One major change Monolith introduced, for example, is that you're no longer able to target a warchief's individual bodyguards if one of Udun's toughest uruks is giving you trouble. Rescinding this option eliminates one of the most effective (and therefore easiest) ways to make a tough enemy more manageable in combat. But that also means that you no longer have a creative strategy to tackle a difficult enemy. Instead, you're forced to keep confronting the same group of high-ranked nemesis orcs in roughly the same way until you manage to defeat them.
In a similar vein, all of The Bright Lord's missions and challenges require you to use Celebrimbor's branding abilities. When I say all of the missions, I really mean all of them. Every single one of The Bright Lord's quests revolves around some sort of branding-themed challenge—requiring you to survive in a battle for two minutes and make sure that you have at least ten branded orcs and uruks for the whole time, or stealth-brand a bunch of orcs without being detected, stuff like that.
Again, Celebrimbor's branding moves are nearly identical to the ones Talion had in the original game—the main difference being that the elf has a few additional ways to brand bad guys. Now you can execute a "ground brand," which is the branding version of Talion's finisher for orcs who've been knocked off their feet. There's also a sort of shockwave attack that brands a portion of the orcs in your immediate vicinity. Oh, and the only way to recharge Celebrimbor's ring powers is by—you guessed it—branding more bad guys. No matter where you look in The Bright Lord , there's more branded content. And not the good kind of branded content.
The problem with The Bright Lord's fixation on branding is that it was the worst part of Shadow of Mordor's gameplay. The DLC's changes don't do much to improve upon it. While branding gives the player extra sidekicks to bring into battle, these mind-controlled allies are impossible to control in any effective way. Both Celebrimbor and Talion, meanwhile, still attack branded orcs and uruks by default—meaning that you have to be extra careful while performing standard melee combos if you want to keep mind-controlled allies alive as long as possible.
Added on to that existing frustration is the fact that Monolith tweaked Mordor's health system for The Bright Lord so that you have to sacrifice branded orcs any time you want to heal yourself. The developers didn't add any new features that actually make managing your small army of branded orcs more feasible and therefore more enjoyable, meanwhile. These three factors add up to an experience that legitimately is more difficult than the original game, but only in the worst ways possible.
And, finally, what about the showdown with iconic fantasy bad guy Sauron?
Again, I don't want to spoil anything. So I'll just say that the final boss fight isn't worth the hassle involved in getting to it. What made Mordor's climax disappointing was that it was an unimaginative way to sum up the game's most provocative features that played out in the nemesis system. Celebrimbor's battle with Sauron repeats the same error, albeit in a slightly different way.
The new stuff that The Bright Lord introduces isn't bad, exactly. The ring of power and Celebrimbor's newfangled branding powers are fun to use when they manage to mesh gracefully with Mordor's already solid combat. But whenever I did notice that I was having fun, say, killing bad guys in slow-motion, I couldn't help but think how much more enjoyable it would be to have access to that power in the original Shadow of Mordor campaign. Like The Lord of the Hunt , Bright Lord's best ideas end up going to waste simply because they're closed off behind an arbitrary virtual barrier of a self-contained campaign that's nowhere near as good as the base game.
As the final piece of DLC in Shadow of Mordor's season pass, The Bright Lord puts one of the best games of 2014 to rest on an uneasy note. I absolutely loved Shadow of Mordor , so I've been disappointed to see its developer build on its original work in such an uninspired way. I hope that whatever Monolith does next with Mordor pays closer attention to what made their original work such a joy to play.
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq .