Twelve years after it first appeared, Monolith’s machine for making orcs remember arrives on Switch 2 in two ports that keep the design whole and leave the hardware underused, and the sequel, freed of its marketplace, finally reads as the game it was meant to be.
A design idea with nowhere else to live
Most influential mechanics in games get absorbed. Somebody invents a cover system or a parry window, and within three years every studio in the business has its own version, refined and renamed. The Nemesis System never had that life. Warner Bros. patented it, Monolith Productions built two games around it, and then the studio closed in 2025 with the patent still standing until 2036. The result is an odd museum piece: one of the best ideas of its console generation, preserved in exactly two games and nowhere else.
That is the real context for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Game of the Year Edition and Middle-earth: Shadow of War Definitive Edition arriving on Nintendo Switch 2. Neither game has ever been on a Nintendo platform before. Aspyr handled both conversions, and they launched digitally on September 30, 2026, sold separately or together as the Middle-earth: Shadow Bundle. The date is a neat piece of symmetry, too: Shadow of Mordor first launched on September 30, 2014, so this version lands exactly 12 years to the day after the original. Aspyr kindly provided both games for this review.
I finished both campaigns and their expansions on Switch 2, docked and in the hand. What I came away with is a clear split. The games themselves still hold up, and in the case of Shadow of War, they hold up better now than they did at release. The ports are a different matter. They are stable, playable and complete, and they also leave a lot of the Switch 2’s headroom on the table.
Talion, Celebrimbor and a Mordor before the Fellowship
Both games sit in the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Talion is a Ranger of Gondor posted at the Black Gate, and the first game opens with Sauron’s captains, led by the Black Hand, executing him alongside his wife and son in a ritual meant to summon something else entirely. What they get instead is Celebrimbor, the Elven smith who forged the Rings of Power with Sauron, now a wraith without his memories. Talion is denied death and bound to the spirit. The two go into Mordor together, one looking for revenge and the other looking for himself.
Shadow of Mordor is the smaller, more focused story. It covers two regions, the ashen highlands of Udûn and the greener, slave-farmed lands of Núrn, and it keeps its cast tight: the three members of the Black Hand, Gollum in a handful of scenes, the dwarf hunter Torvin, and Ratbag, a cowardly orc who wants to climb the ranks with Talion’s help.
Shadow of War picks up immediately afterward and pulls the camera back. Talion and Celebrimbor forge a new Ring, and the sequel becomes a war for all of Mordor, fought across Minas Ithil, Cirith Ungol, Gorgoroth, Núrnen and Seregost, with Shelob, the Nazgûl and a full orc army in play. It takes enormous liberties with Tolkien. Shelob in particular, reimagined as a woman who trades in visions, is the decision purists have never forgiven. Read as a fan fiction with a budget, it works. Read as canon, it does not try to.
Orcs with memories: why the Nemesis System still lands
The Nemesis System is easy to describe and hard to explain until you have watched it work. Sauron’s army is organized into a visible hierarchy of captains and warchiefs, each one procedurally generated with a name, a face, a voice, strengths, weaknesses and fears. Kill a captain and someone below gets promoted to fill the gap. Die to an ordinary grunt and that grunt is promoted for having done it, and the next time you meet him, he remembers. He taunts you about the last fight. If you burned him, he comes back scarred and furious. If you ran from him, he tells you so.
What makes it endure is that it turns the open world into a set of relationships instead of a checklist. The map is full of icons, as every open world of this era is, but the reason to go anywhere is usually a person: a captain who killed you twice, a warchief whose bodyguards you want to pick off first, an orc who is terrified of caragors and happens to be holding a feast next to a cage of them. The best stories either game tells are the ones it generates out of your own failures.
Underneath sits combat built on the free-flow model Rocksteady established with Batman: Arkham Asylum: strikes, counters, vaults and executions chained into a rhythm, with Celebrimbor’s wraith powers layered on top. Talion’s bow slows time while you aim, and his brutality goes well past Batman’s. Beheadings are routine. On Switch 2, both games respond cleanly to input, and the Pro Controller suits them better than the Joy-Con 2 do in long sessions, mostly because a counter-heavy system rewards larger triggers and a firmer stick.
Shadow of Mordor: the lean original
Going back to Shadow of Mordor after the sequel is instructive, because it shows how much of the idea was already present on day one. The map is small by current standards, and in 2026 that reads as a virtue. Objectives sit close together, upgrades come quickly, and there is very little filler between one meaningful encounter and the next.
