Shadow of War Review

Shadows of War is the sequel to the smash hit Middle Earth: Shadows of Mordor. An Arkham city clone with excellent gameplay and innovative concepts, Shadows of Mordor was a surprise hit by relative newcomer Monolith that no one saw coming from this poorly funded game.

The basic idea was that you were a Ranger of Gondor fighting orcs in Mordor. The story and the main campaign were relatively short and simple but the game won millions of fans due to its intricate stealth based gameplay and large roster of procedurally generated and dynamically learning enemies. Shadows of Mordor introduced a new concept called the “Nemesis system.”

Essentially each time an orc killed you in game he had a chance to be promoted, gaining new abilities, possible bodyguards, and new functionality. The orc would even remember killing you and tended to taunt you each time you fought him, adding a unique flavor to the fights.

The studio later improved on its formula by releasing the Bright Lord DLC which added more abilities, higher levels, and better balanced play.

The new Shadows of War game is the much anticipated sequel to Shadows of Mordor and the gameplay is solid. Nothing in the game feels revolutionary compared to Shadows of Mordor but everything feels better than the Bright Lord DLC and far better than the original Shadows of Mordor game. The new world of SoW feels enormous, varied, and far more alive than its predecessor.

The Nemesis engine has also been improved. Orcs are better organized and have better abilities and tactics. Orcs also have the ability to ambush you, magically appearing in a cinema scene while you’re doing something else. This feature can be annoying but definitely adds to the tension of any mission you’re playing since it’s impossible to be sure whose trapping whom.

Orcs that have killed you several times now have the ability to return from the dead (raised by necromancers) and attack you again having been buffed with new abilities. This adds more force to the Nemesis system since even if you defeat your enemy, he can still return with stronger abilities to mess up your later missions. Even orcs defeated in the first game have the ability to return and fight you in the new game. This can be a shocking (and aggravating) element of play since by definition your Nemesis in the last game was an orc you REALLY had trouble fighting.

The new Nemesis system delivers solid challenge through a type of “selective breeding.” Whatever enemies or abilities kill you the most will be increasingly empowered as the game goes on, delivering procedurally generated stronger and more difficult enemies in later missions. Moreover, your enemies will learn and adapt to your tactics even without killing you which requires you to use adaptive tactics rather than simply relying on the same strategy for the same type of enemy.

Some of your orc allies can even spontaneously betray you in combat, which can turn an already tricky mission into a desperate situation. One of the best elements of play is that if an ally of yours falls in battle he has a chance to be resurrected by Sauron and sent back to take revenge on you. All of these are brilliant ideas and I hope the Nemesis system is adopted by many other games.

New beasts and mounts have been included in the game like drakes which allow you to fly and breath fire on your foes which is a serious advantage when besieging an orc encampment. The Branding element from the Bright Lord where you can brainwash orcs into being your soldiers has been much improved in SoW where instead of controlling a mob of orcs you control a literal army and have the ability to assign your captains and warchiefs to a variety of roles.

The biggest change to the system however is the addition of fortresses which you can both attack and defend. A fortress is ruled by an orc overlord who will have several warchiefs serving him. You can lead your army to a fortress and attempt to storm it and take it as your own. However fortresses are large and fortified positions so it’s invariably wiser to take it step by step and ambush the war chiefs one by one before attacking the fortress head on. Additionally each warchief you dispatch is not only one less tough fight inside the fortress but also disables some key defensive feature in the fortress like extra combat squads, siege weapons, guard beasts, or fire vents. This leads to some truly satisfying gameplay.

The fortresses you occupy can also be attacked by enemy armies and you can invest in better defenses and guardians for your fortress to ensure that it won’t fall to enemy hands. You buy fortress siege defenses with Miriam, an in-game currency and what appears to be the primary motivation for micro transactions in the game. However, to be fair, you never NEED to buy miriam. You earn it (slowly) through gameplay by completing missions and accomplishing tasks.

The gameplay is solid and an improvement on the original in every way but never feels truly revolutionary unless you skipped the Bright Lord DLC. The Bright Lord was essentially a lower budget preview of some of these feature so I suspect people who didn’t get a chance to sample them through the DLC will be far more impressed.

