Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth

Two players fight for the One Ring!

In this game one player takes the role of the Fellowship (has more gold at start) while the other is Sauron (goes first), and all you are doing each turn for each of the three rounds is either picking up a valid card from the tableau, selling a card from the tableau or building a fortress (which costs a lot but gives you a bunch of stuff). Blue cards move Frodo and Sam towards Mt. Doom or move the Nazgul towards the hobbits, gold cards give you money, green cards give you skills and friends (with possible special abilities), and red cards let you do army stuff on the small map.

Some cards cost skills to buy (or in later rounds, have "chain" markers meaning you can get them for free IF you already got the first part of the chain earlier). For each skill you are missing, just pay gold. There are three ways to win: complete the "race" track - Nazgul eats Frodo or Frodo reaches Mt. Doom and their player wins. If you collect a fellowship of six different races (green cards) you win. If you have a soldier on each zone on the map you win.

Simple game that so far Sauron has always won in my group, and most of the time it boils down to stopping your opponent from getting the card that he's going to win with. Nice components, with just a little bit of setup time.

Elden Ring: Behold, dastard!

[Part of my Elden Ring journal]

All that delay has finally set the tree of thorns properly ablaze and I find myself back in the ash covered capital where, unsurprisingly "Sauron", the leader of the Roundtable hold tries to kill me. He is easily defeated, as is Godfrey, the first Elden lord who is now here in the flesh. Nepheli helps me kick his ass and not only accepts me as lord but offers to be queen too!

My club is now the size of a small tree. LOL

That will need to wait as past the thorns is the most anime BS opponent so far, Radagon, who has watched so much Bleach that he can flash step. And worse - his second form of being an elden beast can do the same! That's a bit too much for me at this point so its off to explore again, this time raiding a small castle in the snowfield which is actually a good XP grind.

The boss here is the slow moving knight commander from the plagueville swamp again though but now upgraded with a lightning leg. It's a tough fight but I finally beat him and get another magic elevator medallion thingy. If this was a modern setting it would just be a security pass but you know... magic! This one takes me to an octopus infested tomb, followed by a blizzard covered snowfield with archer ladies riding on wolf back! At the far end of this is a strange ghost town that needs fires lit (again) but invisible assassins and sharp shooting snipers make this challenging.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Because everyone likes some orc on orc action.

Last time we saw the half-dead ranger Talion, he had just "killed" Sauron in a not so epic QTE and was on his way to Mount Doom to forge a new ring (because that's a good idea). In short: things don't go as planned and Talion has to sneak his way around Mordor once more, assassinating and recruiting orcs to fight the forces of Sauron and the Witch King.

The Nemesis system from the first game is back and really shines here, not just when you are hunting them or vice versa but also when you get to the siege parts of the game. You want to field your good orcs and not that scrub who runs away from flies, fire and caragors! Speaking of caragors, there are mounts to help you traverse the large maps and/or annihilate your enemies and Talion gets a lot of skill upgrades to keep the killing "fresh".

I love this part!

Most importantly the story is really good. I especially like fighting the Nazgul. Afterwards is a grindy epilogue for those who really like the sieges, which is quite optional. Even for just everything before that it is worth a play though, and I give it four an a half Gondorian relics out of five.

Insight: Unlock fatal counter ASAP to make fights less tedious.

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

This game has taught me why Sauron is the Dark Lord. He sends forth the BSOD! :P

After the first 10 minutes which serve both as a tutorial and a quick story segment to let you know why a wraith possessed ranger of Gondor is sneaking about Mordor you quickly get into the guts of this Assassin's Creed like game, only this is better than almost all Assassin's Creed games I've played to date. You only get three weapons: a sword, a knife, and a bow that easily runs out of arrows but with just those and the unlockable skills you get you can interact with the open world in so many cool and violent ways. Oh yes - super violent ways which gives it a huge tick of approval from me. Not only do you dismember your foes but you can make heads EXPLODE.

This is one of the -tamer- finishers.

And you can make orcs flee in terror. Yup, an often missed behavior pattern in most AI these days (outside scripted events) the orcs actually can do a bit more than flee and die, especially as they climb up the ranks of Sauron's army to become war chief. These mostly randomized bad guys have names, behavior patterns, remember what you've done to them personally, have effects that make them stronger and immunities but also have weaknesses to be exploited. Each one different enough from the next to have an impact when you meet them. Maybe this one hates fire and the other one loves fire and is immune to everything but stealth. Obviously getting caught by them unawares in the open world is bad.

The protagonist is quite godly once you max everything out, but nowhere near the AC curb stomp heroes. Here just the sheer numbers of normal foes can take you down if you aren't careful. Death also has some meaning here as it passes time, which in turn begins refilling the ranks of orc captains you were probably busy emptying. Orcs that kill you and captains that survive the encounter gain in power, making them more dangerous the next time you meet!

Music wise it is ok but its the voice actors that really shine here. I found it clever that the loading scenes have story fragment voice overs which help piece together the past. The story is very cool too, especially for Tolkien fans. I was also impressed by having mountable critters and being able to fight while mounted. All of this makes for a really great game except for two things: a disappointing final fight and that the graphical requirements caused a LOT of restarts for me (PC Version), obviously impacting my overall experience with the product. I stuck with it to the end though, and can safely give this four elven arrows out of five.

Would have been perfect without all those crashes. For anyone else having NVidia issues what I did is put everything at the lowest setting and changed the Win 7 color scheme from Aero to Basic. This cut down the crashes by half.