2/5 ★ – frannybeltoni's review of Middle-earth: Shadow of War.

This was upsetting as I thought Shadow of Mordor was pretty decent, and though the story was a bit of a slog I actually was really enjoying the new additions this game had. Then the perpetual online features reared their heads and ruined the end of the game for me. As I said, the story is pretty boring, with uninteresting characters, semi-interesting design but the few types of missions are too overused. The real draw of the game is the nemesis system, and that aspect is well developed. The characters have interesting and unique personality quirks, and seeing the ways they can interact with eachother and you is fun. Some of the characters feel like fodder, but that makes the unique connections you have even better. The problem is the nemesis system isn't well integrated into the story. Your minions don't show up in the main story, which it would have been hard to do with so many combinations, but it made it feel unattached. Two side quest chains involve the nemesis system, one being Bruz, an NPC you have to convert through the story, who you do missions for. These missions are the only ones that actually incorporate your captains, and I felt they worked quite well. The ending of the questline does fall flat, but the twists and mission structure felt the least repetitive of all the side content. The other questline only actually incorporates it into the final part, but it was really effective, showing you the major captains you took out along the way, and I would have loved this to be part of the final boss instead. Sadly, the best part of the game and the game's only original mechanic is not at all incorporated into the actual story and movement to moment gameplay. The other big issue is the push into online content. This game is a few years old, and hopefully we're moving away from this, but making every game have forced multiplayer elements is going to seriously hurt the replay value of games of this era. Most open world games like this have huge maps cluttered in stuff, which is annoying with missions that perpetually reappear, like captain missions. But this issue is made far worse by having online missions, that clutter up the screen even more, and count towards completion. They're utterly pointless, and as I eluded to, ruin the ending. Just like Mordor the game doesn't have an actual conclusion, but more like Arkham Knight, the game wants you to mess about in its world doing things you don't care about to keep the player invested so they'll buy dlc and micro transactions (that have since been removed). It's a painful experience as the new ways you interact with orcs, the gear system to make hunting orcs more worthwhile and the more interesting skills you have feel like the smaller part of the game, and the game is instead more interested in a boring storyline and selling things to you.