I’m of two minds about this one.

On one hand, it certainly has a healthy amount of neat ideas up its sleeve to differentiate it from other open-world games of its ilk.
It has the Nemesis System™ (© 2021 Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming & Interactive Entertainment) that adds an additional layer of metagame to your shenanigans, and holds plenty of potential.
It’s overall solidly made — or at least any jankiness it does have isn’t too distracting, maybe even adds some spice, a lil’ zazz, a little sum-sumn to the experience?
It features excellent, fluid animation in service of a satisfying (if maybe a tad shallow) combat system. The huge number of enemies you can engage at once, coupled with the number of different gameplay systems at play often spark fun, emergent mayhem.
And it also looks nice on a modern PC, and runs relatively smoothly at high framerates (a somewhat regular asset streaming (?) stutter notwithstanding).


On the other hand, though.

Even with its bunch of cool ideas, the core gameplay loop just doesn’t get much deeper than how it all starts out. Combat can be both trivially easy and frustratingly overwhelming, but either way, most encounters come down to applying the same two or three core techniques ad nauseam.

The nemesis system, while promising, simply didn’t add much excitement to my experience, apart from some late-game bits, where I had fun creating animosity within the orc army and whatnot.
This made me wonder if the game should’ve leaned even more heavily on the system, making it more crucial to engage with it, to exploit it.
As it stands, I kinda find reading about how the nemesis system works more exciting than interacting with it. Cool concept on paper, with very little bearing on the way I play the game.

The game also feels a little disjointed at times. One example is starting a mission or side quest, which is done by walking up to a certain marker on the map and pressing a button to start. After fading to black (and cueing a cutscene in case of story missions), this resets the game state to where it needs to be to start the mission, changing enemy placement and the time of day in the process.
This completely (and sometimes jarringly) disregards the otherwise nice flow of sandbox ruckus that might’ve emerged while wandering the world and getting to the mission start point, and although I’m sure this solution saves a lot of headaches for player and developer alike, and is somewhat standard open-world behavior, it still feels like an uninspired design choice.

The story and characters aren’t worthy of much praise. The game has the type of cutscenes that have me reaching for my phone in a heartbeat.

Overall, the repetitive combat, the ultimately underwhelming nemesis system and the unengaging story make the midgame a little bit of a drag. Not enough of a drag to make me abandon it entirely, but most often I wouldn’t play it for more than 30 minutes or an hour. Open world bloat is kind of watering down the nice ideas in there.


So, in a lot of ways, this is a game of missed oportunities, which is a pity.

But, in the end, I guess I still felt like clocking ~26 hrs in it, over the span of three months. So my fairly educated guess is I enjoyed it, I think?
It was mindless and not entirely memorable, sure. Another way to look at it, though, is that it was frictionless in just the right ways, and sometimes simply that’s what I need a game to be.