The biggest flaw with the gameplay is the awkward controls and the lack of a targeting system. I’ve touched on this issue before but basically, action games are getting increasingly sophisticated with an ever increasing array of options and abilities, however humans have the same ten fingers we had a thousand years ago. This means that of necessity, a button needs to have multiple roles. In SoW the ‘A’ button lets you run, lets you jump, lets you vault over an enemy, dodge an attack, climb, roll, and pull yourself up a ledge. This dazzling assortment of options is based on context: the computer assumes you want to interact with the object closest to you and focused on. When done correctly this is smooth and natural and feels great. However, the issue is that SoW is a game about armies and you are consistently getting mobbed by dozens or hundreds of orcs. With no ability to lock onto a target the computer frequently gets confused about what I’m focusing on and what I want to do. I died more times than I can count because the computer thought I wanted to roll into an enemy rather than vault over him. I got impaled a ton of times because the game made me run into a wall rather than climb it. I don’t want to be too harsh on this play style because it is brilliantly done when your not in a crowd but maybe it’s the wrong approach if you want to make a game that has such an overcrowded space with so many NPCs running around each other. A simple lock on mechanic could have made the game play absolutely brilliant and I don’t know why they didn’t include one.

The solid gameplay and the innovative game design absolutely make this game worth playing even if you have no interest in the works of JRR Tolkien. It’s just a great game. The Nemesis system seems simple but its implementation easily show enormous capability for dynamic story telling. On these points the game easily score a 9 out of 10. Unfortunately, other than the sometimes twitchy game control, the other place the game falls flat is the story.

(Spoilers ahead)

The story is set between the Hobbit and the first book of the Lord of the Rings. The main quest focuses on Talion and Celebrimbor’s attempts to destroy Sauron who has murdered both of their families as well as them, reducing them to undeath.

The plot of SoW can be best split up into two distinct sections: the main quest which also includes Shelob’s quest line, and four quest chains centered around side characters.

One quest chain involves Idril and Barannon, two soldiers of Gondor who are guarding Minas Ithil from Mordor. This is one of the most human and relatable quest chains. In this chain you help defend Minas Ithil and after it falls, you rescue Gondorian soldiers from slavery and death in Mordor. It’s nothing amazing but it’s effectively told and the romance between the two is nice.

The second quest chain deals with Eltariel, an elf in service to Galadriel sent to Mordor to harass the Nazgul and keep them off balance. Eltariel seems loosely based on Tauriel from the Hobbit films. There’s not much to this quest chain in terms of story, it’s mostly just setting up Eltariel’s character and establishing the new Ring as a corruptive force that will inevitably enslave Talion and Celebrimbor. She mentions this in literally every quest. Eltariel leads you to three different Nazgul who all fight in notably different ways, in addition to keeping a small army of orc body guards. The Nazgul fights are engaging and often challenging.

Carnan’s quest chain is interesting. Carnan is a strange creature who appears to be some kind of forest spirit. I suspect she was initially envisioned as an ent-wife but this was changed later in development after someone pointed out ents don’t have magical shape shifting powers. Her quest chain is fun because it involves you fighting a Balrog and hunting down necromancers. All of these are pretty cool concepts to explore and some very fun and challenging fights. Carnan’s quest chain focuses on mounted combat. You need to fight orcs (and Balrogs and ghosts) while mounted on beasts including Drakes.

The best quest chain in the game by far belongs to Ratbag. Ratbag is a returning minor character from Shadows of Mordor. Ratbag is a typical orc: vicious, cowardly, stupid and greedy. He wants to become a warchief in spite of his breathtaking incompetence and convinces Talion to help him take out his competition from the shadows so Talion can draw out Sauron’s servants. This gambit succeeds but said servant of Sauron immediately executes Ratbag for his incompetence. However, Ratbag apparently survives and later forms an alliance with an enormous war troll (whom he named ‘Ranger’ in honor of Talion), achieving his dream of becoming an overlord of a powerful fortress controlling much of Mordor. Ratbag has discovered however that being an overlord is a lousy job with too much responsibility and every underling plotting to betray you. Thus when Talion and Celebrimbor storm their fortress with an army, Ratbag gives up without a fight, even agreeing to serve you.

