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Shadow of War review in 2 and a half minutes

In 2014 the predecessor of this open world
action adventure was released and it was praised for it’s nemesis system where orcs would
hold grudges against the player which would make the experience a lot more personal. Now three years later Monolith have returned
with a new installment with extra content not all of which good. The graphics haven’t really improved and
in some areas the original looked better, but the world building feels more complete
now with more unique locations and the music also helps with than. As in the previous game the combat flow is
still good and now there is skill tree which is a bit more extensive. Something that stood out was the phenomenal
options menu, containing many graphical and audio settings as well as the option to show
or hide each HUD element individually. Most of the quest lines are diverse and interesting
but similarly to the first game, the 30 hour main story is nonsensical but it does helps
string together the different quests. After you finish those you are left in a freeroam
mode called the Shadow Wars, which can take up to 10 hours to complete and is very grindy
as you have to kill or capture orcs and used them to defend your fortresses many times
to unlock the game’s real ending. And I don’t have a problem with grindy content
but it seems that it’s only function here, is to sell lootboxes, which is something I
passionately despise and would like to see eradicated, especially from singleplayer games. It’s a practice that has no benefit for
the consumer and it’s main way to create money is to pray upon people with addiction
problems. But back to the gameplay, as good as the options
menu is, the others are slow and unintuitive, for example disassembling an item requires
holding down the button for 2 seconds, which becomes excessively slow when dealing with
the many garbage items thrown at the player. And while the combat works well when fighting
a few enemies, when you face a horde of orcs, the very aggressive auto-targeting becomes
a real pain, because it removes the finer control from the player and turns into a handicap. All in all Shadow of War is an ok game, it
feels worse compared to shadow of Mordor as the nemesis system has been gutted in favour
of loot boxes and very little has actually been improved. I wouldn’t recommend this game, unless you
are a big fan of lord of the rings and haven’t played the first one, but even then buying
it would mean voting with your wallet for singleplayer microtransactions and we definitely
don’t want that.