Fun beat ‘em up combat mechanics cannot fully compensate for the standard Open World-ness and shallow (albeit unique) nemesis system.

Spoilers ahead.

The “revelation” that Celebrimbor had possessed Talien’s dead body to do this job was… not a revelation? Completely unsurprising? I could not even tell if Talien cared, but i sure as hell did not care. That was weird.

The game is a beat ‘em up. It is a one-trick pony. All the missions are essentially designer-contrived scenarios trying to exploit one or more aspects of the central fighting mechanic. These work sometimes, and other times are frustrating.

I got all the collectibles for both the artifacts and pieces of the larger picture. The primary driver for me was the short audio exchange between Talien and Celebrimbor after getting each collectible. It offered insights into their characters and motivation in a way that blended well with the game and story context. It never felt bolted-on to pad out the game.

The Nemesis system was interesting, but ultimately shallow. The captains and war chiefs are all randomly generated for variety, but since there are always more coming, no matter how many you kill, it loses any sense of meaning. Also most of them are not even a challenge, let alone substantial enough to be considered my “nemesis”. The most interesting one was Ratbag, a character you help climb the ladder toward becoming a war chief as part of the main story. Unfortunately, once his part is done, he is never seen again.

Also, at the end, it said to face my nemesis, like it was part of the end game sequence, but who shows up? Takka “The Complainer”, a captain that i killed and he just kept coming back like 20 times over the course of the first act. He was not a challenge or anything, so was that supposed to be a joke? I did not understand that at all.

The core movement and fighting mechanics are at first very cool. As you get closer to the end of the game, however, you start to see some serious issues, which you only notice once you become a proficient player. Basically the targeting is bad in combat. Normally you kind of don’t notice this, but when you are tackling tougher challenges, like the side mission to defend the bridge, and you need to target a specific enemy, good luck.

The same is true of movement. Once you are good at the game, you want to move quickly, but the mechanics keep going slow and steady, so it becomes frustrating, leading to errors that are more an issue with impatience than player mistakes. For instance, you climb up a wall to an unsuspecting archer and want to stealth kill him. You have to wait for the game to offer that option, otherwise you move somewhere you did not intend to go. It just doesn’t react fast enough and pop those options up when it should.

I enjoyed being able to play as the alternate character models.

Ultimately i wanted to like this game more. I am one of those people who likes Dynasty Warriors, so repeating the same combos over and over to kill 1000 grunts is fun for me. I liked the weight of the combat. I liked the brutality, especially when it scared other grunts away. I liked branding enemies during fights, turning the tide of battle as much by increasing the size of my force as directly killing the enemies. I liked sneaking around and scouting out a fight before engaging the enemy head-on. I liked diving from ridiculous heights to stealth kill a guy in the middle of a group and hearing the other grunts freak out, stumble into a campfire, and otherwise create chaos. I liked switching to the bow with bullet-time during a fight and taking out 5 or 6 enemies with headshots before anyone knew what was happening.

I also liked the story. I liked the characters and their motivations. I liked the minor characters (e.g. Torvin, Ratbag). I liked the cut scenes and the narrative.

There is a lot to like in this game, but at the end of the day, it is all for naught. The biggest problem is that, just like most open world games, nothing you do in the game matters even a little bit. You can march into an enemy-controlled town and kill dozens and dozens of grunts, but they will keep spawning and keep coming. You can never win. You can free slaves, but more will pop right back up. You can brand every enemy in sight, but new ones keep coming. When you look at the map, the only thing you see as progress is fewer collectibles and fewer side missions. Keep checking those little boxes off your Open World To Do List, but forget about making any real mark in the world.

screenshot 1 here

screenshot 2 here