Another crucial character in Ratbag’s quest chain is Bruz. Bruz is a war troll whom you have brainwashed into serving you with the power of the new Ring. Bruz is a vicious brutal fighter but seems likable enough and even charming for a troll. He’s involved in several tutorials and basically teaches you how to command an army of orcs. He helps you defend your new fortress from a hostile attack and after you successfully rout the attack, Bruz betrays you and stabs you in the back with a spear, taking the fortress as his own.

To the game’s detriment, this betrayal made me really mad. I’d spent hours claiming that fortress and the game had just instantly taken it away from me with Bruz’s unheralded back stab. However to the game’s CREDIT, this betrayal made me really really mad.

This wasn’t a random event it was part of the story and by disrupting my plans in this way the game had succeeded in making me hate Bruz more than I ever hated Sauron. The next few quests in the game involve taking back my fortress from Bruz and then hunting him down to punish him for his betrayal, a series of quests I pursued with gusto. Bruz had made this personal and I reacted that way. This is brilliant story telling and Monolith deserves credit for doing it so effectively.

In writing a standard maxim is “show; don’t tell” and in video games this is written as “do; don’t show.” Bruz’s back stab is perfect for demonstrating what it’s like to command an army of orcs and to try to bend the forces of evil to your will. Talion and Celebrimbor’s dialogue regarding Bruz is inspired since for the first time, death will not be sufficient. If Bruz’s fate doesn’t terrify the other orcs, they’ll all start to plot against them. This shows Talion and Celebrimbor’s growing corruption and “ends justify the means” philosophy in a very natural way and it’s brilliant story telling.

After defeating Bruz and dealing him a fate worse than death, Ratbag and I part amicably. Ratbag is a great character as he’s not only funny and likeable but he’s an orc who suggests that not all orcs are totally evil. He’s vile and vicious but also demonstrates a lot of genuine loyalty to people he thinks have earned it. This is something the game showcases very nicely without devoting plot or dialogue to specifically discussing the issue. The Shadows of Mordor series has broken from Tolkien and shown that not all orcs and completely evil and not all elves are completely good. This is a nice touch because it makes Tolkien’s established world feel real as opposed to an idealized fantasy world.

The worst quest chain by far is unfortunately the main quest chain. The story is all over the place and reaches a lunatic finish by the end. Celebrimbor and Talion forge a new ring of power in the opening scene. This ring is not just an elven ring, but a Ruling Ring like Sauron’s and one which Celebrimbor believes will give them the power to challenge Sauron. However before you even get a chance to play with this ring, Celebrimbor is abducted by Shelob and she forces Talion to hand the ring over to save his partner.

The early part of the game is focused on protecting Minas Ithil (Minas Morgul) the last bastion of Gondor’s power in Mordor. Ultimately they are betrayed and the Nazgul succeed in taking the city (this event actually happened about a thousand years before the game but this is the least of the script’s problems) culminating in a pretty cool fight against all the Nazgul. After rescuing Shelob from the Nazgul who seek to take the Ring, she returns the Ring and Celebrimbor and Talion use the power of the new Ring to brainwash an army of orcs to take Mordor from Sauron. The main quest then has you seizing all the provinces of Mordor from Sauron. After taking all four fortresses from Sauron, you are ready to march against Barad-dur, Sauron’s own palace. Aside from Shelob’s inclusion the story was actually pretty good especially campaigns to retake the fortresses but in the last Act the plot takes a seriously hard left turn.

While storming Barad-dur, Talion fights and defeats Isildur (the man who defeated Sauron in the beginning of the Fellowship of the Ring) who has now become a Nazgul (I’ll touch on this later). Talion defeats Isildur and Celebrimbor begins to enslave Isildur to serve him rather than Sauron but Talion refuses and slaying Isildur, grants him freedom and puts his soul to rest.

Celebrimbor is unexpectedly enraged by this and they have an argument. Talion argues that he wasn’t fighting to create an army of slaves and that they should just hurry up and kill Sauron. Celebrimbor replies that Sauron can never be killed and must be enslaved. The two reach a stalemate but Celebrimbor has apparently gotten tired of Talion’s resistance so he abandons Talion and gives the new Ring to Eltariel.

The undead Talion begins to die from being separated from Celebrimbor. Shelob then appears before Talion in a vision saying that she foresaw Talion and Celembrimbor defeating Sauron and then replacing him as they sweep out of Mordor to conquer middle earth with an army of orcs. She had been conspiring to prevent this. Shelob then tells Talion how to save his own life and he puts on the slain Nazgul’s ring.

