(May 2-May 7)

• Middle Earth: Shadow of War - Two years ago, when I played through Shadows of Mordor, I had nothing but high-praise for the game, with only minor nit-picking geared towards the difficulty (far too easy). Last year, when I posted my first impressions about this game, I really only commented about the difficulty modes having night and day differences (with hard mode having enemies who became immune to nearly every attack far too quickly). Now, I feel like whatever I would have said about this game is being marred by my final couple of days with it
  In the year-long break since I last laid waist to the hordes of Uruk, a few things had been changed - loot boxes removed, the final mission's length being chopped in half, and some new "prestige" skills, but getting back into it, it also seems like there were some other changes to the game, or at least, some things I didn't notice during my last foray into middle-earth - the glitches. By the Gods, was the game littered with them these last few days, ranging from captains with no heads, to the camera zooming away during executions (or Talion's model disappearing during executions), to Talion's inability to target certain platforms to jump to (or jumping to platforms I didn't want him to jump to), to constantly targeting the wrong Orc when attempting to drain/dominate (or heal in the case of allies), to allies idling during combat (side-stepping, back and forth), to counters just not registering properly.
  Now, most of these were fairly benign, but when dodge-counters stop working (oddly, don't recall any issues with parries - just the dodges), and you are attempting to fight off dozens of enemies, some of which whose combination of perks can one-hit KO you, it ends up ruining the experience. The weird thing is, out in the wildlands, the counter issue rarely occurred. From what I could tell, it mostly seemed to happen during siege/defenses, when there were a lot of enemies on screen. So who knows, maybe this was just the PS4 not being able to keep up? Dunno, but whatever the underlying cause, it definitely soured my final take on the game, which is all the more upsetting, considering how high I regarded the original.