sorry, but gamespot review is wrong!!!
it never gets tiring fighting those bad guys - its so satisfying when you fight off a few of them near a prison where your men are, and then you excecute a few of those fantastically ridiculous, wonderfully gruesome over the top finshing moves!
they also seem to fall back and take hits quite realistically, and the graphics and gore are briliant
as for those final battles - WOW
the gamespot review said something about them being really easy and all the same, and that theyre easy you just run and kill the shaman straight away. thats completely missing the point... DONT kill the shamans.. keep fighting for ages and ages hacking away at hundreds of enemies, enjoying the carnage and those finishers even more! you die, but then you run back in again, just to enjoy prolonged, gruesome, intense combat on a scale most games cant match. just watch as your men fight off the enemy... theyll battle each other so well.. they do combos on each other, then one might lose his sword, so they start wrestling each other and struggling! they do so many different moves, for that many AI to be fighting like that its pretty impressive.
its just like spartan total warrior, the WHOLE POINT is that combat is easy and repetitive. you can enjoy the hack and slash and the brilliant finishers, but when your thumb gets tired of pressing the X button after an hour or so, theres an easy objective so you can finish quickly when you want.
and i love those minigames where you fight the big bosses... where you have to tap different buttons and he jumps on them and dodges and all that heroic stuff.. its like watching lord of the rings sometimes! with all the fighting going on around you too, AWESOME.
and stealthily sneaking round and encampment taking out th earchers before you charge in to surprise the grunts in the middle with a flame pot. great fun.
yes the stroyline kinda sucks, and maybe it is missing side quests.. but that doesnt matter.. the immense combat makes up for it big time.
BUY ITTTTT
=)