Talion is now abandoned by Celebrimbor, corrupted by the dark ring, and wielding the necromantic powers that Isildur was wielding during this game. He goes to Minas Morgul and takes it for his own, fighting and defeating the Witch King and the other Nazgul. Meanwhile, Eltariel and Celebrimbor succeed in defeating Sauron and almost bind him into servitude but at the last second Sauron cuts the ring from Eltariel’s finger and Celebrimbor is consumed by Sauron. Talion then uses his necromantic power to take all the territory in Mordor away from Sauron again before finally succumbing to the dark power of the ring and becoming a Nazgul. The plot then skips ahead some years to when Frodo destroys the Ring. At this point Talion is depicted as truly dead and free in some type of paradise land.

Holy shit. How do I even go about analyzing this narrative? I think of Shadows of Mordor as a kind of Middle Earth fanfic. I don’t expect total faithfulness to the lore but I do expect that if you bring in a named character, concept, or location, you should do so accurately. After all, if you DIDN’T want us to be aware of the connection with the novels, you would invent your own characters, concepts, and locations, and just set them somewhere in middle earth.

Essentially, that’s the whole point of a fanfiction: You don’t need to create all your own characters and settings. You can use characters and settings we’re familiar with and we’ll accept them.

However this also comes with obligations. If I’m writing a Seinfeld fanfic we all know who Jerry, George, and Kramer are so they don’t need to be reintroduced or explained. That being said, if I start a story where Jerry has given up on comedy and decided to become a peanut farmer, I owe it to the reader to discuss and explain this change. If I simply put Jerry on the peanut farm and show him fertilizing crops and harvesting peanuts, my reader is going to be so busy wondering what got us here that they won’t be paying much attention to the story I’m trying to tell. The reader will be ignoring the story I wrote in favor of filling in the holes in the story I didn’t bother to write.

That’s a plot hole and that’s bad writing.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Shelob. I have no idea why Shelob is even in this game. For one thing, Shelob in the game is altogether different from how she’s presented in the books or the movies. Shelob is an elemental evil, MORE elementally evil than Sauron. The way she’s presented in the games make absolutely no sense.

Shelob in the game serves as a kind of dark haired Galadriel. She gives Talion visions of the future and some sage advice. She appears as a shapely woman with a seductive manner. Most of the commentary about Shelob’s inclusion deal with her shape shifting powers and human form but I’m ok with those elements.

My issue is that Shelob is the “chaotic evil” character in Tolkien’s legendarium. She IS more evil than Sauron. Sauron wants to rule Middle Earth. Shelob wants to devour it. Tolkien sums up Shelob’s motivation by saying she wants: “A glut of life for herself and death for all others until the mountains could not hold her up and the darkness could not contain her.” Shelob would NOT be interested in helping Talion. In addition we know for a fact she wouldn’t care enough about the Ring to even pick it up much less conspire to steal it. Gollum lead Frodo to her cave specifically because he knows she’d throw the Ring away after she ate Frodo.

You don’t even need to read the books to realize how stupid this is. If Shelob WAS the kind of character she’s described as in SOW, she wouldn’t have tried to eat Frodo in the movie. If she was this benevolent character, when she realized Frodo had the Ring, she would have brought him supper, given him supplies, and then sent off to Mt Doom with a fricking map. In the game she is driven by a desire to destroy Sauron and protect Middle Earth, but in the movies and books she is only motivated by a desire to devour and consume.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t bring Shelob into the story as a character but you need to do it by working with her character. If you want a character who acts JUST like Galadriel, why not just use Galadriel?

If you do want to specifically bring in Shelob as a character for whatever reason, how about making her clever enough to recognize that she can’t kill Talion while he’s wearing the Ring? Why not make her kneel down before Talion and Celebrimbor and ask to be their vassal? She humbles herself, claims she recognizes the true Lord of the Ring, and offers her services to use in any way they wish, all the while hoping for a chance to make a meal of them later.

THAT’S in keeping with her character. Moreover, it actually lets her be a temptress, something the game clearly wants her to be viewed as but never successfully conveys. It also flows well with Tolkien’s concepts of power’s corrupting nature. Shelob would be tempting Talion to give into his hunger for power. This is a concept I literally thought of off the top of my head and it would have worked far better.

