I'm still waiting to pick it up, mostly because my SNES Classic is everything I've ever wanted. But I loved Shadow of Mordor, and what I've seen looks really cool. So, as much as you can look past the endless controversies that have kind of taken over the discussion - how have you been liking it?

It's good, it plays great the Nemesis system is still rad and has a bunch of refinements now. The story is still not great but deftly clears the bar lying on the ground that the first game left behind.

You'll never need a lootbox to proceed and there isn't a godawful grind in it's place as some pre release coverage was quick to speculate.

Are different opinions considered "controversy" now? I assume that everyone agrees that its "more of the same" at least.

@bwheeeler: This is just my personal opinion but I could play it on a friends PS4 for a around 2 hours and its actually super tight and it plays better than Shadow of Mordor. It has more stuff to unlock and it the combat feels way better. However the worlds are more designed to be focused on action gameplay than and it became less of an "open world" sort of deal. I think this game is way better than the last game if you enjoyed the nemesis system and the combat and wanted more from that.

It certainly feels way bigger than the first game but I'm not so sure about that.

Its more of the same which is to say its an ok game.

Pretty much this. Personally I think I found the first game more enjoyable though, purely because it's more of a "open-world playground" while SoW tries harder (and fails) at being an APRG with emergent gameplay. The fortresses is an interesting idea but fails from a gameplay perspective, and the reigning back on combat "superpowers" made it more frustrating than enjoyable for me. There are a some really great new features to the Orc Nemesis system though.

You know the saying "tough but fair?" This is not that. It's not that hard, but every death feels unearned. I'm constantly fighting the camera, or hung up on geometry, and the button presses register inconsistently.

It's perfectly fine.

I'm beginning to like it. Need to get a little more competent, and also have the game open up more. I'm only 2 hours in, and am doing every side-quest.

I had torrid affair with it while dealing with a head cold. It's great junk food. Takes a long ass time for you to unlock all the stuff you need to properly take advantage of the nemesis system and boy is this game fascist as fuck but it's a really good time. Oddly, Shadow of Mordor is a way better looking game. All the textures on console look much worse than they did before (I'm on a PS4 Pro) and Talion's cloak physics are much less sophisticated. I also miss how flat and open the levels were in the first game. But hey, I can't say I didn't have a really good time listening to podcasts and dominating orcs for 20 hours.

I've been having the same issues as @nengjanggo. It seems there's a certain lack of polish. The movement is stuttery and the controls feel a tad unresponsive. Talion regurlarly locks on a different enemy than the one you want to hit. The design of the actual mission goes from poor to plain awful. They actually make fighting a balrog one of the most boring boss fight ever.

That being said, the "number" game is fun. Engaging with the nemesis system is great, though somewhat shallow, and I think loot actually adds to the game. Having weapons that give you poison/curse/fire ability can change how you will play the game and that's neat. The fortress assault are fun if somewhat messy.

It's a fun mindless game, but far from a great one.

It's alright. There are a lot of cool ideas going on there, but a lot of it is not very well implemented. A few things I'd point out as being on the negative end right now:

• The pathing is generously termed "suspect." Getting Tallion to go where you want him to go is kind of a crapshoot in most instances. The game doesn't do a very good job of predicting what the player would want to do in a given situation. For example, if you want to hop off one building, land on the wire between buildings and then leap to the next rooftop, you've got about a 1/4 chance you'll just drop straight down, a 1/4 chance of jumping past the wire and falling to the ground, a 1/4 chance of going after something else entirely and a 1/4 chance of actually going where you want
• There are way too many enemies in most instances. They tried to add a bunch of new enemy types, but in practice, you're just swarmed all the time so it's usually pretty pointless to fight. This has the side-effect of hurting the skill tree, since anything that doesn't provide some form of crowd control is pretty useless compared to skills that do. They tried to implement the glaive as a solution, but I find it's really hard to get that to face the proper direction in combat. They need to implement the ability to at least turn around while charging it.
• The nemesis system has got some cool ideas, but they don't really follow-through on them very well. For example, it's a great idea to have different "tribes" of orcs that can do different things, but in practice that idea gets lost. The tribes aren't distinct enough visually for you to tell them apart without actually getting intel on them and the specials linked to the tribes just end up being another thing on the big list of things related to an individual orc rather than feeling unique. Given that I have yet to plan a strategy around an orc's tribe, I feel like that was a missed opportunity.
• I like some of the dynamism of the new nemesis system, like how you can be ambushed or that special orcs will spawn based on actions you take. However, I think it needed to be used more sparingly. It's really fun the first time it happens, but when it starts to feel like any action you take is going to spawn an orc and start a fight, it just gets tiresome. I particularly think they turned up the "death defying" trait way to much. An orc getting a second wind once in a while is fine, but it really feels like I need to kill every orc twice, and that gets tedious.

