Fun, but needs work. If only it had a little bit more work on it, it would have been at least a 9.
User Rating: 7.5 | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King GBA
I have mixed reactions about this game. The gameplay is fun. You can play as one of 5 characters. Only 3 are worth using,(Aragorn, Gimli, Gandalf, Legolas if you like shooting stuff). You run around and kill things, they drop stuff, you level up and incease stats and learn or upgrade active or passive skills. The 3 diffuculties are amazingly different. On normal, you can fly through the game relatively fast and fun, and second time you can probably do it in under an hour if you use the same leveled character. You'll get 4 bonus maps total. You can't go up to hard until you've gotten to a very high level and have excellent equipment. Most people probably just don't have the patience to get to Grueling. I'm not saying this means the game isn't worth getting to the higher diffuculties. The game is so fun and addicting to kill things in that I found it hard to put down. There are lots of stats to specialize in and a lot of characters to specialize them to and a lot of items and weapons to help you along. There isn't much enemy variety. You'll find it that stronger enemies are just color swaps of previous ones. The irritating thing is, it's either your a warrior or gandalf as far as the characters go. All the characters except frodo, he sucks, is pretty much a different kind of warrior except gandalf. He can go any way he wants whether it be warrior, mage, or both. They are all fairly unbalanced. A lot of games enemies aren't fair. If you have mastered the timing of you and every single enemy and how much damage you do, is it fair. Otherwise, you just jam buttons and collect the loot. A very small amount of work could have made this game pretty good, but somebody skimped out and it ended up being addictive and decent. The addictive part comes from the powerleveling combined with decent. You ever notice the games that suck are addictive? Pokemon? Runescape? You see where I'm going. This game could have been but wasn't. 7.5 out of 10.
