izigame.me

Manswine!
Oooh, lookee what we got ’ere. A filthy, softskinned maggot squirmin’ about on the ground, tryin’ to dig up information for this lit’l ole’ gob ’o software ‘Shadow of War’. Well, if it’s dirt you want, Gamewalker, you came to the right orc. I’ll be more than happy to slice your head open with this sharp axe ’ere and fill it with all kinds of useful tidbits about this game. Yeah, I’ll pluck out those juicy lit’l eyeballs of yours and bob them into a vat of boiling facts and features, then squish the remains into your ears so you can hear how entertaining this game is and… and… then I’ll tear off your boots and make you eat your own feet while cracking your buttcheeks open to bite out your… your… rect… umm… uhh… Ohhh, just read it and bugger off, already! Geeeaaaaaah!
The first thing you’ll encounter when you start up SOW is the intro theme song. It’s a short piece, but a thoughtful, moody composition and gives reassurance you’re about to embark on a deep gaming experience. In addition to the music, sound effects and excellent voice acting, there are other aspects to admire, some of which were improved upon from it’s predecessor SOM, most notably the size of the download file. 107Gb. Stop rubbing your eyes, it won’t change what you just read. 107Gb. Save them for all the crying you’ll do as you wait for it to ever finish. If you have a crappy connection like me, you must resolve to the fact you can’t do sh!t on the internet for the next 30 hours. It is, however, remarkably stable for a game of this size, only crashing once 62 hours in because I didn’t run the file integrity checker. Sadly, the save file did not survive.

Once in, you’ll find yourself playing a grieving, recently deceased ranger of Gondor, Talion (or, as they called him at the tavern Hard ’n Stiff, ‘Talion the Stallion’). On top of this, he’s also possessed by the wraith of Celebrimbor, an elf with a grudge against the main antagonist, Sauron. Think of him as a strong-willed, yet naggy wife no exorcism can remove. Still, he offers useful information to keep Talion advancing along with the main plotline.
The gear he gets to wield and wear reside under an interface of mediocre design. After you pick them up—and you’ll pick up plenty—they each go into long, long scrolling lists with no end in sight. If you want to remove them, you must pay for this service. What?!? Instead of forcing us to deplete our hard-earned game funds for their disposal, why not just let us sell them?
Like many RPGs, the gear can be improved, although in this game it took a rather bland design approach. Collecting augment gems is good in theory, but when there are five tiers, 2-5 requiring 3 gems from the previous tier, you’ll need to collect 81 t1 gems to acquire one t5. Despite this daunting task, however, there are quest rewards giving higher tier gems as a shortcut, making it somewhat less painful. It’s not until you can mount a graug will you reduce this from a slow, repetitious nightmare to a hilarious stomp and smush farming fest as you clear out entire Uruk encampments with your three-toed 7k horsepowered rototiller. I had all of the top gems by level 30. (Shhh! Don’t tell them I did this.)
Character progression is borderline cliché, but it gets the job done. Most of the skills are useful and provide new and entertaining feats to perform in the game. Skill point allocation isn’t balanced, however. By level 38, I had—what I believed to be—all the useful ones. By 50, I had 20 extra. Hey! Can I sell these too? Sigh.
Controlling Talion is one of the best features of the game. The player motion is smooth, especially in combat, and you’ll want to explore every buttcrack and crevice to be found in all the beautifully crafted maps spread throughout this seemingly seamless game. However, before you can even begin to immerse yourself in this amazing kinematic experience, you must first pass… The Keyboard Remapping Test. At first, it seems like any other game: click on the ‘W’, then click on ‘NUM 8’ and ‘Woohoo!’ you can now move Talion forward with your shiny new movement key. But—for some neuron-disconnected reason—it doesn’t quite work this way. Take this disturbing example: If you remap the key to enter stealth mode, sixteen other keys will also be idiotically remapped to enter stealth mode and—for whatever reason—flush your neighbor’s apartment toilet. “Ha ha! Flooded your bathroom!”

There are numerous feats your hero can acquire to battle his foes, and it’s a simple task of paying attention to the visual clues—both deliberate and as a consequence of the rendered scene—in order to triumph amid a swarm of thirty, angry orcs. I couldn’t get enough of this to the point I was picking fights just to do combat, even if I got no advancement beyond a few augment gems. Screw the plot! Clang! Clunk! Smash! Smush! Stomp stomp stomp! Aaaaand… off I go to Combat Anonymous.
The foes you’ll encounter are just as interesting. As indicated by the intro, named orc banter—before they attempt to dispose of you—is hilarious. At first, I thought it would wear me down early in the game, but there are so many of them, it wasn’t until about level 40 I kinda wanted them to shut up and let me smash their heads in. One taunted me for so long, I expected to see an arm come up followed by the other tapping a finger on a wristwatch. He finally ended his babbling bitchboast by declaring he’d rip off all my skin and make me eat it. Kinda meaningless since, at that point, I’d already nibbled off a good portion of my right cheek in frustration. But, it did give me an opportunity to stretch out my neck and get the feeling back in my right shoulder… then eat a bag of popcorn… and half a jar of peanuts. Later, upon reflection, I realized this was by design, and they were shamelessly feeding on my frail and delicate addiction. You… sweet, beautiful bastard designers.
The final ‘boss’ battles—and some of the earlier ones—were tedious, rolling around on the floor like a circus chimp, desperately trying to interpret the clues to defeating the two remaining foes. “Ok, numpad+ numpad+ numpad+. Roll around roll around… squeal like I just got a banana up my butthole numpad+ WHACK! Witch king slap to my head! Owww! That hur… wait! Was that ‘NUM’ I saw? Should I drain… numpad+ numpad+ WHACK! Aww crap, I’m dead I… What? Hit the right mouse button to dodge the death blow? I did! Repeatedly! Nothing happened! Geeeaaaaaah!”
Did you know a keyboard can sail quite far once it clears the window sill? That landscaping guy six blocks down the street? BAM! Beaned right off the deck mower and into a Morgai nest.
As you may have guessed—despite all the whining—this is a positive review. The game is entertaining early on, but then wears you out with what I felt was too long of a level grind as you built Talion up in preparation for the aforementioned cut-and-dry nature of the ending battles. But, I suppose they all come down to those final moments, don’t they. Admittedly, it’s way better than breaking down and deciding on a lame deus ex machina conclusion where Sauron plummets to his death in a tragic outhouse accident because someone forgot to install the toilet seat. “Ha ha! Soiled your robe!”
This impressive production will entertain you for about a hundred hours and, if you have more talent than me to get through those tough final battles without dislocating a knuckle joint, you’ll appreciate how the ending climax ties into the original LOtR storyline.
I recommend this game to all manfilth.
I can’t wait for the third installment of this franchise – Middle Earth: Shadow of Shelob’s Boobs