 Before I spend 20-something minutes talking about what Shadow of War does right and wrong in terms of gameplay and story, I would like to condone the widely-despised real-money marketplace which is in the game. While the gameplay doesn't suffer from this edition, it's my belief that the reasons behind putting the service in Shadow of War have to do with the normalisation of a predatory business practice that has set out to hurt consumers for the monetary benefit of industry giant Warner Brothers, which owes developer Monolet. This point has been reinforced by Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed Origins, as well as, to a more disgusting extent, EA and Star Wars Battlefront II's paid-to-win loot boxes. I despise this practice and hope none of you, dear viewers, will take to using real money to unlock what was previously unlockable with cheat codes. With that out of way, let's talk about Shadow of War. The eternal annoyance of the sequels to open world games is you have to start over from zero. So it is with our protagonists, after unsuccessfully dispelling the shadows of Mordor. In the first game, the star team of Talenn and Celebrimbo have crafted a shiny new ring of power, only to lose it and forget just about every awesome skill that could be performed at the last game's end. It's the rule of the land, but letters instead of delving feet first into the story, take a look at the orcs. Green orcs, grey orcs, free orcs, slave orcs, stick them on the stick, they're all the same. The Nemesis system, the most interesting bit about the first game, has gone on to considerably change how captains work this time around. Captains still have traits, additional attacks and abilities that each orc tries to kill you with, but those have been revamped. These traits now depend upon what their base and advanced classes are, as well as partially by the tribes the orcs are part of. There are six tribes in the base game with two more to be added as DLC over the next couple of months, and here's a couple of the classes you'll be crossing swords or arrows or javelins or maces or other deadly weapons with. The Beastmaster. Not only will beasts not attack those, they'll usually ride and summon Karagors to make life extra difficult. Sometimes, if you're lucky, some of them will even summon a Grog. These gigantic beasts are the life of the party. And you don't even want to know what the Drake's have to offer. The Commander. It's all on the label. This class has all kinds of nasty abilities to buff and summon allied orcs. Warbanners, summoning reinforcements, wandering groups of orcs. Nasty boys' doze. Then there's a tank. Wonder what doze fellows do. Tanks are sturdy orcish fighters, most often armed with a big ass shield and spear, quick to adapt and able to withstand loads of punishment. Trackers seek you out no matter where you hide, and will set up annoying traps to disable and impede you. They'll also track you, as the name implies, even when you try to escape. Slayers are extremely skilled fighters, usually equipped with a pair of axes. They possess exceptional combat prowess and skills. Tricksters are experts in nastiness and the unexpected. They confuse bewilder and fill the hearts of everyone with joy. Okay, I lied about that one, but they do fill your heart with pointy things. Most captains and other officers also have weaknesses, mortal as well as such weaknesses that dizzy or otherwise incapacitate and terrify them. Using those is all but demanded of you, if you're playing on the nemesis difficulty, as I did for the later part of my claytru. Gosh, that's a mouthful of orcs to give me a wash of the taste. Other than reintroducing this improved nemesis system, Act 1 reacquaints you with a bunch of open world activities in the dual starting zones of Minositil and Kirit Ungol. Chapter 1 has the objective of introducing the story that glues it all together as well. And how does Shadow of War achieve that? Three words. Sexy Spider Lady. I'm now going to catch you up real quick on the events that lead up to the Shadows of War. Are you ready? I'm not ready, it's about to be intense. Following the events of Shadows of Mordom, Talin and Celebrimbor forge a new ring of power in order to banish Saron forever. Don't know who those are, Celebrimbor is the greatest Elven smith of the second age. Deceived and seduced by Saron to craft the rings of power then betrayed, tortured and after a brief wandering, snatching drab, killed. Talin is the most unlucky ranger of Gondor in Middle Earth's history. His family is murdered when the black gate is redecorated, his throat is slit, his body used for the dark ritual to bind Celebrimbor's spirit to this plane. Together they have wacky adventures, a bad cop gondoc, cop routine, a common vengeance fetish and now a strange fascination with the Palantir within Minus Eight Hill. With a helpful tip and a ring-snatching drab, courtesy of Sexy Spider Lady Shelob, the stage is set and the first act begins. It tells of the fall of Minus Eight Hill in a strange relationship between the Ranger and Shelob. The spider shows him visions which I have to say look pretty great. A few Gondorian characters are also introduced but their stories aren't all that compelling. Shelob, strange as it is to see her in a human form and acting as a dark gladrile is probably the most compelling story element in this first chapter of the amazing fanfic that is Shadow of War. And I say fanfiction because Shadow of War really takes her guidelines, not rules, approach to Tolkien's texts. If you're a hardcore Tolkien fan, which I am, but you can't accept loose interpretations, which I can, this game might not be for you. But it is a