[Zigûr]

I only found out about this game a few days ago myself and my first instinct was a bit of eye-rolling, because the premise is indeed pretty ridiculous. The idea of a Man gaining, to quote the gameplay video, "wraith powers" without the use of a Ring and yet not being enslaved to a Ring-bearer is playing extremely fast and loose with the source material.

First I'll discuss the gameplay video. Looks a lot like Assassin's Creed, doesn't it? I've played the first four all the way through and some of three (god knows why) and while they're fun I feel like they're very much gaming on autopilot: all the 'cool' stuff the characters do is mostly through simple button commands, like quicktime events. The other one it made me think of was the Batman Arkham games, of which I've played the first two. That kind of gameplay can be fun, but risks being monotonous unless you're given a good reason to use new weapons, abilities and such. I hope there aren't any forced stealth sections in the game, because they're always the most annoying bits of both Assassin's Creed and Arkham.
I notice the big Orc talks about "our lord Sauron." He should call him the Great Eye. Speaking of which, it looks like Sauron actually kills the Gondor garrison in person. So is he a big eye or a big chap in armour who looks a lot like the Lich King from Warcraft III? The orc heirarchy system looks interesting, although again the idea of controlling orcs with "wraith-power" is a pretty long bow to draw. Incidentally, here in Australia at least, "Ratbag" (the orc's name) is a slightly old-fashioned insult for someone mischievous, irritating or annoying. The pettiest complaint I have about this video is the gravelly macho voice over, which just sounds silly. Elvish (and even pseudo-Elvish) always sounds weird to my ear when spoken with an American accent.
My biggest real concern is the violence. I'm not in any way opposed to violence in video games: last year alone I enjoyed BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us, which were both extremely violent games, but they were about violence. Professor Tolkien's work features a great deal of violence, but violence is in no way presented as "cool" or "fun." He had seen real violence and abhorred it. I would like to hope that the violence in this game, such as that orc's gruesome decapitation, serves some thematic purpose beyond the titillation of the audience.

Now let's talk about the interview. The director of design states that the story is set at the end of "a couple of thousand years of not much happening" by which time Gondor's vigilance upon Mordor has been reduced to "a skeleton crew." In fact this had more or less transpired nearly two thousand years earlier during the luxuriant reign of Atanatar II Alcarin, and the fortifications were entirely abandoned as a result of the Great Plague about five hundred years after that. What's more, Minas Ithil had been conquered a thousand years before the time in which this game is set, and Uruks from Morgul had overrun Ithilien about five hundred years previously, establishing a general state of danger in Eastern Gondor, so it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that nothing had been going on around Mordor since the end of the Second Age.
I notice the interviewer (and the voiceover in the gameplay video) use the word "human." It's "Men." Orcs are human. Elves are human. Hobbits are human. Men are human. Dwarves are not human (although they're close). It's a minor gripe but one which, if emphasised more, would probably give people pause for thought when it came to delineating the "races" of Middle-earth.
Speaking of, I don't like the Orc designs, although I realise they're from the films. Orcs should look like soldiers. They should have a uniform. They shouldn't just be covered in random, arbitrarily spiky bits of metal and old bone. Orcs are us, oppressed and debased and denied as much identity as possible. That being said, I appreciated his remarks about the "weakness of evil to turn on itself", something Professor Tolkien himself identified as a failing of evil and one of the reasons we should not despair at the presence of evil in our world.
He talks about "spaces Tolkien deliberately left" in which new stories can be set, but I think that might be exaggerating a touch. Professor Tolkien did like to leave things to our imagination but something this grandiose (a wraith-powered Ranger wreaking havoc in Mordor) doesn't exactly seem like the kind of thing he had in mind.
It's interesting that Peter Jackson was supportive of them not adapting the films, probably because he recognises that games based on films are usually pretty terrible. A few exceptions come to mind, of course - Goldeneye 007 on N64 and the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade point and click adventure game, for instance. I was surprised that there was no video game adaptation of the films of The Hobbit, but I assumed until now that the Estate's lawsuit had something to do with that. That being said, I had the "The Return of the King" button masher on Gamecube when I was a teenager (I still have it somewhere) and despite being stupid brainless action it was an entertaining game to play with a friend. I played both "Battle for Middle-earth" games too. Being able to besiege Minas Tirith or defend the Hornburg was fun, although the second one took some pretty serious liberties with the source material (summoning Tom Bombadil to kill all your enemies with a stupid dance, for instance, or a rather unfortunately-designed "Wyrm" that could pop out of the ground).
Interestingly the designer seems all in favour of this game not just being an adaptation of one of the films in the same way that the films are, in his words, "not just clones of the books; they're amazing movies in their own right." Says you, mister. Funny that he should mention the Batman Arkham games, because a world like the one of comic book superheroes where there's no single narrative set in stone seems to me to be far more suitable for video games than a linear (albeit long) history written by one man sixty years ago. The game looks interesting, and I might keep an eye on it, but despite the fact that he's not around any more I can't help but think that Professor Tolkien would not really have approved. We know, of course, that the "paint and music and drama" quote was not an idea he supported later in his life. In his letters the Professor admits to being a bit of a grump and a curmudgeon at times, but I have a lot of respect for him, and while I'm resigned to the commercial exploitation of his works (I think a compromise we must make for the comforts of an affluent society is a shallow popular culture) I still think it's a shame.

You know what I think would make an interesting setting for a game? The Kin-Strife. It's confronting and deals with issues of racial prejudice, and would break the mould of just killing lots of Orcs.