So yeah, a lot of great ideas, and the game is fun in short bursts, but it sort of feels like a missed opportunity. It probably would have been better as a more focused game, rather than stuffing a bunch of ideas in there for the hell of it. You can really feel the bloat the loot-box design added to it.

Shadow of War is more of the same unfortunately it still misses as much as it hits, SW starts very poorly placing Talion in a sandbox you can't interact with against much higher level enemies without the tools to fight them, then after a few hours of running point to point exposition heavy campaign missions as SW justifies raising an army at the start of act 2 you'll get domination and the game will start proper.

The meat and potato's of SW is really fun dominating a captain having him betray forcing you to shame and then dominate again causing him to go insane especially so when the dialogue changes each time, but the nemisis system still doesn't have an end goal as the fortress capture isn't great being all spectacle and after finishing the first zone the game just repeats its gimmick.

SW also has a bunch of minor issue which bring it down one bug bear is Talion never quite goes where I want him to often jumping to the wrong place or not wanting to jump at all especially annoying is the dreaded foot high wall.

Captains will be given random traits and can adapt to your moves its a real pain in the right / wrong combo when their immune / invulnerable to everything you have especially when your locked in an overlord battle, I've had a few 30min fights where I'm spamming roll chipping away at his HP.

One of the biggest complaint against the first was being too easy while SW is tougher is often feels very cheap with infinite ads and no longer being able to mass dominate with invulnerable adapting Captains.

SW feels like a few steps forward and a few back not much of an improvement over the first I'm still not sold on the nemisis system with the unskippable dialogue becoming tiresome, and Talion is still the most boring person in Mordor.

Also so far 20 hours in the loot boxes are a total none issue.

It feels completely different from the first game, playing on Nemesis difficulty. After the first 4-5 hours of Shadow of Mordor, you could just run in and murder everything without any effort. You didn't even have to be good at the game, Talion was just an unkillable god. If you try to just run into the middle of an encampment in this game, with 1 or more captains, you just get fucked up. It seems like they removed the shackles from the enemy AI, so more than 2 or 3 will attack you at one time, now all sorts of shit comes flying at you. You have to use mobility and stealth a lot more, and it makes for really entertaining and dynamic encounters. With the new adaptation mechanic, you can't just exploit the one thing a Captain is weak to over and over, eventually he will become immune to it. I'm sure eventually after like 30 hours into the game I'll start getting overpowered gear and whatnot, but so far I'm really, really enjoying Nemesis difficulty.

It's aptly named, by having all orcs be a big threat, it forces you to engage with the Nemesis system much more. It's also much less reliant on you actually dying to advance itself. That was such a huge issue in the first game. It's a tougher game, no doubt. Talion just simply isn't as powerful in Shadow of War, and that could rub some people the wrong way. To make up for that, he is much more slippery and mobile, though. I think overall they fix more mistakes than they introduce, I believe it's a marked improvement over Shadow of Mordor.

Game's really good; it does have some problems but the microtransactions certainly aren't one of them (I didn't even open the store until like 12 hours in; no prompts to do so either). I think it's roughly on par with the first game, maybe slightly better but its quite debatable; has a ridiculous amount of depth and replayability which the first game lacked. It's not better than Horizon and Nioh (though it certainly has better gameplay than Horizon), but it'll probably still wind up around my 5th or 6th favorite game this year in a fantastic year for games. If you like the Silmarillion etc. there's some cool stuff going on even if the central narrative is crap.

The name is terrible. That's probably the worst part of the game; but you can just call it Mordor 2 and you're good.

@efesell:

In terms of the loot boxes, have you gotten to the late game section where you need to defend your own fortresses? From what I've heard it seems like the game gives you more reasons to pay for legendary orcs as opposed to slowly grinding for them in this part of the game. Haven't gotten there myself so I couldn't say how true that is.

