LogFAQs > #888529330

Personally, I'd say that if you liked Evil Within, you'll probably like Evil Within 2, and if you liked Shadow of Mordor you'll probably like Shadow of War, but that Shadow of War is a much worse sequel than Evil Within, and the odds of you potentially being disappointed with it are much higher.

For what it's worth, I bought, played, and generally enjoyed Shadow of Mordor, and I don't really consider Shadow of War to be worth buying, except maybe once it's hugely on sale for like $20 or less.



Dikitain posted...

I haven't heard anything about Evil Within 2, but Shadow of War is supposedly really good despite the loot box debacle (and the usually WB crap).

The real problem with the loot box issue is that it's directly tied to the incredibly dull and plodding end-game grind if you actually plan to play through Act 4... which you may not, since the actual story missions end after Act 3. Act 4 is basically all the sort of completionist fortress battle gameplay that would have been purely optional content in any other open world game - but which is basically mandatory and unavoidable in this if you want to see the "true" ending of the game.

And it definitely feels like they specifically hid the "true" ending of the game behind that gameplay - and seemingly designed that gameplay to be as monotonous and RNG fidgety as fuck - solely to pressure players into spending real world money to buy their way to success (and cut out 20+ hours of pure grind).

Basically, if you're the sort of person who is mostly playing just for the narrative, or for the hack-and-slashy gameplay, you're probably fine just playing the game, skipping the entirety of Act 4, and then just watching the 3 minute long final cutscene on YouTube. But if you're something of a completionist and you think you'd probably feel pressured to finish the entire game, or if you feel like taking a moral stand and not rewarding scumbag publisher bullshit with your money, you may want to avoid it like the plague.



Zareth posted...

Shadow of War looks exactly like the first game, except with loot boxes.

The narrative as a whole is also much weaker in Shadow of War, for people who actually care about that sort of thing.

But I'm not even sure that "exactly like the first game" is much of a positive even if it was entirely true. Because as much as everyone always fellates the Nemesis system, it never really seemed all that interesting or worthwhile to me in Shadow of Mordor. 90% of the time I was killing captains first time I encountered them so there was almost no "Hey, remember me?" scenarios going on for me at all, but even when I did let a captain slip away (or when the game decided that a captain I'd killed had miraculously survived somehow) and they showed up later, the fact that all the orcs are mostly generic as fuck anyway meant that I didn't really CARE all that much. The idea of the Nemesis system would work better in a game where enemies were more distinct, or if the system itself was far more robust and developed, but as is, it feels more like a gimmicky rather than the core gameplay that an entire game should be built (and marketed) around.

Much like Radiant AI in Bethesda games, it's a mechanic that sounds far cooler in concept than it does in actual practice (where it's usually meh at best and broken at worst).


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