I expected an epic fantasy war-game. I knew the combat was gonna be Batman Arkham inspired, and hell, when it works it works, but so many fights, especially early on before you unlock all the cool moves and upgrades, are so repetitive, shallow and overall meaningless. You think you're making progress at first, and i guess you are in the sense that boxes in the questlog and map screen are getting ticked, but orcs respawn almost instantly ad infinitum. You clear so much of them out of specific locations, you "free slaves" over and over again, but the game just generates replacements for both slaves and orcs that are indiscernible from the ones you just cleared. In fact, this is so bad that you can spend an infinite amount of hours just bouncing around 1 tiny corner of the map doing the same things over and over again and the map state even in that one corner will never change. What unsatisfying and frustrating design. To make it worse the same is the case with the nemesis system. You can spend hours hunting down and slaying all the orc leaders, only to find that they all restock as if nothing happened. Even long-term recurring rivalries just feel so formulaic. It was kinda epic the first time an orc i thought i killed came back for revenge. But after that it was just annoying. What looked like novelty turned into more tedium and repetition.
The game is filled with orcs absolutely everywhere, so whether you’re doing side quests or main quests, you have to run through open areas with hordes of these things and killing them is pointless. Every quest requires you to kill countless orcs, so why would you stop to kill countless more along the way. Its like one long fight sequence that never ends. This game should be called Middle Earth Shadow of Sisyphus.
The upside is that the core systems this game steals from Batman Arkham are good enough, that they make for some cool and satisfying moments both in combat and stealth. The issue is that navigation is janky due to the controls for all the different platforming movements being so similar, that the game often can’t tell which movement you’re trying to execute or which platform you are trying to jump or grab on to, thus leading to a lot of frustrations where inputs end up doing things you didn’t intend. Fights against monsters are so gimmicky that they lack satisfaction and cool-factor. Only standard orc combat when you manage to pull off an epic combo or a really cool execute really hit the satisfying highs you want from an action game, but these are often diluted by repetitive combat slog, that again is made tedious by its ultimate futility.
The story is only good in the main quest and even then, only at times. Often it feels very filler-like and uninteresting, but there are specific moments, usually when Talion faces off against one of Saurons highest ranking commanders, whose design is so far above everyone elses in terms of detail, presence and overall impression that they feel almost distracting. Like yeah these 2-3 character genuinely look amazing and killing them feels cinematic, epic and incredibly satisfying. But that just made everything else in the game feel even more generic and dull in contrast. Chasing SOME of the side objectives did end up being fun, due to the addictiveness of the core gameplay mechanics, but there is a fine line between satisfying and tedious in this game, that it very often fails to ride. Major side-quests that tie into the main quest like the Dwarf Hunter and the Gollum ones also lacked substance and fun factor, and ended up just padding the gametime for a game that already is quantity over quality.
Overall its competent enough in its presentation and execution that I can't in good faith give it a proper low rating, but its so often dull, derivative and uninspired that I can't give it a proper good rating either. It sits somewhere in the mediocrity range. 6.5/10 Competent, but dull and ultimately disappointing for such a reputable game.
