Middle-earth: Shadow of War picks up right after Shadow of Mordor. Talion and Celebrimbor forge a new Ring of Power and start building an army in Mordor to challenge Sauron directly. The story pushes harder into Tolkien fan-fiction territory — Nazgûl origin twists, new characters, and a more bombastic tone — but the real substance is in how it turns the Nemesis concept into a full war machine.

Combat is an evolution of the first game: flowing melee, counters, executions, wraith abilities, and a pile of unlockable skills that let you tune Talion into a stealth assassin, front-line butcher, or parkour archer with wraith tricks baked in. Movement is faster and more exaggerated, which sometimes undercuts the weight but pays off when you’re scaling fortress walls under fire or bailing out of a fight that’s gone sideways.

The Nemesis system comes back bigger. Orcs still remember you, but now they can also ambush you mid-mission, betray you during sieges, return from apparent death, and show up with new scars, titles, and grudges. You’re not just hunting captains — you’re recruiting them, gearing them, and slotting them into assault teams or fortress defences, trying to create an orc roster that fits how you like to play.

The big addition is fortress sieges. Each region has a central stronghold held by an overlord and their captains. You weaken the defences, assign your own orc leaders with different siege upgrades (siege beasts, gates, elemental tricks), then launch an assault where your army and theirs crash into each other while you run objectives, duel captains, and push to the keep. Once conquered, you’re the one defending it from counter-attacks.

At launch, Shadow of War buried some of its later progression behind microtransaction-driven grind. Post-release updates removed the real-money lootboxes and rebalanced the endgame, leaving a still-large but cleaner experience focused on playing with the systems rather than the store. In the Vault, Shadow of War is the “big messy sibling” to Shadow of Mordor: not as tight, but a crucial example of how far an AI-driven enemy hierarchy can go when you tie it to territory control and sieges.