Recent reviews by Confurius

I'm not a Metalhead so I'm clearly not the target demographic. And many in-jokes and references probably flew right over my head. The only cameos I recognized were Ozzy, Jack Black's brother Kyle and that one comedian from the Sarah Silverman Program, that should tell you all about my Metal cred. The game is a type of open-world strategy hybrid. I've never played Pikmin, but imagine there are some similarities. The game is a bit on the short side, but the story is engaging. The side quests are more like missions that have 5 basic formats that are simply spread out over the map. There's not a lot of story content in doing the missions. If there had been more story elements to these missions it might have been a lot more enjoyable. You earn currency by doing these missions that can be spent on better weapons or cosmetic items. With me not being a metal-head those cosmetics really didn't interest me much. Other actions/collectibles unlock additional (actual metal) music to play while driving around. The game is quite old by now (11 years in 2020), so as an open-world it feels quite dated by now. In conclusion the game could have been longer and more fleshed out, and if you are a Metalhead, no doubt, you'd get a lot more entertainment out of it.

Meh. I would still recommend it, seeing as it ultimately still entertained me for over 70 hours, but it was truly a slog, as evidenced by the fact that it took me over 2.5 years to finish a play-through. It just didn't grip me or keep my attention. In the end, procedurally produced characters are still lacking something. And the existing story and written characters weren't enough to keep my attention. The combat also got tedious at times and picking the game up after months or in one case a year of not playing often meant learning the combat all over again. We've had an MMORPG (LotRo), JRPG (Third Age) approach to Middle-Earth and this AC/GTA style approach. Maybe some day we'll get a combination closer to an open world RPG to Middle-Earth and make me truly satisfied.

Had a great time. As a fan of Gothic and Gothic 2, the island mechanic instead of the one open world involved a bit of getting used to. Giving and taking access to certain islands for story reasons seems very similar to how Acts were used in the early Gothic games.
Some Islands will temporarily restrict you (not giving of having access to a ship), but after the restriction is lifted the island access becomes more freeform untill you get to another island with a restriction. My early way of playing of 'clearing' islands was not really neccasary, because after clearing the individual island's 'main' quests all other 'misc' quests can just be done in the freeform part.
Only came across one gameplay breaking bug (lockpicking suddenly unavailable, because a quest NPC didn't return a lockpick after being freed) but this was fixed by using a publicly available cheat code. Kudos for some quests that didn't seem solvable because of previous character progression choices, but after having a google turned out to have a creative non-skill based solution.