It's official now. If you're a studio with a popular 80's movie, just give it to Teyon. They'll get it right.

This is better than the main game in every way. The story is solid, voice acting is far better, characters are more developed and compelling, and the gameplay is faster paced and more action-oriented. If you enjoyed the base game, treat yourself to this. It's worth full price.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about the good old days in the 2000's, where there were no shortage of games that were decent, but not blow-your-mind AAA titles, and how those types of games had pretty much disappeared. Then this game popped up on a sale.

Downsides first. It's pretty obvious the game doesn't have a AAA budget. The facial animations are stiff and robotic and the voice acting is downright terrible at times. The first few missions are boring and tedious.

However, this is the first piece of media since 1991 that actually honors the Terminator franchise. The game starts picking up once you get your first plasma weapon, and keeps getting better and more fun right up until the end. The story is competent and engaging, and dovetails nicely into the first 2 Terminators. The graphics are appealing and recreate visual moments from the movies perfectly. The music and sound effects are pulled straight from the films. The gameplay loop reminds me a bit of Far Cry 3 and ends up becoming just as fun. You can tell that despite the lack of resources, the devs had a real love and passion for the Terminator films and made a real effort to create a video game worthy of the franchise. I definitely think they succeeded.

I'd also highly recommend the Annihilation Line DLC. It's even better than the main game.

If you're a fan of the Terminator films at all, go ahead and treat yourself to this. If you like single player FPS games, pick this up on sale.

I want to recommend this game so badly. The weapons are impeccably done, the mechanics are fun, the graphics are beautiful, the music fitting, and the sounds great. It even has great emotional impact when you listen to some of the tapes, and solid firearms and life advice in others.

But the difficulty is just too damn brutal. It turns the game into a repetitive frustrating slog. I've only seen the third level twice. You die in one single shot from any enemy turret or drone, and often get inexplicably flung off ledges when trying to platform. And one single mistake will knock you back a level. I understand that kind of mechanic even though I disagree with it. But knocking you back for having to quit the game is unforgivable. These kinds of difficulty mechanics belong in an optional hardcore "gauntlet" mode, not the game's only difficulty setting.

"Local man literally too angry to die"

That should have been the tagline for this game. I've never played anything that captures rage and brutality like Shadow of Mordor. You can feel Talion's lust for revenge while cutting through hordes of Uruks. This is also the only game I've played where I felt powerful but challenged at the same time.

I'm not into Lord of the Rings, I saw them once when they were out in theaters well over a decade ago. The story is okay, nothing too bad, nothing too compelling either, but drops some LOTR lore that I wasn't aware of and found interesting. This takes place before the main trilogy. Golem makes several very well done appearences, as well as Sauron in the Bright Lord DLC.

My only complaints were very minor and have to do with your character's pathfinding. The movement feels almost like it's on rails when it comes to jumping or climbing. This leads to Talion climbing when you don't want him to, or jumping somewhere you didn't intend. But it was never frustrating enough to ruin the experience.

I play almost exclusively tactical shooters, mainly Arma. For me to be this impressed by a game so far out of the norm for me is very rare. Definitely pick this one up. I'd say it's worth it even if it's not on sale. The Bright Lord DLC is pretty cool and makes it worth the upgrade to GOTY edition alone. SPOILER: The Bright Lord's final boss is Sauron, and a pretty satisfying one at that.

This game started rough in the alpha, but since then I've come to consider this as the greatest shooter of all time. I could gush about it for hours, but I'll keep it to pros and cons.

-Easily the most realistic shooter ever made
-Beautiful graphics
-Great dev who embraces the community and mods
-Least asinine DLC scheme I've seen
-Regular updates that greatly improve the game
-Mods. If you dream it, there's a mod for it
-Best soundscape of any game I've played
-Nails the feel of shooting and moving with firearms better than any other game
-Almost all flaws from previous games have been improved
-Large mutliplayer community
-Difficulty, interface, every control, visuals, and AI are fully configurable to your taste. AI too accurate? You can change that
-Gigantic maps that 400 hours later I still haven't even covered half of
-Unique moments and battles that can't take place in other scripted shooters
-Mission editor allowing for literally any kind of gameplay
-There's not enough time in a life to explore all official and user missions and mods

-Extremely hardware demanding. Get yourself a good processor
--Core i5 4690k @ 4 ghz / GTX 970 OC'd gets 40 FPS on average, but regularly dips to 20
--You'll also want an SSD. Standard hard drives will give you occasional 1-2 second freezes
-You will run into bugs, mostly with how missions play out
-Commanding friendly AI is extremely clunky. Improvements have been made but total overhaul is needed. C2 Command mod mostly alleviates this
-AI is difficult to implement when creating missions
-Mission scripting is difficult and confusing. There is a full wiki and forum dedicated to it but they don't help much
-While the devs are wonderful, the community is elitist and less than helpful

Pick this game up. Seriously. It's worth every single penny.

I played it once. S'alright.

All of the frustration of offroading, none of the fun.

Less than one hour in it became painfully obvious the devs have no experience offroading. Where to begin?

The camera is absolutely terrible. There is no first person view, and no useful camera views at all. You will find yourself running into things and damaging your vehicle because of this.

The entire environment is basically quicksand. If you get stuck somewhere for more than a few seconds you will find yourself dug a few feet into this mud. I can tell you from experience this is way off from what should be happening.

The only environments available look like drab eastern European forrests. Where's the deserts? Where's the snow? Maybe some forrests that aren't as wet with less mud?

All in all, if you actually enjoy off roading you will not enjoy this game.