@smurf_in_a_blender: It depends. If you have been doing a good job of dominating legendary orcs throughout the game you would be fine. There's two types of grinding you could do, depending on how you wanted to go about it. The way I played the game, undermining war chiefs before taking over a fortress was a crazy amount of fun, and you can totally do that if you give up the fortress instead of defending it. This basically gives you an entire other fortress to recapture, which was my favorite part of the game anyways, so I didn't really consider it a "grind," just more of what I already enjoyed. Sure its quicker to succeed in a defense, and you may not have the troops needed to do that, in which case you would need to grind the nemesis system to populate enough legendaries. Really all depends on what you are looking for.

@fredchuckdave: I really enjoyed what they did with the Nazgul. I like LotR, but I'm not like an avid superfan though, so I don't really care how well it fits into "lore" or "canon." Reading the books and watching the movies, I always wanted to know more about who these guys were before their corruption. I also really like the way they gave some depth to Shelob, who ive always seen just portrayed as a giant spider asshole, even it doesn't fit the written histories of Middle-Earth stuff that, honestly, I'm never going to bother to try to read. Its fan service all the way, this game's license problem just has been that there are many different "types" of fans, and what I enjoy may really put off some of the "diehards" though.

@smurf_in_a_blender:

As far as just completing the story, Orc rarity doesn't matter AT ALL, legendaries might be able to survive a bit longer but regular peasant orcs do just fine themselves. The AI and fortress defenses are enough of a shitshow that a couple of extra abilities are pointless.

The grind is in getting your Warchiefs to level 60, which involves a tiny bit of EXP grinding (make sure you have EXP boosting gems equipped through the whole playthrough) and some pit fights.
You'll have a shit ton of ingame currency by the end. Going into Shadow Wars I had over 100k Mirian, which meant that I could fully upgrade all fortresses and buy more silver chests than I would ever need.
Just don't spend any of that currency until you're in Shadow Wars and you're set.

I used chests to get high level orcs for Núrnen and Cirith Ungol, for the other regions I just threw level 20 orcs into the high level pit to die and dominated the higher level opponent after the fight.

Act 4 took me about 16 hours to play through, but if you go the Leeroy Jenkins route and purposefully concede every fortress and immediately assault them again, you can probably do it in 8.

It's great.

Repetitive and bland.

I've been really enjoying it, If you ignore the market place and don't take the story too seriously it's a decent improvement over the original.

Playthrough have a mid point review up which sums up what i think so far; https://play-through.com/2017/10/16/middle-earth-shadow-of-war/

The microtransactions are a non-issue. The story is absolute trash, and they force you to do a LOT of it before they open up some of the world. The level design feels very lazy, slapshod, identical camps scattered across a bunch of small, awkward terrains. Combat is batman. The nemesis system is a lot of fun to play with, but ultimately this feels like an assassins creed connect the collectible dots game. regret buying at full price.

Loving it

Played it for a few days and thought it was ok then Evil Within 2 came out and I played through that twice. Now I don't have any interest to go back to middle-earth. The latest bombcast further cemented that decision

The game has some weird shortcomings. I'm starting off with the bad cause I think they are the least talked about. The save system, for instance. You cannot manually save and it won't tell you when it autosaves (as far as I know?). So any time you exit the game it's anyone's guess whether your last accomplishments got saved. But it will take time to let you know that all unsaved progress will be lost. There is a trick to it. If you want to be sure it saved, then use the auto-travel, because apparently it always saves after auto-traveling.

And don't roll back to a previous save state in the cloud because it can and will make you lose on orcs, even those that you may have purchased (which you should not do). I also don't like the advertisements in the main menu. They feel very much out of place with the rest of the game. Everybody knows by now about the way they butcher the story. It's interesting how the story missions are easily the worst part of the gameplay loop that they build. Because they seemingly couldn't find a way to make story missions use the world and tools that they give you to set up some more interesting and fun new activities. Instead they feel very limiting and same-y. They even limit the places you can go to in a way that feels out of place.

This game has a very outlined gameplay loop: Getting into a territory, finding the towers, finding the collectibles, collecting the intel, dominating the captains, challenging the warchiefs, taking the fortress; which makes up like 90% of this game. It's a good gameplay loop but that's kind of all there is. And doing this over and over again can become a little tiresome. I think it would have benefited the game if it kind of had an overall build up. And not the sawtooth progression they went for. Where you don't start over again, and over again, but have more of an ever increasing influence on the world because of the past positions you took to create a sort of satisfying snowball effect. The fortresses could have been a little more devious and different maybe. I feel like they could have done better especially with the variation of the gameplay.

