Middle-earth: Shadow of War Review (slackurate™)
If you are familiar with American Outsider Art, you may have come across Henry Darger. Darger spent the majority of his life writing and illustrating In the Realms of the Unreal, over 15 thousand pages of literature describing a massive conflagration between two diametrically opposed forces. Good is entirely good, evil is purely wicked - there is no ambiguity. The epic details chapters of this all-encompassing struggle with breathtaking heroism and unspeakable savagery, which only really ended because the author was dying of old age.
That is the reference that comes to mind most when playing Shadow of War. You are Talion, a ranger who, by all biological metrics, is very dead, but has bonded with elf wraith Celebrimbor to fight Sauron in the big baddie's quest to corrupt all of Middle-earth. The means to do this is a ring macguffin that will convert orcs fighting under Sauron's flag to yours. Yadda yadda.
You stealth and hack-and-slash through rather open strongholds leading to a fortress controlled by a hierarchy of orcs - outlined in this game's signature (and, like... patented??) Nemesis system. You can slay captains or convert them to your side. Each captain is named and titled, giving you a shortform biography of what ugliness they got up to before you got there. It may not be super deep, but it is effective in producing what feels like a land with history and activity - there are things going on without you. They also "remember" their last encounters with you - if you fled, if they retreated, if you failed to kill them. And by your undead nature, I feel the game wants you to treat your own death as part of an ongoing narrative. Orcs level up when they kill you. There exists a story where a lowly grunt takes on a name and title after clubbing your skull in, then moves up the orc corporate ladder.
You are given/can unlock many tools in stealth and combat and there are many possible ways to encounter orcs. These orcs are, like, busy. There are encounters - duels, camp raids, caragor hunts - that you can ambush, and those not involved wander in zones around the map. Only a select number of orcs - the Overlord, the Warchiefs, the Outpost Leaders - are really siloed, hiding behind walls of gameplay significance.
Depending on your view, the process of picking off orcs with sword, bow, or dagger, converting some to your side, leveling them by sending them on missions (or buying levels outright like the industrialist you are), and leading your army to a big setpiece confrontation with the Overlord might be very repetitive. A Strong Story this game... really does not have. It's big bad Sauron, all hope being lost, and timely intervention to rescue mankind from desolation. However, the game can also be a platform for your own story and experimentation.
I can understand why someone might play this game for hundreds of hours, and it's based on these horrible, ugly, petty orcs. Every orc presents the chance for a mini-epic to play out over hours. I was killed by an orc, he leveled up, I challenged him again, he taunted me for my lack of skill, he killed me again, he became a Warchief, I challenged him again, and he gave me one last insult for how long this took before I cleaved his head off. Thus ends the saga of Dush the Uncatchable. And that's one saga in a potentially never-ending story between you and these orcs, separate from the game lore entirely. Add in loot mechanics and instanced online play and you get a great bad case of the 'to-do's' - always something to collect, always something to level, always something to grind, always something to challenge.
Thus, I return to Darger. I won't claim to understand what in someone's imagination could continue to inspire until the longest manuscript in the English language was produced, but the feelings of it are in this game for me. Conflict never ends, there is always something bigger and nastier around the corner, always some insurmountable foe to... surmount. But I am a person who derives hours of entertainment checking the pockets and corners of games like Bioshock, Fallout 3, and Prey for my own personal narrative content outside of the Big Story. What that impulse is for environment in those games, it's more for character in Shadow of War. And that may not be appealing to some at all. But, I've got a sick orc named Ukbuk the Scorpion and I'm going to make him Overlord.