You play as Talion (Main Character), who traverses the Middle Earth for revenge against the Black Hand of Sauron for killing your family. Mostly its go here & kill there type of game. But what makes it interesting is the different ways you can approach a scenario. You can brand enemies and use them to turn on your foes, you can stealth kill them, you can set wild animals free from the cages & among them to cause deaths, go berserk and kill them all, shoot explosive barrels or unleash deadly bees on them by shooting a hive.
The combat in the game is solid. Whether using bow, sword or dagger, the game seamlessly mixes combat moves and killing effects. Special executions, brutalization & branding the enemy are creative and fun to use. Gollum from LOTR makes quite a number of appearances in missions & cut scenes.
The world is largely repetitive in terms of level design since its a small open world for you to explore and forts & campfires to clear of the enemies. The Orcs are well designed and dialogs are straight forward. The hierarchy system setup with the ranks of Sauron's Army enables some challenging combats. Like when you taking on a war chief, you will want to first brand or kill his bodyguards in order to make the fight easier. As even at upgraded levels some fights can turn very nasty as you get heavily outnumbered.
The upgrades are simple & effective. The runes that you get after killing a captain or war chief are used to add power to your respective weapons. Borrows heavily from the Assassin Creed franchise as you again climb on towers to unlock the stuff and side missions for the area. Side missions are very repetitive once you get the hang of it. There is the typical collect artifacts & objects thing that gives you Miriam which can be used to get weapons upgrade or unlock a rune slot. The XP is used to upgrade Talion's physical combat prowess.
Further down the game Talion becomes way to o powerful and you feel the combat is a breeze. The main missions lack the intensity except the last 2 missions. Boss fights are easy & easily manageable. Definitely worth playing though, the game is a good feel of the LOTR franchise. Made me want to go back watch all the movies again :)
Sound - 9/10
Graphics - 9/10
Gameplay - 8/10