Mechanically speaking the game is a step up from Styx: Master of Shadows. There are less bugs and things are much more intuitive. The levels also feel more free to roam around, in a sense, though at the same time less memorable. Where the game really struggles, however, is the story which is a big step down from the previous installment.

There is no real sense of an overarching narrative and characters are dropped without any real warning or meaning. And the end is so sudden and anti-climactic that I was honestly thinking that I must have missed something and that there was a secred "true ending" or something. But no, the game just ends in a very unsatisfying way.

If you loved the stealth aspects of the previous game, but didn't care about the story, then this game is a strong recommendation.

In short:
Great gameplay mechanics
Weak story

I am not a fan of the Lord of the Rings in general, and even find the Peter Jackson films to be rather boring. (I know, I know. But that's a discussion for another day.) But my disinterest in the source material is not why I find this game to be mediocre at best, it's the gameplay.

The first half of the game is just fetch quest after fetch quest, mixed in with a bunch of awkward combat. You can use the ring as Frodo to evade enemies, which drains your purity that can be restored by doing quests. On paper this might sound interesting, but it's very poorly implemented and I found myself only really needing the ability once very early in the game when I got swarmed by wolves. For all other combat the good ol' "hit three times and then jump away from their predictable attack" technique works wonders.

The game does get better towards the second half of the game, but not by much. The game does introduce gameplay as Aragon (who can't jump, making him in some sense worse in combat but he's got a bow and arrow that can be used to kill enemies from a distance where their AI is not good enough for them to figure out what's happening) and Gandalf (who is overpowered as I guess he should, which makes the gameplay rather boring).

Then there are the bosses... Oh man, the bosses. They are among the worst boss fights I have seen in a game, and no boss is worse than the tree boss where you literally have to throw a stone at it for (and this is not an exaggeration) around 75 times and you do this from outside the range of the boss' attacks, making it just dull. To make things worse, the boss doesn't really give you good visual confirmation that you are actually damaging it, so unless you happen to know that you need to repeat the same throwing action many, many times in a row, you would believe that you are doing something wrong.

Being based on the first book the game also just suddenly ends in a very unsatisfactory way against a very anticlimactic fight.

The world looks like an open world at a first glance but is very linear but somehow also very disorienting. Somehow the game manages to make me get lost despite being linear. The end result is a world that both feels empty and yet confusing, which is not a good thing.

The story is not really presented well either, with a lot of scenes being very abrupt. But at least the narrator actually does a good job and is by far my favourite part of the game.

There are much better games on the Playstation 2 out there. So skip this one.

The game is nostalgic for an era of computer games that I am not nostalgic for. The game has a few design choices that I didn't enjoy. For instance, there are jumps that if you fall down you need to take a detour to get back to where you were. This, in of itself, isn't that big of a problem, but combined with slow movement (even with the movement speed upgrade) and the ability to save and load pretty much anywhere, just reloading always felt like the better option. The upgrades feel rather boring too, and the leveling up system fills no function other than make you regain a small amount of health.

All in all, it's not a boring game but with so many better Metroidvanias out there, I'd be hard-pressed recommending it.

Lacks the charm of the two previous releases. Gone is the quirky humour and in its place we get wall-breaking conversations. I didn't mind that the levels weren't connected, but it just didn't feel as polished. There's also a ton of extra content that's pretty much just going through the game again but with other characters, which felt kinda pointless and lazy. It's perhaps not a good sign either that it felt more fun to play as Risky than as Shantae herself. It's also a let down that the 100% completion ending only really mattered post boss battle and not during it, despite what the plot would have you believe.

All in all the game isn't bad, not at all, but it's just not as good as the previous entries, and not as funny.

A remarkably beautiful game with controls that feel great. My only gripes with it are rather minor, but include:
There are a bunch of sections (especially the escape sections) where unless you already know what's coming up, you just don't have enough time to react before a death trap.
Occasionally it's hard to discern what is a backdrop, foreground or an actual object you can interact with, which at one occasion made me jump onto a platform that wasn't really a platform.
* The game ends a bit too early, and I didn't really feel like I had explored everything yet.

But don't let those criticism stop you from playing this game. It's a great metroidvania and it's really, really beautiful.