Shadow Of War

Hands-on with Shadow of War’s spider mercs and singing orcs

- James Davenport

In my first five minutes of Middle-earth: Shadow of War, I hired spiders to torment an orc bard. He wanted me dead – sang about it and everything. I wanted us to lead an army together, and sweep the land with song. If only he hadn’t made such a fuss over my spider mercenaries.

My goal was to siege a fortress, a massive castle with thick stone walls, battlements peaking into sharp points, each occupied by artillery units dropping curse bombs in big AOE circles on the dozens of fragile orc soldiers below. There’s quite a few of them in Shadow of War, and taking control of each will be a unique experience. That’s Monolith’s goal, at least.

LEAVING IT TO CHANCE

During my demo last week in Santa Monica, I played a fortress siege sequence – taking over a fortress led by an enemy overlord takes back the territory from Sauron’s forces, letting you to push further into another region, giving you a crack at another fortress and so on.

Fortress encounters all share a similar structure: you bring your army to their gates, charge, breach walls, take over capture points, and then bust down the front door and kill or subjugate the leader’s ugly ass. In most open world games, as you become more powerful, the process gets easier. In Shadow of War, that’s also mostly true. For instance, captains drop loot, which generate stats based on how they died – if an archer does the deed, you might get a new bow.