Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™
Fair · RPG · 2017
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $49.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 21.1h
- Value
- $2.37/hr
- Reviews
- 89% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 6 GB of memory, AMD HD 7870, 2 GB / NVIDIA GTX 660, 2 GB, 70 GB of storage. Windows only.
Experience an epic open-world brought to life by the award-winning Nemesis System. Forge a new Ring of Power, conquer Fortresses in massive battles and dominate Mordor with your personal orc army in Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2024 is where it bottomed out, at $2.49. It has been discounted 72 times in the 10 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 4 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 9 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 98 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 92 percent. Among the games that feel like it, God of War ($49.99, scores 74) beats it on value, while it beats Darksiders III ($39.99, scores 35).
Steam's global achievement data says about 9 percent of players ever finish it. On a 21.1-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 3 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written November 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 54 percent of the 2,365 reviews written there were positive, against 89 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
21.1 hours to finish it, 57 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.7 times the campaign.
9 years after release it still had 1.4K people in it at once.
Valve rates it Steam Deck Verified, so it runs on the handheld without fiddling.
The drop-off
72% start to 9% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 21.1-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
1,405 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Game soft locked on "Shadows of the Past" quest because the Wrath bar would not fill. I read three bug reports about this problem and tried every available fix. None worked. Can't progress game in a meaningful way without it. Be warned.
It's mixed really. Recommend ONLY if it is 90% off. It does this all the time. Just wait. It's not worth the full price or 1/2 price, or even 1/3 of the price. Pro(no "s", there is a single one and nothing else) - Combat. Combat is so fun. Ohhhh the combat. Oh man it is sooo satisfying. You slowdown time, you shoot arrows, you teleport with your arrows. You chain execute, you freeze things. Oh man this is so good...
Incredible. One of the greatest video games of all time. The nemesis system is the coolest and most unique systems in a video game ever made. I will never forgive WB for locking it behind a patent. WB games has not done anything with it and hasnt released any good games after this and the arkham trilogy. They deserve all of the failures for what they have done. Sadly we will never see another installment of this or...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Middle-earth™: Shadow of War™ scores 59/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/356190/middle-earth-shadow-of-warThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.