‘’Middle-earth: Shadow of War is an action role-playing video game developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It’s the sequel to 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 10, 2017.’’

The game looks stunning! You get to explore gigantic maps while riding mythological beasts, fly through the skies on Drakes (dragons), climb and manoeuvre around buildings which all adds to the addictiveness of this game. Very similar to the Assassins Creed game mechanics, but somehow fully realised. If you take Assassins Creed and add to it the Lord of the Rings lore, you get this game: monsters, conquering nations and the overall classic RPG element that is missing from many games nowadays. It’s such a vast tale filled with familiarity, but also wonder. You’re going to see characters you’re familiar with but also plenty of new ones. It’s structured in a legendary narrative that combines many different storylines instead of having a single simple story. The different quests see you fulfilling many story points that ultimately bring about massive repercussions for the Middle-earth, but you can uncover those for yourself. You’ll do missions set around the world of Lord of the Rings. Each nation is crafted excellently, serving a major purpose for the story and to give you a fantastic experience.

Shadow of War is immense, and the upgraded combat and movement system is varied and fun and if you get the expansions it’s even MORE immense!The developers of this game gave their all into its creation, to the point where you can personalise your own style to the letter by unlocking a wealth of new abilities across the massive skill trees. Also, any game that allows you to control a dragon’s mind and ride it him around in an open world, breathing fire into other monsters like some sort of medieval GTA..it’s a triple A game in my book. There is also the online conquest system, that allows you to play online with other people and attack their fortresses. Oh that’s right…fortresses, the most fun part of this game is the conquest of the nations: attacking each nations Overlord by the Orcs you conquered with your own hands and when you’re done with the main game, you can focus on getting the best of the best orcs to make the best of the best fortress in order to defend and attack others in a sort of online but not really fully online experience…but in a good way that makes the game shine!

There are so many things to do in this game, you could easily spend 100+ hours on purely side quests to get a bunch of useful legendary equipment for the more grind/completionist crowd of gamers.

The only negative I can think of for this game is the Orcs personalities, which as I’ve noticed from other people’s reviews it’s something they loved, having hundreds of unique Orcs and people voice acting so many lines over so many Orcs…and the Nemesis system which actually allows the Orcs to remember you if they killed you before, this is absolutely fun and charming for the first dozen hours of the game , but after that it sort of becomes repetitive and you want to say to them ‘’Oh shush already! Just let me kill you!’’.

Aside from that nitpicking, it’s one of my favourite single-player games of all time, and I recommend it to anyone who is on a budget and can only afford to buy 1 high end game a year. I would rate it a solid 8/10. A masterpiece. 

Review by: Savvas Constantinou (DragTV)