Either way I like this game because of that strong gameplay loop. The controls are a weird mix as well. So they feel good, the combat feels good to me, but then especially on Nemesis difficulty I died a ton of times due to an ability not focusing on the orc that I wanted it to focus on. Specifically the B button Drain skill was notorious for this and at points made me die like 5 times in a row which was infuriating. But If you drop to the normal difficulty the game feels kind of easy. So personally I couldn't find a good middle ground that I liked.

I'm giving this game a 7/10 if we ignore the in-game transactions because I think you can have a good time with this game but there are these problems that you should be aware of.

The more I play of it the more this feels like the most flexible Open World game as far as gameplay goes ever; Mordor was up there but in Mordor 2 there's such a ludicrous number of options available to you for murder/MC or watching something/someone else murder something for you; which means its probably like top 3 in terms of open world gameplay period; maybe just the best (only real competition I can think of is the Witcher 2; which has various issues that Mordor 2 doesn't have). Sure the story missions are kind of boring (though they do have interesting characters) and the overall story arc is real dumb but that's kind of immaterial to the core experience. There's also lots of ways to speed up how you get around the world which means its probably a pretty good speed game (which the first game was as well); though a bit on the long side I imagine.

Played up to the soft ending, it's dumb but also cool since if you're going to be non-canon you might as well be absurd as possible (when's Shadow of Beleriand?); the boss fights are kind of mediocre but still way better than the first game's. Postgame seems fine as well, the game gives you an ability that negates the need for any chest buying (even of the silver kind) pretty much; you just have to unlock it. Seems like a bunch of whining about nothing; let alone microtransactions not mattering for the first 35 hours of the game. The fact is most of the legendary traits aren't even that great, you need a really good roll for a random legendary orc to be better than a well rolled normal orc; and in the endgame it seems like virtually nothing matters other than having lots of orcs (of any caliber) and buying more defense upgrades (none of which can be purchased with real money). I've got like 12 Legendary orcs banked from free chests and weekly challenges and stuff but have never had any reason to use any of them; I don't really get it other than people whined about microtransactions pre-emptively and half of the games press decided to follow suit later on for no particular reason. Yay dumb shit.

9/10, same score I'd give the first game; though to be fair this one has more than twice as much content and 5-10 times as much Nemesis content; it's also non trivial a lot of the time.

I've had a lot of fun playing the game but one issue i have with the combat is activating executions(or combat drains/brands) through the Might meter instead of your combo meter. Unless i enter a battle by stealth killing a bunch of Orcs, i find it takes a long time to build up Might so i can unlock the executions or cool special arrows. There is one upgrade that supposedly makes successful sword strikes gain Might faster at the cost of it draining when you get hit or leave combat but that feels like it should be part of the core ability.

As someone else said, the Glaive attack kinda works for crowd control but takes way too long to charge up and doesn't hit enemies behind you. The lack of adequate crowd control abilities early on makes most of the fights very annoying.

I am having a fun time just treating it like a playground, the skill tree has stressed me out a bit. I've had some really good moments with the Orcs, I was debating on starting a thread for people to share these stories. Honestly I forgot about the micro transaction stuff( I am only about as far as the quick look). I kinda feel off for jumping at the bit and plopping down $60 for it...

I'm also playing on the hardest difficulty, its punishing enough that it keeps me engaged with all the options i have, keeps me from brute forcing my way through stuff like I did in the first game a lot.

So uhh holy shit. I 100% completed the first game and thought this game would be much the same, but boy did they throw a curveball I did not expect.

In Act II I took over everything, did every sidequest, was pretty sure the game was about to end...and it didn't. Up till now the story has been trash but it really picks up after Act II. I have no idea how this is going to shake out, but it revitalized the game for me. Was all set to finish it quickly and move on to other things but it's the gift that keeps on giving!

It's solid, but the combat and movement still bothers me. It's like a more clunky Batman in combat and a more clunky Assassin's Creed in movement and climbing. Other than that, I am having a good time with it.

