I don't usually write reviews for game, in fact it's my first one, and the reason behind it is simple: It really deserves it!

I played the first Shadow of Mordor, really liked it, because it's a well made game, there were no major flaws, except it was a little short on maps, I wanted to see more of the Mordor.

And now I have exactly what I wanted!


Graphics are a better, although not mind-blowing for a 2017 game, but what's good is that it's well-optimized! No lags or stuttering, or infamous bugs like you can often see in some open world games (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed.)
Only glitchy stuff I had was that one time my mantle tried to strangle me for like, 3 sec, we've seen far worse.

I really like the music as well, it's really immersive, and goes well with the universe.

The universe, then again, is really great! Not surprising since it's LOTR's you could say, but although I did like the movies, I'm not really a fanboy nonetheless. Anyway, gotta admit, it's immersive, I played about 40h in 4 days, so... Yeah. (Haven't finished the game yet btw.)

Now for the final part: The gameplay! If you like this kind of game and especially if you liked Shadow of Mordor, you'll defo like this one, it has everything SoM had and so much more!

A lil' bit of RPG to spice things up: You have 6 pieces of gear (bow/dagger/blade/mantle/armor/ring) divided in 4 tiers (normal/rare/epic/legendary), and you can add gems to them, a bit like in Diablo 3.
Items have your level, you can level them up a bit doing some challenges, legendaries can be leveled up to 60 (max level) if you want to keep them throughout your progression.

The nemesis system has been improved, you can now assault fortresses with your armies, fights are epic! Your armies can have special "assets" like archers, graugs, banners... Drakes that you can ride... If you want to know how Daenerys feels, now you can, and it's awesome!

The skills, you have about everything you had in the first opus, and more!
Now each skill has upgrades (up to 3), the only thing bugging me is that you can only have one upgrade for a skill at a time, so the domination upgrade, or the elf-shot upgrade for the drain, not both :( but well it forces you to adapt a bit your build to your gameplay and to the situation, it's a good thing.

Multiplayers: There's next to nothing, but the small things present are nice. You can avenge another player by killing the orc that killed him, or defend/assault a fortress online. Both of these things get you nice rewards too!

To finish, I'd like to say a word about the microtransactions: If you don't like them, you can just ignore them, and you can still farm all the legendaries and have them all, you can even have gold coins doing daily challenges to buy chests without putting in money, so for those that don't like that, ignore. I haven't bought any coins, and have about 25 legendaries on the 60/70 available, and most of them are not really useful anyway so no big deal.

However, for those who like to speed up their progress, they can, and the game can be even more profitable in the meantime, meaning more reasons to have a Shadow of Mordor 3, while doing absolutely no harm to those who won't use them, it's a win-win!

Serisously though, microtransactions can be bad in multiplayers game because they can dig a gap between paying-users and free-users, but in a solo game, where you won't even feel it if you don't want to, what's the harm ?