glorious sort of fanfiction from time to time and I'll tell you that, seeing Shelob fight Nazgul's while wearing a ring of power, it has a certain appeal to that kid I used to be, the one who'd strike action figures against one another while imagining awesome contests of power going on between them. After the 5-10 hours of your all-killing refreshment course, it's finally time to get into the most talked-about feature of this game. Building your own army to contest every fortress within Mordor, or most of them anyway, no longer are you constrained within just two territories that number jumps to five with the introduction of Nurlen, a lush jungle-inspired island of green within the darkness of Mordor, Seregos, the snowy area in whose centre is a near-golden fortress, and finally Gorgoroth, the volcanic region nearest Baradur. I enjoyed exploring these zones, each of them was different enough not to bore me out of my mind as I collected artifacts it held in, and the other collectibles generously sprawled throughout each of the five zones in the game. My personal favourite collectibles were Shelob's webs, since they each built to a cutscene that I finally unlocked when I got all 15 of said webs. The voice actress for Shelob, Polyana McIntosh, did a really sorry job with the material she was given. It's in the nature of this kind of game to have plenty of collectibles in a mostly static world. I say static, but here's what I loved most about Shadows of War. The Nemesis system takes away that static feeling. Orcs will ambush you, come back from the dead after you've dispatched them, and turn the new after you've killed their blood brothers, or done them some sort of wrong. For example, if you hit your bodyguard a few times too many in the course of battle, he might just decide to turn against you and turn it to go screw yourself or eat track. There's other options of this besides, but each time one of these happens, it's a damn thrill. At this point, even though I had tuned the difficulty up from normal to Nemesis, I still found the game really really easy. Sure, I will die every once in a while, but not because my opponents overwhelm me as much as because of my tendency to get distracted, or, more likely, to advance the careers of Orcs I found particularly funny. And when the game does get a difficulty spike in Chapter 4, it's not necessarily the good kind, but that's all I'll say for now. How about Forceful Sieges? They are epic endeavours, but quite different from what I expected. To be clear, I was looking forward to large-scale siege warfare between two clashing armies while I took a more active command. What Shadows of War offers isn't bad, but it's different. Forceful Sieges consist of picking several commanders among your chosen elite and purchasing one of three upgrades for each commander. These might be trolls to break walls, a wild rake appearing in the middle of battle, siege beasts firing different kinds of munitions and so on and so forth. This planning stage takes place before the battle itself begins, as for the actual business of doing glorious combat. Not simple enough. You capture indiscible fortresses within the fortress while battling it out with those lovely chums, the captains and their war chiefs. Once done with this, you face the overlord of the fortress in glorious combat. For some reason, despite the fact that you've got about 10 captains behind you, especially if you dominate instead of killing the enemy captains, you always face these powerful legendary orcs where you're lonesome, with the exception of your bodyguard and loyal beastie. That final battle with a dirge of enemy orcs appearing can be either exciting or grind down to a halt and become a bore, since you're in an enclosed space and a lot of your agency is kind of taken away. You don't really have the option of going stealthy when fighting against an overlord since, you know, one room for walls. To get to the siege you need to prepare, which will take a fair amount of time. If you're looking to be optimal, the first action you take when you enter a new region is to find a bunch of worms and squeeze them for intel. Find a bunch of captains, preferably ones who pull double duty as bodyguard war chiefs. Once you dominate those, you can command them to betray the war chiefs. You then beat the latter ones within an inch of their life and either chop off their heads or take control of them too. I have got inside spies during the siege and the defenses of the keep are disabled for your lovely warriors to prance inside and murder everyone. It's simple enough, but takes some time, especially when you do it four or six times in a row. It gets a bit too frustrating at the end of it. With that in mind, let's move on to the discussion of story quests within this chapter. There's plenty of them revolving around several characters and the best ones have to be with Bruce. Oh, Bruce, you clever, ugly troll, you! Bruce might just be the best character introduced in the entire game. He's hilarious, he's an optimist, he's voiced by that guy who played a werewolf in Teen Wolf, and he was one of my personal favorite nemesis. I'll tell you the entire story at the end of the video. His role in Chapter 2 is as follows. He was the very first captain I turned and helped me build my army. He gave me funny quips about how I should go on about that. And of course he eventually stabbed me in the back with a spear and threw my corpse off a fortress tower. Thanks, Bruce. I wasn't too pleased with that. What followed was a lengthy game of cat and mouse through every zone in Mordor. Bruce kidnapped Ranger. No, not me. Ranger is another or log, or troll. The best friend of returning little creepy orc, Radbag, who is still hilarious for the record. Eventually I got up to Bruce in Gorgorot, but I didn't kill him, no. For his betrayal, I broke his mind, making an example that served as warning to anyone. Considering betrayal of the Bright Lord, the other particularly entertaining questline in this chapter had me battling a Balrog, while riding a nature spirit with a questionable accent, actually it was an awful accent, and then falling a necromantic cultist from raising the Balrog and creating yet another undead faction of Orcs in Mordor. Dang the ghost, that didn't happen. Oh, and speaking about accents, it really was, it was a horrible accent, that. It was like something came alive from the Witcher tree. An elf appears, and she's voiced by Laura Bailey, and that makes her cool. You know, Laura Bailey from Critical Role? Yeah, that one. Awesome. You'll fight and unlock bits of story about different Nazguls with her, and those bits of lore are really interesting. You should have given me your daughter's hand when I asked. The daughter's safe return. Don't fight him. If you kill me, you'll start a war. About Gondorians? Rescue missions that you don't know where, since one of the DLCs next year will revolve around that particular storyline. And that's about it. In as concise an explanation as possible, the quests themselves don't introduce particularly interesting gameplay, but they do serve to break through the nemesis missions and fortress siege preparations that can get a teeny tiny tad monotonous after a fashion. Once all four fortresses within Mordor are yours, you can move on to the next chapter. I finished all the secondary quests by this point, as I got a prompt that if I moved on, nothing would ever be the same. 2014's Shadow of Mordor had one of the most forgettable, unfulfilling final battles, a cutie against Sauron himself. Its sequel doesn't quite fall so low in terms of disappointment, but this third act, which is for all purposes where our narrative comes to its fitting end, makes something of a mess. And when I say fitting end, we'll get back to that one in a second. Seeing as this chapter introduces preciously little in the way of new mechanics, you might as well be warned, I'll be discussing story spoilers, although if ever there were spoilers not to care about, is the ones about Shadow of War's story. Flipping a page of the previous game's script, we're once again attacking Baradur, along with Eltario and the host of Orc Minions. Once again, reality faces expectation and is found wanting. What should have been an epic battle between attackers and besieged, he is little more than moving from point to point to the long, narrow wall, defeating captains who told me we'd met and that we were Nemesis, and yet none of them seemed even a little bit familiar to me. Guess, my particular iteration of the Nemesis system got a bit screwy this time. This wall sprint culminates with a fight between Talion and Isildur, that blow whose weak will we can blame for all middle-earthly crappiness. The ring rate challenges you and battle ensues. It was bogged down by your very own captains, try as I did to hit the Nazgûl, I kept stabbing my own damn orcs. They crowded around him but did no damage whatsoever. It infuriated me to no end and took way longer than necessary. With the defeat of Isildur, the relationship between Ranger and Raid finally reached its lowest after Talion releases Isildur, despite Kalebrimbo's desire to enslave the ring rate and force him to serve. Kalebrimbo is right. We fight and fight but evil always returns. Talion, we can end this here. You must ensure water is restored to light, not darkness. One dark lord for another. This is not the end I have fought for! I gave you sight and yet you still do not see. You showed me a fate. I could not change. You are wrong. When Kalebrimbo forged a new ring of power, I saw where your path ended. Locked in battle against Sauron at the top of Barador. And you won. Sauron was enslaved and the bright lord rose in his place. armies of Mordor marched forth under his banner and Middle Earth fell under his heel. Is the future I fought against? The future you prevented? Because you saw Kalebrimbo for what he was. Your war is not yet ended Talion. Are there a bright lord or a dark lord rules Barador? The balance of power must be maintained or all of Middle Earth will. Minus Morgul. Yes. From there Mordor can be held back. That's right. Talion manages to survive via arachnid intervention. A self-spirit and assassin go on their merry way to leech the big bad of Middle Earth and supposedly take over the world. What follows is Talion's new look. A lovely spectral green as well as spooky orange eyes and a semi-demonic appearance overall. I like this new grave walker. He looks like his fed up with everyone's bull. He dispatches Minus Morgul's orcs with a mix of undead and ghosts courtesy of his new power set. Just slightly different from his old one of course. And he follows this up by kicking the witch king's incorporeal form into temporary Yelong Oblivion. By Matt Mercer or at least his incorporeal voice. This action then switches to Eltariel and Kalebrimbo battling it out with Sauron. This fight isn't a bad one although I would have liked for Sauron to have had some unique animations. His model used several animations I've grown sick of seeing after performing an execution for example and let's just say they could have done a bit more to fill this battle as epic as it should have been. Then this happens. And this my dear viewers is how the game ends. Gasp. But wait there's more. Could it be a final chapter to clear up this rushed mess of an ending? Spoiler. Haha. No. You