Middle-earth: Shadow of War expands the Nemesis sandbox into a full strategic layer, and the expansion mostly justifies its sprawl. A ranger and the wraith bound to him build an army to conquer Sauron’s fortresses, dominating captains, planting spies and staging betrayals until every warchief on a map either serves or falls. The moral ambiguity of the Bright Lord plot threads through the campaign, Shelob’s memories and Gondorian artifacts reward lore attention, and the whole structure runs far longer than its predecessor while sustaining the same counter-combat core. This is a bigger, busier machine, and its best gears still turn beautifully.
Sieges stand as the clear peak. Assaulting a fortress with the army cultivated over dozens of hours produces the game’s most epic spectacles, with warchiefs, drums, trolls and friendly captains converging on gates and courtyards, and the payoff of flipping a stronghold to the Bright Lord’s banner lands every time. The friction is that the spectacle burns briefly: sieges are among the shortest activities in a very long game, and the pacing never gives the best part of the design the room it deserves.
Army-building carries the addictive loop between assaults. Dominating captains, promoting traitors and seeding spies trivialises warchief hunts in the most satisfying way, and the temptation of one more recruitment proves hard to resist, turning a revenge plot into a collecting spree. The Uruk roster itself is a genuine upgrade: designs are varied enough that two captains rarely look alike, personalities run from cowardly schemers to bombastic loyalists, and the gross factor has been dialled up along with the character work. Captains who remember deaths, betray, adapt and rise again make every encounter personal.
Enemy adaptation cuts both ways. Facing a captain who has learned to counter favoured tools is fair design on paper, yet certain defenders with vault breakers and enrage spam become infuriating rather than tactical, and targeting in crowds remains as messy as before. Climbing has regressed too, with grip registration noticeably worse than in the previous game, and worm availability swings wildly by region, making army intel a formality in some strongholds and a guessing game in others. An in-game timer that misreports play length is a small oddity worth noting.
The Shadow Wars endgame asks for the same fortress-defence loop repeated across all conquered strongholds, a grindy structure whose shape owes much to launch-era monetisation, with loot boxes in the original design suggesting how much of the grind was commercial rather than mechanical. On modern balance, levelling and money flow generously enough that the loop is more tolerable than its reputation, but the repetition is real. The skill system’s one-skill-at-a-time limitation also feels arbitrary, and removing it via mod reveals how little the restriction added.
The Blade of Galadriel chapter hands over light powers so overwhelming that the challenge evaporates, in a short arc that nearly maxes its skill tree before ending. Desolation of Mordor takes the opposite approach: a mortal protagonist hiring mercenaries in a desert campaign with a grappling glider, and a permadeath rule that lends genuine stakes, rewarding a cautious route through its map. The two chapters make a worthwhile, contrasting pair.
Overall, the sieges, the personality-rich orc sandbox and the betrayals-and-spies loop deliver a strategic revenge fantasy nothing else matches, and the combat core stays satisfying across a very long campaign. The Shadow Wars grind, regressed climbing and occasionally infuriating adaptive defenders weigh the tail sections down without dimming the high of turning Sauron’s own army against him.
