As a Tolkien fan, this game doesn’t give me everything I wanted; the worldbuilding is good and feels genuinely like Middle-Earth, but the story struggles to be as compelling as anything by the author who inspired it, and there’s a bit of artistic license with lore changes that I’m still on the fence over.
However, this game isn’t meant to be an adaptation of LotR or the Silmarillion; it’s meant to be its own experience, and that experience is called Orc Decapitation Simulator 2014.

if finding 50 different ways to kill orcs sounds like your jam, then this is the game you’re looking for.

Finished the first 99% of the game, which is challenging but very doable, and shouldn’t be surprisingly difficult to anyone familiar with this genre of action sidescrollers. There’s some satisfyingly over-the-top stage bosses, and the controls are fluid and fun.
The final boss chapter and ensuing boss fight, on the other hand, elects to replace our “steep difficulty-curve” with more of a “solid brick difficulty-wall”.
Kind of like if you were a contestant on that American Ninja Warrior show, got to the end of the obstacle course, scaled the warped wall, and then suddenly the TV producers started shooting live rounds at you from an A-10 Warthog