The defining shift happens in the second region, when Talion gains the ability to brand orcs and turn them into agents. Suddenly the hierarchy is something you can rewire instead of just thin out. You can brand a captain, send him to challenge a warchief, and watch the power structure reorganize around your choices. It is the seed of everything Shadow of War would later build its whole structure around.
The Game of the Year Edition gathers everything released for the original: the Lord of the Hunt story expansion, built around Torvin and the beasts of Mordor; The Bright Lord, a short campaign that puts you in control of Celebrimbor at the height of his power; the Guardians of the Flaming Eye warband mission; and a collection of extra warband missions, runes and skins. The Bright Lord is the standout. It is brief, but playing Celebrimbor alone, with no Talion to temper him, makes a sharp point about where the series is heading.
The age shows in other places. Animations are stiffer than the sequel’s, quick-time prompts gate several key confrontations, and the final encounter remains one of the weaker endings of its generation, a sequence of button prompts where a fight ought to be. These are the same flaws it shipped with. Nothing about the Switch 2 version makes them worse, and nothing fixes them.
Shadow of War: fortresses, followers and a marketplace that is gone
Shadow of War is the stronger game, and the version on Switch 2 is the best form of it that has ever existed, for reasons that have nothing to do with Aspyr.
The sequel’s big structural idea is the fortress. Each region has a stronghold run by an overlord and defended by warchiefs, and taking it means building an army of dominated captains, assigning them as bodyguards, spies and siege leaders, and then running a full assault on the walls. Win, and you install one of your own as overlord, and the enemy will eventually come to take it back. The tribes give the orc army more personality than the first game ever had, from the theatrical Mystics to the Feral beast tamers, and the two Nemesis expansions included here add the Slaughter and Outlaw tribes, with the Outlaws rejecting both Sauron and Talion’s Bright Lord in the name of an age of the orc.
At launch in 2017, all of this was undermined by an in-game market selling loot chests and orc followers, and by a final act called the Shadow Wars that asked for hours of repetitive fortress defenses before revealing the true ending. The market was removed entirely in 2018, and the Shadow Wars were replaced with a streamlined epilogue narrated by Shelob, the Witch-king and a darker version of Talion. The Definitive Edition carries all of that forward. Without a store hovering over the progression, the late game reads as a long, demanding endgame rather than an upsell, and it is far easier to enjoy on those terms.
The edition also includes both story expansions. Blade of Galadriel follows Eltariel, an assassin sent by the Lady of Lórien, and Desolation of Mordor casts you as Baranor, the Captain of the Tower from Minas Ithil, raising an Easterling army in Mordor’s eastern deserts. Baranor in particular is a welcome change of pace: a human soldier with no wraith powers, forced to rely on gadgets and allies. The Sword of Dominion bonus weapon is in there as well.
One caveat matters more than it first appears. This Switch 2 version is built for offline play, and Online Conquests, Vendettas, Fight Pits, Chests and Training Orders are not available. The Garrison, which used to depend on a connection, works offline. If you remember the asynchronous fortress raids against other players’ defenses, they are gone. For most people this will be a non-issue, since the campaign never needed them, but returning veterans should know.
Two stories about how far revenge goes
Read together, the two games tell one arc, and it is darker than the licensed-game label suggests. Shadow of Mordor is a revenge story that slowly turns into a story about the partner Talion chose. Celebrimbor’s history, revealed in memories scattered across Mordor, makes the case that the wraith in Talion’s head has his own ambitions, and that those ambitions look uncomfortably familiar.
Shadow of War follows that thread to its conclusion. The new Ring, the dominated armies and the fortresses all push Talion further from the Ranger he was, and the game is at its best when it lets that cost show. Troy Baker’s Talion grows quieter and wearier as the campaign goes on, and Alastair Duncan’s Celebrimbor carries real menace under the regal surface. Where the sequel stumbles is in tone. It swings between grim tragedy and grandiose spectacle, and some of its biggest swings, Shelob above all, feel more like a pitch meeting than a story.
The orcs, oddly, are the best writers in both games. A procedurally generated warchief with a stutter and a grudge often lands harder than any scripted villain, and that remains the most remarkable thing about the series.
Thirty frames and the PS4 ceiling: performance on Switch 2
This is where the reservations live. Shadow of Mordor runs at a capped 30fps with a maximum resolution of 1080p, whether docked or in the hand, which is effectively the target the original PlayStation 4 version hit in 2014. The PC version of the same game has comfortably exceeded that for a decade, and it runs at 60fps on a Steam Deck. On hardware with the Switch 2’s capabilities, the absence of a 60fps option is the single biggest disappointment of this release. Beyond a sharper image on a modern television, there is little here the older consoles did not already deliver.
