, each gear has their own stats and unique boosts that come with it. You do have to complete a challenge to either unlock the boost or upgrade the gear, depending on the rarity. Plus, you’ve got the set bonus boosts for the legendary gear. So, that legendary rarity piece of gear is definitely worth collecting. On top of the gear, you can equip gems that give even more extra boosts to each piece of gear you have. Each gem is also upgradeable so you can keep leveling up you stats until you have the best gems.

Gear Customization | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

You can also pick from a very limited choice of skins to change your character’s appearance, but honestly these skins are practically just like switching characters altogether. So it lacks a huge factor of customizability. However, the option is there if you want to play as another race or sex.

And that’s about it for the customization, or so I’d like to say. Although the main character skill system in Shadow of War won’t be included, the subskills for each skill still counts as a customization option. You will be able to unlock all of the skills and subskills in the skill system, but you still have to make the choice on which subskill you want to have in your subskill arsenal for each skill. So, you still have that little touch of personalization.

To close it off, the customization options Shadow of War has is definitely more than it seems on the surface, giving it a pass.

Engagement

Moving on, does Shadow of War keep you engaged at all? The answer to that is Kind of... At first you’ll be addicted to slaughtering orcs, because the combat mechanics are just satisfying, but within time you’ll realize that you can do so much more… like gathering intel about Orc captains by interrogating low rank orcs, hunting them down, and making a choice of whether to kill, shame them to decrease their level, or recruit them. You can even assign one as your bodyguard, making you crave for the perfect Orc bodyguard. However, this all changes late game. The game becomes a bit of a grind fest. Quick hint, it involves the fortress sieges and defenses we mentioned before. While it is fun to build your Orc army and play around with the upgrades and abilities you can give to your recruited Orc captains, these fortress related activities can become repetitive to most as you’ll have to do them over and over again. On top of that, it can be considered as a means to extend playtime rather than to add value to the gameplay.

Nemesis System | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

It keeps you going too, because you’ll want to have an entire army of Orc captains at your disposal, both to back you up in future battles against Orc captains and your future army conflicts. Speaking of the army, once you recruit Orcs you get to do anything with them, ranging from commanding them to spy on the warchiefs or warlords to killing other captains. You can even unlock new abilities for them and give them caragor mounts, which I’ll admit is pretty satisfying to play with.

The point is, end game engagement is something the game had going well at the start but slightly fell off towards the end.

Uniqueness

Since the start of this review, you can probably already guess that what makes this game unique is its one of a kind Nemesis System, which in fact Warner brothers did patent until 2036, offering mechanics that other games simply cannot replicate yet. The game creates new and unique scenarios each time you encounter an Orc captain. This means each Orc captain has their unique traits, whether it’s physical or stats wise. It doesn’t end there either, you’ll find out that each Orc captain has their own unique voices and behaviours too when you cross swords with them.

Resurrected Orc Captain | Middle Earth: Shadow of War

They’ll even remember you and hold a grudge against you if they manage to survive the battle against you. This is what sets the Nemesis system apart from other open world RPG games, well except for its predecessor: Shadow of mordor. You’ll always have unique encounters with Orc captains every single time. This means each playthrough of the game will have different unscripted stories that plays out differently when it comes to Orc captains.

All in all, it’s clear that the Nemesis system offers unique features that you won’t find in any other game.

Verdict

To end our journey in Middle Earth, Shadow of War brings you a great extension into the Lord of the Rings universe, while bringing you open world mechanics on top of it. You’ll be busy indulging in some of the addicting side activities and experimenting with its adequate amount of customization options. Let’s also not forget that the game rewards you with its own extensive Nemesis system, providing you with unique scenarios and engagement that almost stretches until the end. However, the game does have a few aspects where it completely falls flat as well, whether it is little freedom within the world, or a world that’s only full of enemies. At the end of the day, you’ll have to put a little bit more thought to choosing this one as your next open world game, receiving a C Tier from us.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

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