Playing A Game Middle-earth: Shadow of War PC

Middle-earth: Shadow of War is awesome for a good, long while -- after you unlock the domination ability, and before the endgame Shadow Wars combat becomes tiresome.

Shadow of War really does feel like the fulfillment of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor's orc-conquering promise, particularly as teased in the Bright Lord DLC. Finally, you can build an army of brainwashed orcs; sabotage an enemy fortress's defenders; storm the gates, take the throne and change its color on the map which surely pisses Sauron off quite a bit.

And you get to do so in more, more-diverse map areas, a very welcome improvement over the last game's limited environments. Shadow of War even does a pretty great job of guiding Talion into and through those maps with its multi-threaded, free-form quest lines. (Although the moments when one quest thread is blocked by another can be a little awkward and confusing.)

The embellished inventory system feels kinda unnecessary, with so many equipment slots and so many item types and so many stat effects, and ultimately none of it matters so much as just choosing the highest-level gear. At least there's an upgrade option, so if your equipment is old and falling behind, you can bring its stats up to your current level.

The captains with multiple invulnerabilities problem seems like it's even worse this time, though. Maybe because of how crowded and chaotic battles can get; if there's one thing worse than a shield-wielding captain who blocks normal attacks, can't be countered, is immune to vault reversals, and is immune to freezing -- it's when that captain is densely covered by other orcs, and the game's targeting system misdirects your strikes on them to annoyingly bounce off of the super-captain instead.

Encounters like that can really take the fun out of combat, and coupled with how monotonous the wave-based siege defense mode gets, the Shadow Wars epilogue just doesn't feel worthwhile.

That aside, though, Shadow of War's proof of the concept set up by Shadow of Mordor is pretty thoroughly satisfying.

Rating: Awesome