The cap would matter less if the 30 frames were evenly delivered. They are not always. Frame pacing in Shadow of Mordor is uneven, and in the later stretches of the campaign, when the screen fills with Uruks and fire, stutters and drops break the rhythm of a combat system that depends on timing counters. It never becomes unplayable, and the input still registers cleanly, but the motion can feel heavier than the frame counter suggests.
Shadow of War holds its 30fps target well in ordinary play and leans harder on the hardware in the largest siege battles, where drops are more noticeable. Its real problems are elsewhere. Loading is slow, with the load into the open world routinely stretching past half a minute, and that works against the pick-up-and-play appeal a handheld version should have.
Pop-in is the other recurring fault, and it hits the sequel hardest because the sequel is built around speed. Once Talion’s Elven agility upgrades are in place and you are sprinting across Gorgoroth, geometry, foliage and even enemies resolve in front of you. In a game whose fantasy is the wraith that moves faster than the army, watching the world assemble itself in real time is a real distraction.
Handheld against docked
Docked on a television, both games look exactly like what they are: clean versions of the PS4 originals. Shadow of War in particular benefits from the more varied environments of the sequel, from the white stone of Minas Ithil to the snowfields of Seregost, and its art direction has aged gracefully.
In the hand, the picture changes. Shadow of Mordor keeps its image largely intact but shows heavy aliasing on the 7.9in display, with shimmering edges on armor and architecture that better anti-aliasing would have resolved. Shadow of War cuts deeper, dropping image quality in handheld mode to a softer, smudgier picture with muddier textures. On the smaller screen it is easier to forgive than it would be on a television, but it leaves the sequel looking worse than its predecessor in handheld play, which is an odd result for the newer, better-looking game.
Both remain fully playable undocked, and both suit the format surprisingly well. The Nemesis structure breaks naturally into short sessions: hunt one captain, take one outpost, come back later. Loading aside, these are games that fit the way a handheld actually gets used. Shadow of War also supports the touchscreen, which is useful for the army and orc menus.
Schyman’s Mordor: score and sound
Garry Schyman and Nathan Grigg scored both games, and their work is better than the series usually gets credit for. The music for Shadow of Mordor is built on low brass, choir and percussion that rises when a captain enters a fight, and the Nemesis encounters come with their own musical cue, a short sting that tells you before the camera does that someone important has arrived.
Shadow of War broadens the palette with more choral material and a grander, more martial sound for the sieges, which can be overwhelming in the best way when an assault reaches the fortress throne room. The orc voice work deserves its own mention. Hundreds of generated captains share a pool of voice actors and lines, and the variety in delivery, from mumbling cowards to bellowing zealots, is a large part of why the system feels alive.
Living with both: pacing, storage and where to start
These are big games in every sense. Shadow of War needs 73GB of storage and Shadow of Mordor needs 50GB, so the pair together claims 123GB. On a 256GB Switch 2 with the system reserve taken into account, that is more than half the free space, and it is worth planning for before you commit to both. There is no physical edition.
On pacing, they make a sensible pair. Shadow of Mordor is the shorter, tighter experience, and its main campaign moves briskly. Shadow of War is long, and even with the epilogue streamlined, its third and fourth acts ask for patience in exchange for a satisfying payoff. With the expansions included in both editions, the combined content runs well beyond what most single releases offer.
Difficulty is manageable throughout. The Nemesis System is forgiving by design, because dying is part of the story rather than a failure state, and Shadow of War includes difficulty settings that let you soften or harden the fights.
If you are deciding where to start, start with Shadow of Mordor. It is the purer expression of the idea, it sets up the story the sequel depends on, and it is the smaller download. Move to Shadow of War if the system hooks you, because everything the first game hints at, the sequel builds out fully.
Verdict
The Middle-earth duology was always more interesting than its license. Underneath the Tolkien branding are two of the most inventive open-world action games of their era, built around a system that nobody else has been allowed to develop, and the Switch 2 versions carry that system over intact. Shadow of War in particular has never been better: complete, free of its marketplace and closer to the game it should have been at launch.
The ports themselves are serviceable rather than ambitious. The 30fps cap, uneven frame pacing in the first game, long loads and heavy pop-in in the second, and a handheld picture that softens the sequel more than it should all keep this from being the definitive way to play. Aspyr brought the games forward and stopped there.
Buy them if you have never played either and want the Nemesis System in your hands, because nothing else on any platform offers it. Start with Shadow of Mordor, and keep the sequel for when the orcs have their hooks in you. Skip them if you already own these games on a PC that runs them at 60fps, or if smooth motion matters more to you than where you play.
