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The previous console generation saw the release of not one, but two amazing high budget Lord of the Rings games, from a studio with a long-running legacy of development. Their stories might not be the absolute best for fans of the Tolkien canon, but their gameplay, graphics, and overall design hold up better than most of their contemporaries — and I’m truly baffled that we never saw a third chapter.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel Shadow of War have titles that go out of their way to try and disconnect them from the books and movies that they are intimately tied to, but make no mistake: these are explicitly made for existing fans of this franchise. They weave their own wild stories alongside bits of scattered lore from across the many pages of the “Legendarium,” as Tolkien’s writings are known, along with a production design that strongly evokes the work done for Peter Jackson’s movies. Some superfans might deride these games as fanfiction (and indeed, the stories are mega silly even by pulp fantasy standards), but they’re produced at such a high level of polish that they still demand attention.
These games cast you as Talion, a not-Aragorn played by video game’s most stalwart voice actor dude Troy Baker. Talion has a…
