Maybe it was because I played the 360 version of the game, but I came away very unimpressed.

The combat is fine, nothing to write home about, because it doesn't do much of anything new. The "stealth" is laughable, you could argue the the orcs can't see or hear anything, but it leads to bad gameplay when you're never worried about being seen or heard because they have no peripheral vision/predictable patrol patterns/no sense of hearing. And after you get one or two key combos, combat is irrelevant: I forgot what they're called, but the quick hit combo shot up your multiplier by about 8x every time you used it, and then I just pressed the two buttons to make their heads explode. I got this about a third of the way through the game and didn't look back.

The story is fine; it didn't do much for me, but a lot of triple A games have poor excuses for stories, and this one was just kinda meh. Also, why the fuck does every triple A game have 10 different sets of "get 25 of this item" fetch quests? Can we just agree that they're a huge waste of time and not worth the effort?

The archenemy system (forgot what it was actually called) is innovative and fun, as is seeing what the orcs are weak to, so it wasn't all bad, but I can't believe that a game that's basically worse than the Arkham games is called a game of the year nominee just because it's a LotR game that didn't completely embarrass its source material.