I've always liked the game as a fan fic, so the noncanonicity of it has never bothered me (and LotR feels a bit too catholic for my tastes anyway). My problem is actually exactly that there's a lot more story in this game than in SoM, where most of the game was just freestyle orc farming or fun sidequests with no direct relevance to the overall plot (go Torvin!). In writing far more story content than before, they've revealed the weaknesses in their writing to a far bigger extent than previously. Talion was always a bit of a doormat for more forceful people to walk all over, but you could sort of buy into the heroic/pragmatic dichotomy between him and Celebrimbor there. But his interactions with Shelob and Celebrimbor in Act I feel like a bad fanfic - Talion shows far too much understanding for the creepy spider lady who just abducted his partner and extorted the ring of power that he himself wanted to make at the end of SoM, and apparently doesn't even consider that Celebrimbor has a reason to pissed of at her. And Celebrimbor just turns into a downright jerk with no patience or finesse while he previously could be shrewd about getting Talion to go through with his plans.Voss wrote: If you don't give a shit about Tolkien canon, the story isn't that bad. Not award winning by any means, but far more fleshed out than Shadows of Mordor.
I've yet to come across anything I'd regard as a 'shocking twist.' The first overlord reveal had me laughing my ass off, but that was about it. The traitor was expected (and a little obvious), everything else so far has been consistent with their Alternate Universe narrative.
There are actual people to interact with this time, which is a big improvement, and the tension between his initial allies and Talion slowly realizing that his aims and his ghost buddy's aims aren't exactly congruent are pretty well done. (Though so far he doesn't seem to act on that).
My biggest problem is Talion starts off making a stupidly bad deal (which is driven home in every dialogue with Celly), and is far too passive about everything. It sort of fits, since he's dead, but he has no agency at all, and just follows along in everyone's wake, pursuing their goals, regardless of what the beings in question are (and there is a surprising variety), what they want or why.
Game-wise it is a significant improvement. More environment variety, more ability variety, more enemy variety (the tribes help, as do the trolls), and while the game is still throwing tutorial shit at you in the second act, they don't do the 'you must kill 30 ghuls with a full bar or you can't progress at all' mission bullshit that the first game did.
They did change up some things with no explanation. I was desperately trying to get the cursor centered for 'last chance' attempts (both giving and receiving) several times and failing before I realized that the game wasn't doing that anymore. It just hadn't explained it. It was just a matter of not touching anything until the big circle converged onto the little circle. I actually though the mouse icon was bugging out.
This is going to be the model for their interaction in most later quests, too - Talion on one side, Celebrimbor on the other, and all the conflict never leads to a resolution, they just end up doing whatever the quest targets say for no explained reason. They bitch at each other a lot here (and Eltariel joins in later for a three-way bitchfest) but you never see them resolve it in a way that would explain why they still work together. I don't want to spoiler, but you'll probably see about half of the big twist of Act IV coming from a mile way, anyway. The other half makes about zero sense.
Mechanically it's doubtlessly a great improvement, though some of the new mechanics have been taken too far. The modular skill system where you switch between upgrades makes sense for the elemental blast attacks, but with a lot of other skills, that tactical choice is fake. You don't have to chose between having your Shadow Strike Chain or being able to Shadow Brand - if you have more than one of them unlocked, you can freely switch in the middle of battle, so you actually have both abilities whenever you want them, if you can be bothered to fiddle around in the menu. They should've made most of the upgrades cumulative and just toned the broken ones from SoM down so you can no longer get unlimited power quite so easily.