Shadow of War gets a free, chunky demo to go with its 66% price cut

You can now play a decent chunk of Middle-earth: Shadow of War for free thanks to a new demo released by Monolith Productions.

It'll let you play through all the missions in the Núrn region, in which you build an army of orcs and kill off warchiefs. Once you've amassed a strong force, you can march to the area's massive stronghold for a full-on fortress assault complete with siege machines.

After laying waste to the fortress, you can challenge its overlord, and once they're defeated you can install one of your own loyal followers as the new big boss. It's a pattern that repeats throughout the game, so the demo will give you a good idea of whether you could get into the rhythm.

If you play past the demo, which you can download from the game's Steam page (warning: it’s nearly 50GB, which seems silly), your new overlord will carry over, and to encourage you to do just that the full game is on sale for 66% off for the next 24 hours or so, making it $20/£15. If you just want to buy the full game from the start, it's on sale even cheaper over at Green Man Gaming.

Andy gave it a solid score in his review, and its controversial loot boxes were recently ditched entirely, so now seems a good time to jump in and swing your sword.

And also, f**k this one particular orc.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.