know that character in fantasy novels, movies, games? The one that for whatever reason gets the shortest end of the stick. So short it's not even recognisable as a stick anymore. More of a toothpick really. Talon is that character. He's been that character all along since he started off guarding the black gate which is by and by the worst job in fantasy novels everywhere, short of cleaning the Sauron's petrol's chamber pot, I think. But things have only gotten worse. And in Chapter 4 Shadow Wars it gets as bad as it can. In terms of narrative though, I'm not exaggerating when I say there's exactly three minutes of it. Chapter 4 is a replay of Chapter 2 with a few differences. It starts off easy enough with the defence of one of your thoughts. Defending is fun enough at first but holding points and defeating waves after waves of captains gets really really old. Once you're doing your fifth defence within the confines of two hours and a half. You see the thought act is divided in ten stages of defending. These stages get tougher and longer, the closer you get to the end. Here the cynic and me can go right ahead and blame Monolith for making this part of the game more demanding in terms of grind in order to force you to buy real money loot boxes. The thing is, it doesn't quite work like that. See by Stage 5 the captains attacking your thoughts have outleveled you by a fairly wide margin. More annoying than this is the fact that if you die while defending, even after defeating every captain but one or two, every point is under your control and you've got twice as many captains as you began with. You still lose the thought that denies all sorts of logic and pisses me off, frankly. So it's at this point you think this is done for the sake of real money micro transactions, possibly but I don't think so. You see no matter where you get your orcs from, they can be a higher level than you, which doesn't remedy the aforementioned problem of orcs overpowering me with their higher level. No, what is demanded is grind, pure and simple, doing more of the same menial tasks I had done for over 35 hours up to the point of starting the work in this review and I almost gave up at that exact point. But there I took my time and that's the best way to enjoy this false chapter. No more of playing Shadow of War hours at an end. I instead play the siege or two for half an hour at a time and no matter whether I won or lost the siege, I didn't bother getting fired up about it. That is the best way to go about it. Narrative wise, everything ends with the basic idea that Talion keeps Mordor in the perpetual state of conflict until the three people of Middle Art are ready to wage the War of the Ring. By the war's beginning, Isildur's ring has finally corrupted Talion and forced him to join the Nine. I could give the developer some leeway and pretend that this entire act is a weird metaphor about how war never changes and how vengeance never brings about anything good and nice. But if the nemesis system has stopped me anything, here's that vengeance has never tasted sweeter. I'll leave you with a few parting remarks and questions that keep bothering me. First of all, what happened with the new ring? Really, what the hell happened with Celebrimbor's ring? Did Altariel run off with it? Did it remain in Saro Brimbor's possession? However you want to call. That weird amalgamation twisting of Tolkien's law? If so, why didn't he use it to take control of Talion's armies? Yes, yes, internal fight for control. Well, it obviously didn't last too long and rings don't run off sharp black towers by their lonesome, I imagine. While the story itself may not be amazing, the voice actors really, really are. We've got Troy Baker behind Talion and Alastair Duncan behind Celebrimbor, Liam O'Brien reprises an excellent anti-circus, like Gollum, along with many other industry professionals like the aforementioned Matt Mercer and Laura Bailey. I do believe that everyone's favourite, Null and North, voices a fantastically creepy necromantic orc. The nemesis system is fantastic, creating genuinely entertaining stories that will live with me much longer than the shadows of war's secondary questlines. These stories also make a whole lot more sense than the game's narrative ending. The best storytelling is born from the various interactions with these ridiculous orcs. I've met Mad Orcs, Poet Orcs, Bard Orcs and many more besides. They have all wanted to cut my head off for some reason, but I cannot say that I blame them. As for a personal nemesis story, let's get back to Bruce, the most wonderful character in the game. He kept returning and coming after me, unhinged as the poor old lad was. He would whimper, not my fort, as he'd come at me. I cut off his head, of course. A few hours later, I guess he showed up, stitched up and whimpering even more than before. So I got him to his knees, ready to execute him again, and then he defied death. I just couldn't bury that creepy little spark, that little flame of life within him I could not extinguish it. So I once again converted him to serve me. Might just make him an overlord to one of these days. But I will miss bullying this particular troll. None of his brethren are quite as fun as he was. Before I go, we can't forget about Skor. This one gets 8 out of 9 ring rates. Because why the hell not? Thank you for watching! If you enjoyed this, press that like button, consider subscribing, consider sharing, do all that good stuff. I'll see you again soon with videos about Hellblade's newest sacrifice, pray, and hopefully Wolfenstein 2. If you'd like to check my previous review, go ahead and press that sweet link on the screen. It ain't half bad. Bye!