One place where the narrative really gets dumb is dealing with the Nazgul. The game names three of them and describes their history. Tolkien did not name any of the Nazgul (except for one: Khamul) so modern writers are welcome to write their own names and backstories for them. However this is where stuff gets stupid.

One of the Nazgul in the game is revealed to be Isildur, the man who cut the ring from Sauron’s finger. This is just bafflingly stupid. How does that fit into the time line? The game shows a cinema scene where after Isildur loses Sauron’s ring and dies, he’s brought back to Barad-dur where Sauron resurrects him and gives a ring, turning him into a Nazgul and necromancer.

How the hell is this supposed to make sense? If Sauron has just been defeated, why is he still hanging around in Barad-dur performing sorcery? Shouldn’t he be in hiding? People are searching for him after all and maybe hanging out in your last documented place of residence isn’t the best place to hide. Moreover, why wasn’t Sauron’s first command to Isildur: “Go back to where you lost my ring and get it for me?” Having Isildur as a Nazgul is just fan service for fan service’s sake and it’s not even good fan service. Anyone who even recognizes the character is going to have WAY too many questions about how this makes sense.

The other Nazgul that the game names is Helm Hammerhand, a King of Rohan and the man whom Helmsdeep was named after. This, believe it or not, is even more stupid, than Isildur being a Nazgul. We’re shown a cinema scene where Celebrimbor and Sauron together give Helm a ring of power to help him put down a coup and recover his kidnapped daughter. This is all well and good, except for the fact that Helm Hammerhead lived THOUSANDS of years after Celebrimbor died and Sauron had been defeated by Isildur. This isn’t nitpicking at this point. Don’t these guys have continuity checkers? This is an obvious issue to miss. Why did they need to turn Helm Hammerhand into a Nazgul anyway? Who even recognizes that name? Why not use a thousand other characters in the mythos that would have made sense? Why not just invent your own character? This is awful fan service and it makes me rage.

The ending however is where things get really stupid. I’d been expecting Talion and Celebrimbor to be corrupted by their Ring. The narrative had steadily been showing us how the power was going to their heads and to be fair, it showed this very effectively without being heavy handed about it. However at the last minute the plot forces a ridiculous argument: Talion defeats the Nazgul Isildur and as Celebrimbor attempts to enslave the Nazgul to his will, Talion rebels and kills Isildur granting his soul peace.

Talion’s reaction makes sense. This is an ancient king of his people with a nearly mythic status. He wouldn’t want to let Celebrimbor enslave him. That makes sense. What does not make sense is Celebrimbor’s reaction. They are about to fight Sauron, all they have to do is walk across the bridge and there is the final battle. This is no time to start an argument, especially about something that really doesn’t matter to Celebrimbor. If he wanted more Nazgul he could easily make more. Hell he could hand that Nazgul’s ring to Eltariel and double their chances against Sauron at a stroke.

Talion then demands Sauron be killed, not enslaved and that he hasn’t been fighting to create a nation of slaves. This last minute moral stance by Talion baffles me because creating a nation of slaves is EXACTLY what we’ve spent the entire game doing. Why is it suddenly an issue now? Yes we’ve been enslaving orcs which are evil but Sauron is far more evil than the orcs. Why is enslaving him suddenly questionable?

Celebrimbor replies that Sauron can not be destroyed, which is true. Sauron won’t fall until his Ring is unmade and since they don’t know where Sauron’s ring is, that ain’t happening. Talion continues to protest but for no real reason. Sauron CAN’T be killed. He’s a demigod. He has to be chained up just to stop him from causing more damage. Whether that chaining occurs by enslaving his mind or locking him up in a cell is functionally irrelevant, it’s still the only available solution but Talion protests while offering no other solution.

Celebrimbor ultimately gets bored and dismisses Talion as merely “a vessel” before offering Eltariel the new Ring and the chance to defeat Sauron with him.

Holy shit, this was an abrupt turn. Celebrimbor is a dark and ruthless character, yes, but there’s never been any sign that he saw Talion as a vessel or a tool. He’s using Talion to serve his needs but this always seemed like more of a partnership than anything else; a union driven by mutual interest. Talion has refused Celebrimbor’s advice before without any serious reaction, why do this now? Why shake up this excellent dream team right before facing a demigod? Are you really so impressed with Eltariel that you’re betting she can master the new Ring in ten minutes or less?

