The story of
Shadow of War follows Talion again as he continues his battle against
Sauron in Mordor, aided by Celebrimbor, the creator of the ring. This expands
on the first game by giving you more areas to explore and focusses on raising
an army of orcs to control Mordor. In terms of the story, it fits in to the gap
between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in a ‘this could
have happened’ sort of way which is quite cool, but probably not to the hard-core
fans of the franchise.
Gameplay
wise, Talion gains experience in an arbitrary levelling mechanic and as you do,
he learns new abilities to aid in the slaying and dominating of orcs. The
combat is still pretty good though it does take a bit of learning button
combinations to best fight most monsters but it’s one of those things that’s
easy to learn and satisfying to master.
That said,
there are problems with the gameplay that makes the game really frustrating to
play at times. Climbing is one of these. I lost count of the amount of times it
would not register me pressing up on the analogue stick to pull up on to a
ledge. Instead, Talion shimmies sideways along the ledge. Both ways. It gets
really annoying, especially when you consider how long the game is.
You can also
dominate animals and monsters throughout the adventure and this is another area
of weakness. The monster controls are awful with the exception of the Caragor
and even then, a Caragor is only good for getting places. The combat is just
not good when monsters are involved as It breaks the seamless freeflow combat
which is the game’s biggest strength. It’s like baking a delicious salted
caramel cheesecake and covering it in sardines.
Fighting the
Orc Captains and Warchiefs is where the game excels in terms of having to
exploit weaknesses to beat your enemies. However, this also becomes really
annoying as most of the time when you initiate combat, they have to have their
little introductory speech saying how they are going to kill you or whatever.
They are effectively unskippable cutscenes and when five of these guys show up
one after another, it breaks the flow of combat. It also doesn’t really add
anything as once you’ve heard one Orc mug you off, you’ve heard them all. It
really grates, especially during the end game when you are fighting loads of
them.
Musically,
it ticks all the right boxes but I did start to get annoyed with Talion’s
depressing one-liners every time you fast travel anywhere – something else you
will be doing a lot. Graphically, despite the traversal issues, they’ve put a
lot of effort into making the environments different. For example, I never
expected to see a forest or snow in Mordor but they’ve catered for these.
Achievements
– 1,500 Points – 72 Achievements
In terms of
the main game, it’s quite similar to Shadow of Mordor in that there are
a few achievements for doing lots of strange things to orcs. I feel like I got
lucky with a lot of these too as there are a few luck-based situational ones.
An example of this is the one for killing a Drake while riding a Graug as you
are dependent on both showing up at the same time. And as mentioned, the
monster combat sucks so even if this does happen, there’s still the matter of
striking that final blow.
That’s the
not the worst one though. The most notable of these is for killing a captain
while riding an Olog and this is painful for many reasons. Firstly, you have to
be in a fight with both an Olog and a captain or warchief. Secondly, you need
to damage the captain until he’s nearly dead which is tricky as they tend to
die quite easily when on low health. Thirdly, you need to mount the Olog and
effectively use him to kill to captain. This is a pain for an additional three
reasons. Firstly, you don’t get a lot of time riding the Olog before he throws
you off so you will likely have to mount a few times when attempting this. The
second is that while you are off the Olog and the captain has low health,
something else could kill it as mentioned above. Thirdly, the Olog is likely to
die before the captain as you have to stab it repeatedly in the back to stay
mounted.
I actually
found an easy way to do this during a Warchief fight when conquering a citadel.
It turns out that Ologs spawn continuously during the fight so I was able to
keep mounting new ones. This somewhat reduces the luck elements.
Twenty of
the achievements come from playing through the main story. There’s also a lot
tied to completing all of the side content, which involves finding all the
collectibles and completing the side quests. There’s no real difficulty in any
of this once the combat becomes second nature.
There are
also some fun ones attached to the nemesis system which involve getting your
dominated orcs to do specific things, like win pit fights against other Orcs or
kill other Orcs in certain ways.
There’s also
a totally unnecessary online component to the game which sees you either
avenging over players in solo missions where you can kill or dominate the orcs
that killed them, or you can compete in online conquests where you invade other
player’s forts and attack them. It draws out the game play that already exists,
doesn’t offer anything new and is a little irritating. There is another
achievement tied to doing one of these conquest battles using a skin from the
Blade of Galadriel DLC too so my advice would be to make sure you do one of
these in the skin before reaching the rank of Captain in the online area – as
that’s what the achievement requires you do to. Ranking points are awarded for
completing online conquests to gold or silver standard and from a combined
score of all your forts you’ve conquered based on the level of Orcs you have
garrisoned there. It’s essentially a mini-grind depending on how much you
played the game while doing the story.
Downloadable
Content
There are
two single player DLC packs that offer something slightly different. The Blade
of Galadriel sees you play as Eltariel who has a different set of skills to
Talion but the core gameplay is the same.
The
achievements only require you to clear her content and use some of her special
abilities a set amount of times.
The real
challenge is in the Desolation of Mordor DLC where you play as Baranor. Again,
there is some solo stuff to do here but the key difference between this one and
the rest of the main game is that if you die, all of your progress is reset –
it’s effectively a game over. You do keep some abilities and main missions stay
completed but the area totally resets each time you die.
The main
challenge here is to complete the DLC with a gold rating. It goes without
saying that this has to be done in one life. You also have to be quick and kill
as many captains as possible as well as playing on Nemesis difficulty. As I had
pretty much done everything in the game just before taking this on, I was
fairly well equipped and it only took me two attempts to complete. That’s not
to say it’s easy though.
Middle
Earth: Shadow of War is one of the most fun games I’ve played for a while
despite the grindfest at the end of the main game. The DLCs also offer a slight
change of pace and a challenge that’s rewarding. Definitely recommended.
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