Let me start out by saying that i have never in my life when playing an hack and slash game feelt so much pain in my right hand.
You are spamming the x button literally the whole entire time!
So the game isent bad, i was kinda addicted to it the first long hours. I do love the stealth and i do love the brutal fights you have against orcs, and that you can kill them in so many ways.
They did make improvments in this game. The orcs have more personality now than the first game so you dont feel like your killing the same orc 20 times over. The enviroment is more colorful, for me its nice but for some maybie the first games enviroment makes sence when it comes to a world of orc, that maybie it should look dark and miserable.
The armour drop is an nice improvement aswell where you can get nice armour by killing cheif orcs, kill an legendary and you get good armour. You also get gems of killing orcs that you can put on your weapons and armour, when equipped each gems can provide you whit special bonuses. There are 3 type of gems you can choose from, potency, vitality and wealth. Some gems you can increase health other makes your weapon do more damage, so you need to understand the gem system and trust me its not hard.
Now we shall go to the essence of the game wich is:
1. Making your own army
2. take over fortresses
3. defend fortresses
You basically recruit an orc whit decent level, you can level him up by giving him comands to, for example kill other orcs.
Every orc has different abillites besides talking you to death, Poision orc, fire orc, trickster orc and much, much more.
It is like so , so you can have more strategy when planing your attack against other orcs whit same abillites and ofc, every orc has its own weakness.
You can ask the orcs to spy on an orc cheif for you and you can have your own body guard that you can call upon when things gets to messy.
If your order an orc to spy then he will be backstabbing the cheif orc when your about to fight him, sometimes he dies right away sometimes he doesent, it al depends on hes weakness.
Okey you can plan how to take over the fortress, each orc you recruit,when your going to war has its own abilites that you can unlock.
When taking over a fortress you will first have to dominate places in the fotress whit your orc army then the last head orc will be your own fight.So choose your bodyguard well.
You can like in shadow of mordor ride beasts, but you can only ride dragons in shadow of war. not my favorite animal but good to have sometimes when taking over. The dragon for me is to slow.
There is alot of side things besides killing orcs, there is also loot of old artifacts if you want to recover more lore. and also you can fin memories if you want to recover celebrimbors memory.
Then we have "words" that you can recover to finish a poem wall so you can get pro armour.
You can also do challanges as celebrimbor to get new weapons or gems dempending on how well you do the challange.
I should mention that there is an in game shop where you can buy war chests or loot chests for ingame "money" or real money... and i dont understand why anyone would spend real money on that.
War chest: you can buy good war orcs. I would advice to do it late in the game.
My opinion:
I love the lord of the rings and i did really enjoy shadow of mordor.But shadow of mordor alone can get really repetetive, shadow of war took it to another level.
After a cuple of hours the game becomes repetetive and a huge chore.
Building your army and taking over fortress takes alot of time, and it makes it worse when the orcs can shut up!
Thats the biggest problem i had whit this game, you can fight up to 4 orcs at the same time and you cant skipp their dialoug! Why dident they reconsider that or think that the player might get fed up whit it?
If the orc cheif kills you ,then you have to hear hes talk al over again. It is so bad.
So not only is it a pain in the A** to take over a fotress the 5 time, the orc just wont shut up, and that is one of the reason i uninstalled the game whit out knowing if i got to the ending or not because i did get confused.
The last thing i did was taking back al the fortress i fought for,and it was there i uninstalled , i just had enough. That is just a bad way of draging out the game, really really bad.
I remeber killing the witch king then taking over hes powers, and when i looked that up in youtube to se the ending , then that was one of them and i got super confused when i had to take over al my fortresses.
I dont think they tought this one trough, i dont thing that they took their time thinking what could make the gamer tired after a while. I truly do not dare buy anymore lord of the rings after this one if they will ever make one. They honestly need to understand what could get to repetetive.
The game isent bad but for me shadow of mordor is better.
