MIDDLE-EARTH: SHADOW OF WAR announced

Warner Brothers Games and Monolith Studios have confirmed that a sequel to their well-received and successful Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor is in development will be released this summer.

Shadows of Mordor was a third-person action game with a combat system heavily influenced by the Batman Arkham titles. It improved on this with the introduction of the "Nemesis System", where villains who manage to defeat you in combat gain new skills and abilities, forcing you to gain intelligence on their powers and try to turn their minions against them. The result was less of a traditional beam 'em up and more a game of Orc Career Ladder Simulator. This was an intelligent and interesting game mechanic, but ultimately could not disguise the game's thin amount of content (particularly the startlingly tiny world maps) or prevent extreme repetition setting in after the first couple of hours. Also, pulling off all the orcish Red Weddings in the world doesn't help when the game's comically grimdark tone is massively at odds with the source material. The game's ludicrously violent tone is so at variance with the spirit of Tolkien that it's quite startling the developers even chose to use the Middle-earth setting and not something - anything - more appropriate.

The sequel, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, features a larger game world and a more sophisticated Nemesis System, with more of the game world affected by your actions, including entire strongholds that can be updated by the enemy if you fail to pull off a raid on them. It also features a storyline that reads like bad Tolkien fanfiction, complete with the hero forging his own Ring of Power (what?) and going up against Sauron directly (excuse me?).

Middle-earth: Shadow of War will be released on 22 August this year.