I'm not feeling it like I did the first game. Suppose much of it is down to the first game just blasting out of the gates in a blaze of glory, and then the sequel just kind of keeps rolling three years later.
I do appreciate that they've expanded on the orcs and the whole metagame surrounding that. That's what's cool and interesting about this game.

Haven't played the first game in a while, but in my memory this is basically the same thing again in regards to the action gameplay, only combat encounters are more frustrating. It's hard to get any flow going because there's almost always some asshole throwing a spear or doing some {A} attack or this or that. And often it seems like they never stop coming. I just don't find it fun to be forced to play so defensively. Maybe there's some way of addressing this by utilizing some power or tactic or whatever, but I ain't got time to figure that out when I have all this shit trying to murder me. I'm just gonna keep dodging forever.

I can't care about the story or world. It's largely boring and dreary. Talion is an utterly dour, mean asshole. Kind of wish he would stay dead.

It's a partially interesting game, but most of it I'm just not that into.
I ought to be at least halfway in and I'm gonna start cheating some, see if that'll get me through the rest of it.

It's a fun open world power fantasy with some amazing moments that rise out of the chaos.

That said, there are some issues that continue to make me question how much more I want to play it. The camera has some real issues, especially when you are near structures or in a cave. The parkour can be finicky and really screw you up when stealthing, which is not helped by the camera. Some of the combinations of abilities and henchmen can be a real nightmare, especially in the overlord battles. Also, why are these solo? I can understand them not wanting to ruin the challenge by allowing your whole army in, but I don't see the issue with an equivalent retinue accompanying you. (I know you can bring a bodyguard and summon, but some fodder would be nice, and the summons can trigger rage)

But my biggest gripe by far is the targeting. I've lost track of the number of times that my plans were completely foiled because the game suddenly chose a target other than the one I was trying to focus on. On a rooftop about to stealth attack a captain below, but oh wait, the game decides that I wanted to target an orc that wasn't even on screen? Check. Attempting to use an execute on a strong enemy, only to have it target some weak orc fodder instead? Check. Trying to dominate a captain after he's broken, but instead starting the slow domination of a grunt off to his side giving the captain time to recover? Check. Attempting to use an X or O prompt to avoid/counter a major attack, only to have Talion do a combat roll or try to dominate a grunt instead? Check. When all this stuff is clicking it feels empowering in a way few games do. When it's not it just becomes frustrating.

I read many complaints about the controls, are they worse than the controls of the first game? The first game felt really tight, totally different from AC where you get stuck on everything.

Find myself getting stuck on ledges a bit, but I Recall that happening in thep revious game for me as well so maybe it's just me.

As for the game itself, I think I like the improvements to the nemesis in general but everything else is kind of flat. The story is somehow even worse than the first game (take a drink whenever the elf mentions the palantir in the first 3 hours, you'll be dead half an hour in), and the story missions themselves are still flat. They introduce a bunch of collectibles but most of them outside of shelob's memories seem completely forgettable, and the weapon challenge ones are also generic and skippable for progression. The fortress siege stuff can be fun but if you really clean out the nemesis hierarchy before hand you literally just run from point to point unopposed tapping buttons. Similar to the first game, I wish there were a difficulty in between normal and hard. For the nemesis system to really work you have to die a bunch so you can see all the interactions take effect, but I'm horrible at counters (too mashy and impatient) and so for me Hard became too much of a grind, but I barely ever die in normal so taking over each region becomes more tedious than anything else. I'm also about 2 and a half regions in and I can see the same nemesis takeover loop happening again and again so honestly, I don't know if I'll finish it.

As to my final verdict, I guess I would say it depends- if you really loved the first game and the combat it might be worth picking up now. But if you're looking for a major upgrade from the first game I don't think this is really it. Sure there's more nemesis stuff, but it feels like just that- more stuff- instead of a huge improvement. On top of that I think they failed to really address major criticisms from the previous game- dumb story, boring story mission gameplay, meaningless side content- and in a lot of ways those poor aspects got even worse.

I dont quite get a lot of the complaints for the game... it is just flatout an improvement to the original in every single way (GOTY contender for many). It is however too padded down by incredible grinding that was optional in the first game... I think there in lies the problem. You'll be tired of the game before you reach the end... but that happens with all games so if you enjoy your first 20-25 hours with this game then I think it deserves some credit.

I'm on the verge of capturing my 4th fort. It is becoming tedious and repetitive.