Nothing in Celebrimbor’s character up to this point has foreshadowed this. His conversations with Talion were always respectful and seemed open to discussion even if he knew himself to be older and wiser. This plot twist, if that’s what they want to call it, almost gave me whip lash. There was just no foundation for it. It’s stupid and it’s contrived.

On top of that, when did Eltariel decide wearing the Ring was a good idea? She has NEVER suggested she wanted to. In fact she’s done nothing else all game but warn us that wearing the Ring would corrupt us and destroy us. We keep questioning her about her battle against the undead Nazgul and she deliberately tells us that the battle between Good and Evil is constant and unwinnable. Evil always comes back, thus the need for vigilance against it. This is in complete agreement with the themes and morals of Lord of the Rings.

Now she sees an opportunity to defeat Sauron and she forgets all those lectures? Celebrimbor offers her the new Ring and she takes it without question. She didn’t even really like Celebrimbor before. She thought he was corrupted and accursed to the point she kept warning Talion against him but now she lets him come into her body with no questions asked? She doesn’t even have a word of sympathy for Talion as he lay dying. These characters become totally different people in the last few scenes.

As Talion lays dying Shelob comes to him in a vision and tells him that she foresaw that Talion and Celebrimbor would overthrow Sauron before sweeping out of Mordor to conqueror the world. She has been fighting against this fate the whole time. All of her plans were an attempt to maintain balance between the Bright Lord and the Dark Lord.

This does not make sense.

Lord of the Rings is not Dragonlance or Star Wars where the goal is to maintain balance between Good and Evil. In Tolkien’s universe, evil is an aberration and has nothing of value to offer. Therefore it must be fought against. This isn’t a subtle point in the series, this is the main point of Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s belief that you can not fight evil by doing evil and that all power is ultimately corruptive is the whole reason we have a story in Lord of the Rings. If that plot element wasn’t hammered home so hard, Gandalf after discovering that Bilbo had the Ring would have said: “Bilbo, I’m borrowing your magic Ring to go and fight an evil demigod. I’ll bring it back next week, ok?”

The entire series is based on the idea that you can’t defeat evil by using evil’s tools. Gandalf refuses to use the Ring for this very reason. The decision to destroy the Ring rather than wielding it against Sauron as Celebrimbor does is made for this same reason.

What’s worse, not only do Shelob’s instructions contradict Tolkien’s cosmology, they contradict the world the game itself has built. Celebrimbor has fallen to the power of the Ring. He has sought to fight evil using evil’s powers and has become corrupted and must be stopped. The good he could do under these circumstances will never be worth the evil he will do and so his efforts are self-defeating. This is all very clear and Tolkien would have approved.

Unfortunately we also have Talion who is apparently noble enough to fight evil using evil’s own powers and will ultimately become corrupted by the Nazgul’s ring but as a noble hero who makes a difficult sacrifice for the greater good.

See? See what I did there? The game presents these two outcomes as being evil and good respectably but there is absolutely no difference between the two. The ending sucks because it’s inconsistent and it makes absolutely no sense.

Talion then goes and overthrows the Witch King, claiming Minas Morgul as his own for however long he can defy the corrupting ring. Celebrimbor and Etariel fight Sauron and nearly win until Sauron in a neat little trick cuts the ring from Eltariel’s finger and seemingly consumes Celebrimbor, although Shelob suggests that they are now bound to each other and trapped in the “Eye of Sauron”, something which is very poorly explained.

You’d think that this is where we roll credits but actually, there is a whole other Act after this. In this act you play as the semi-corrupted Talion who now, without Celebrimbor, is attempting to secure Mordor for himself, in a heroic play to keep Sauron contained as long as possible. In gameplay terms, now you need to play defense on every fortress you conquered preventing Sauron’s forces from taking them back.

Act IV is 100% padding. It’s clearly intended to sell microtransactions since Sauron’s forces will be much higher level than yours and you’re likely to lose these fortresses to them. You don’t necessarily have to buy game currency to upgrade your fortresses. I had good luck letting Sauron recapture them and then stealing his high level war chiefs to help me take them back.

