Recent reviews by pengu station portable

weak recommend.
the polish at the start of the game starts to wear off by the middle, and by the end its clear there's a few plot threads that just never get addressed or just have abrupt unsatisfying conclusions. despite this, it's still an interesting lovecraftian story, with the tropes and twists you would expect from one.

7/10, weak recommend as this game has some real flaws that fanservice cant solve

for fate fans this game is sprinkled with homages, references, and returning characters
for fate newbies, this is a somehwat accessible entry to the fate universe, but ultimately i would recommend either reading the visual novel or watching an anime than playing this

while the story has a handful of shining moments, it is otherwise shallow and underdeveloped. foreshadowing that never pay-offs, characters that have no motivations, no development, no arc. in other fate grail war stories, there's a lot of intrigue and surprises that upset your understanding of the conflict and characters. here? only in trace amounts. theres a lot of potential here in the setting that just isnt being realized.

mechanically this is a musou game. you press light attack a few times and heavy attack to complete a combo. thankfully unlock and upgrade a robust set of combat stances that keep it fresh and interesting. there is a bit of a learning curve for knowing when to burn your 6 different combat resource meters to make combat not a slog, and failing to do so forces you to slog through otherwise difficult fights. unlike other musou games you dont have to worry about conquering and reconquering territory, all fights are restricted to a set arena and after you defeat the enemies in that area you can move on.

on letdown is there is no real post-game mode where you can just do combat challenges with all the different characters in the game. if you want to continue beating up enemies after cleaing the game you have to start a new game+, and you are still restricted to the enemies and playable characters the story has at the time.

mild spoilers:
there is a fairly interesting structure to the game that the human player character starts out quite weak when fighting monsters and enemy servants when compared to his servant, and early on you must rely quite a bit on your servant to help turn the tide of battle. as you upgrade your stats, gear and skills the gap between the player and servant diminishes, eventually the human master surpasses his servant in some ways. this is strength is acknowledged and addressed by the plot of the game.

10/10 This game really makes you feel like Gollum!

to be fair, you have to have a very high iq to appreciate The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. the themes are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of literary criticism most of the subtext will go over a typical player's head. theres also Gollums nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterization- his story draws heavily from not just Tolkien's catholicism but also the moral conflict of Wagnerian operas, for instance.

and yes, by the way, i DO have a Gollum tattoo. and no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. nothin personnel kid

war takes everything that was good about shadow of mordor and improves upon it
if you like training up captains; now you have options in how to choose grow them and ways to make use of them when you have the 'perfect squad'
if you like fighting hordes of orcs you can throw yourself into base assault/defense mode
if you just like dueling/stalking individual orc captains you have more ways to set up confrontations in the game world
theres more regions to explore and theyre all bigger than the original game regions

mixed is the new gear/skill system. in mordor it really felt like eventually you unlocked every skill and there was a 'best' set of runes for each piece of gear that you never touched once you got them. in war, theres more varied armor and weapon combinations and skills have 3 different set upgrades you can swap from. on one hand this encourages different playstyles and discovering new combinations, on the other hand this means sometimes the optimal way of playing can sometimes just be opening the menu mid-combat to completely swap out your gear and rearrange your skills based on which captain you are fighting.

the blade of galadriel and desolation of mordor DLC modify the base gameplay and introduce new skills that really shake up the standard formula, really worth checking out.
the final balance patches improved the game a lot:
first by making sure you never really face truly invulnerable captains by changing captain generation/captain skills
second the skill tree, itemization and orc training changes makes every single coin, experience point, and gem you pick up worthwhile even well into late game

one major con is that there are a lot of hackers on the PC version in online fortress assault mode. if your rating gets too high you will eventually fight a captain that is unkillable and will one-shot you if he bumps into you. you can still get the highest rating in online mode without running into hackers, but soon after you will just run into only hackers which ruins the experience.

its ok

starts out strong but the later puzzles rely too much on your clones being positioned just right so that you can move left or right without them falling off a ledge and ruining everything.

this game has a gimmick of rotating the world to make things happen, but the rotation is too slow to make you feel like youre solving puzzles, but instead just trying to figure out how to get the floaty physics to work in your favor.

assassorc creed: mordor asylum. most enemies pose no challenge and after levelling up your abilities even the dreaded captains become easy. disengaging from a bad situation is almost always an option.

the most tauted feature -- the nemesis system -- is kind of interesting but not really. if youre bad at the game, then it at least simulates a rivalry between you and an opponent. if youre good then its like every captain you meet is a diablo 2 boss monster spawn and you just have to deal with the modifiers.

the story starts off with an interesting and promising premise and then after the first boss battle the rest of the game has been rushed to a hasty completion. final boss is a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ joke and the ending is god awful. it makes earnest attempts to adhere to canon in some places and in other places ignores it entirely to make for a more videogamey experience.

dlc:
test of x - actually kinda cool. to get on the elite leaderboards you have to play a tight game with no slowing down or errors.
x rune - most of the runes provided aren't really gamebreaking and you will eventually find better runes to replace them with.
x warband - you will hardly notice these in game and they can only be done once per playthrough
lord of the hunt - this adds a side-story to the nurn map where you have a scripted set of warchiefs to kill. unfortunately gameplay revolves around new mount/ghul mechanics that aren't really fun at all.
the bright lord - prequel mission set. fundamentally changes the gameplay up and adds a real honest to god boss battle to the game. unfortunately the one ring mode is too good so gameplay devolves into charging it and abusing it.
dark ranger skin - the best skin in the game

overall: its ok.

The game doesnt render very well on my Nvidia 680, which means on certain levels I can be standing in pitch darkness but the light meter says its bright as day. The worst offender is there are two specific sections towards the end of the game where a moving spotlight has to be avoided and it's impossible to see. It is possible to get around the spotlight by killing the guards, but its just a real hassle to line up the shots properly to do so.

As for the rest of the game I think it starts out ok but the Guard AI gets progressively more psychic and psychotic. The final level will test your patience and sanity, esp if you decide to not quicksave.

originally when I played Dead Men over a decade ago I did not like it. I thought it was a shallow buggy game that valued style over substance, and that substance was a cover shooter, an extremely crowded genre at that time. with the fullness of time-- and the general direction the games industry as a whole has taken-- I now value that style far more than substance.

good games are rare to find, so it doesnt seem right to penalize a particularly interesting game for having bad gameplay. theres some interesting story, characters and level design in this game that are worth exploring.