The inclusion of Act IV baffles me. There isn’t even a final boss fight. It’s just a long grind until you defend or retake every fortress you already took. At the end of Act IV, Talion is depicted as being fully corrupted by the Ring and he joins the other Nazgul preparing to hunt Frodo. The story then skips ahead to the destruction of the Ring where it shows Talion stripping off his weapons and armor and walking off into some type of paradise.

Act IV is a terrible idea because the character we’ve been playing at all game is completely changed. There are no more dry observances from Celebrimbor or witty banter between Celebrimbor and Talion when a mission starts. There are no more comments between them when you find collectibles which made me disinterested in collecting any more collectibles. Act IV is a frighteningly stupid idea. Do yourself a favor and don’t trigger the final fight until you’re completely done. The game warns you to finish the side questions which is admirable but never mentions how drastic the change will be or I would have found all the collectibles first. The whole concept of Act IV is lame, stupid, and a transparent ploy to sell microtransactions.

In summary the middle part of the game was awesome. There was some very effective storytelling, especially dealing with subtle concepts like ‘is it right to use evil’s own arts to fight evil’. Talion and Celembrimbor’s slow corruption is made abundantly clear in a natural way. I was really expecting a strong finish to this story but was completely blindsided by Celebrimbor’s betrayal before fighting Sauron. This last minute plot twist made me seriously angry.

The biggest problem I had with the Bright Lord DLC (where Celebrimbor as a living elf takes the Ring and fights Sauron with it) was the ending. In the final fight of the game, you face Sauron and you kick his ass. It’s a hard fight but eventually you succeed and you throw down Sauron. Then the game cuts to a cinema scene where the Ring abandons Celebrimbor, returning to Sauron who effortlessly kills him.

This is bullshit.

You can’t force me to fight an enemy, win, and then have me lose in the cut scene. I know some Tolkien nerd out there is saying that this is realistic because Tolkien wrote that you couldn’t use the Ring physically against Sauron but if that’s true, I shouldn’t have been able to use it in the fight either. You can’t have this both ways. It’s infuriating to have the game force you to win a fight (by making you retry each time you lose) and then make you lose in the cut scene. That’s contrivance and it’s lazy writing.

For SoW I really wanted a better ending, one where you could win and defeat Sauron. I know it would be inconsistent with the lore but the game has taken so many liberties with the lore already that this excuse rings hollow. This is a fanfic and it’s a power fantasy. I don’t want to have my efforts dashed at the eleventh hour again.

I would have been totally satisfied with a Star Wars lightside/darkside ending. One where Celebrimbor and Talion realize they’ve become worse than Sauron and voluntarily throw their Ring into the fire, killing themselves in atonement, and redeeming themselves. There could be and should be another where they either don’t realize this or don’t care and rule Mordor from the throne in Barad-dur. I worked for hours to earn this ending and the one provided was not nearly worth it because it made no sense. Talion’s “sacrifice” was absurd and there was no in universe reason for the characters to make the decisions they did other than the author decided they should.

What really pisses me off is that they’ve short circuited what could have been a promising up and coming franchise. Imagine an SoW DLC where Talion and Celebrimbor lead an army of orcs against Minas Tirith in Gondor. A whole campaign against a human army and invading a city and fortress ten times bigger than anything we got in SoW. We could have a full other game about unleashing the Nazgul against Gondor. How is it different to fight an army of humans instead of orcs? They’re better organized and have better equipment. They have superior tactics and training. How hard is it to storm the largest city in the world, compared to the relatively small fortresses we claimed in this game?

Imagine a campaign where we return to Dol Guldor with the Nazgul and invade Lothlorien, a forest setting populated by elves. What types of abilities would they have? Elves are stealth fighters so a campaign against them promised a completely different play style than the orcs.

What about leading an army to Erebor and storming it with the help of the remaining dragons of the North? All of these campaigns would have been awesome but instead the game decided to cut itself off in favor of long term multiplayer play and microtransactions.

This is starting to make me really angry again so I better wrap up.

SoW is an improvement on the original in every way except in play control and especially writing. If you’re a Tolkien fan you’ll probably be pretty mad at all the liberties by the end. Nonetheless the game play and innovation alone make this game worth a serious look.

Final score (ignoring the story): 9/10