A middle of the road title that's not bad, but neither is it exciting. The problem is that better games are out there.
Story: You should already know the story. If you don’t, there is no point in playing this game. Even though you play as different sets of characters that are following the main Fellowship, to events in the Two Towers, then Return on the King, you are still led into some of the major battles that are set up in the books. Imagine having your own team of a Godorian, dwarf elf, and a crappy wood ranger, then meet up with the main heroes like Gandalf that can do over 17,000 damage with just a more flashy variation of a lighting bolt spell. If that got you sweaty, you should take off that LotR T-shirt and be prepared for a few sweaty armpits moments like that!! The game has it’s own story, but it’s really bad it’s not worth mentioning at all, but it ties in with the main story.
The books and films are more entertaining. This game contains 109 cutscenes from the film with Gandalf (usually) giving some dialogue over it. The purpose of this game is for money; to make people have renewed experience of the film in a different form of media. Or rather give the impression of, but it didn’t quite come off shown by this hackneyed game instead. It’s taking the book to film, from film to game… The outcome could have been far, far worse, but providing you liked Lord of the Rings, you could like this game. And could is just about adequate.
Gameplay: Derivative. I really didn’t want to draw up any comparisons, but this game is really similar to Final Fantasy X its funny (but you got to have a cry about it afterwards without anyone seeing you kind of way). It’s Diet Final Fantasy X with no artificial sweeteners with Lemon. There is no big map like FFX. You run around with a mini-map in the top left showing you were are the places you have to go, a compass, and you run around from area to area with random battles inbetween. What this game has that is different to FFX, there is an icon that gets brighter indicating the probability of an encounter. There is another glowing icon in blue that shows you how close you are to an unavoidable fight (there are some of those hidden around; some of them are “quests”). There are no “towns”. This isn’t a classical rpg where you have fighting, a rest up, equip yourself and more fighting them repeat, which makes sense, because there is a lot of fighting and turmoil in Middle Earth. It is more like you are pounded against waves of enemies until you reach a save point which heals your entire party, and repeat until you’ve completed an area. So in a way it is like FFX but with more bloody orcs. How exciting. Okay, Urah-Kai, but they are a type of Orc, so bleh. You also open up chests along the way. Don’t even think that you’ve missed some good armour or top class weapons. Unless you thought that treasure chest was a Mimic, which you know don’t exist in this game…
So you travel along, level up regularly, find the best armour, fight some easy battles, have some slightly hard battles, um… well, this is nearly an interactive game. You just have to make the right choices like actually healing members and not relying on levelling up or save point for healing. What is surprising about this game, that even though the system feels borrowed, it is different enough to be interesting. There are some simplistic strategies which are unique to this game because of unusual status effects. And also Dwarven Ale seems to be the only item that removes stun, stagger, fear (and greater fear), and sealed magic, and there aren’t enough of them in the game. Stagger is like what would be paralyse or stun would me, but much cheaper. Yes, status effect names seem slightly misleading, and also item descriptions. Me and my friend have never figured out what items actually remove which status effect. Dwarven Ale removes everything, gives you respect of your peers and keeps you warm at night and a headache in the morning…
Combat is ok. It was the typical hit crap until its dead affair, normally spamming the most powerful special because tactics were so last year. Occasionally you do have to resort to book of tactics which normally it would be a boss encounter, but there aren’t enough of them in the game.
It probably the only rpg where I’m curious at my kill count. I felt that I was really in a war, and slayed about 30,000 orcs, worgs, Urah Kai, Goblins… um, flying dragon thingies… pachyderms and other miscellaneous creatures. This game would have been more annoying playing if it wasn’t cut up by the cut-scenes.
Graphics: Over use splash effects over 2D graphics for magic casting special effects, not that it’s bad. But occasionally the graphics do look good, but when it does, there is always the hint of jagged edges, but they are solid for the rest. It didn’t make me think I was in Middle Earth though.
This game has so many familiarities to FFX the mini map and the action bar in battle, but sadly it’s repetitive travelling round from place to place without so much as a break or decent character interactions unlike Final Fantasy X, which usually such pieces are met with montage shots of scenery and deep meandering back stories. Not this game. What happens is that you reach a new area, and the characters start to automatically interact with each other. Then this tiny piece of dialogue gets interrupted by a monster or two, which turns into a fight. This game is a hack n’ slash alright. This game doesn’t even try to capture the visual sense that you are in Middle Earth, just some epic fighting, which does seem very real as you do battle with swathes of enemies, but the final battle was disappointing and really didn’t make any sense at all.
You have scenes from the film which are very nicely copied and pasted and edited to correlate to what is Gandalf is saying to you. Sometimes he tells you what you should be doing like your current objective, or sometimes delivers a story. But it’s not very consistent when you find these scenes which can be out of sequential order as some are gained whilst going into a new area, opening a chest, winning a certain battle, or completing a quest, which some of these you don’t have to do, but you may accidentally do them anyways because you are generally following a path that seems to take you towards the end of the game, but there is lots of crap in the way in the form of enemies. And coincidentally your quest was to kill all of the enemies or something along the lines of that, but worded differently, but you definitely had to kill something. These quests aren’t given to you by a peasant as you would expect, but a prompt on screen tell you that you have a new quest when you enter a new area. I don’t know what they were trying to do with this. Keeping the presence of character interactions to a minimum and make it a battle fest. Disappointing.
Sounds: The music is consistently epic, but I really got annoyed with it. I just killed a goblin and there is music in the background that sounds like I’ve had the hardest battle in my life and that goblin wasn’t going to give up. The music isn’t every excitingly epic, just typically epic that you can just imagine that it was cooked up from several film promo musicians and they just got recycled music from their old portfolios. Well, that what it felt like…
Sound effects are cool. Sometimes when you critical hit Orcs they sound like chickens. I think that is awesome. The sounds sound authentic, but voice acting is as cut an’ dry as it could be. Not weak, but not strong either. And that Dwarf sounds like he’s tired all the time when he wins a battle. I’m telling you, that isn’t a battle cry. The cut-scenes sound great with Sir Ian McKellen providing extra voices over them. However, it suffers from low volume syndrome. It’s getting very frustrating that I have to turn volume up for cut-scenes, and down in battles as I don’t want random really loud grunting enemies emanating from my TV speakers.
Conclusion: Sadly, this game is fairly short, the ending is such an anti climax as I recall getting a cut-scene from part of the film’s ending before actually finishing the game and getting nothing for finishing the game, not to mention a poor finale, there is no reason for playing through the game again once you have completed it, although it was fun. Evil Mode as an extra is fairly meh. You have fights playing as a party of monsters or as a boss, but the same tactics of spamming the most powerful move still applies. You get powerful items you can add to your save game once completing an area in Evil Mode, but you don’t really want to play through the main game again, so why do you want to do that?
Really, it’s a repetitive, hack n’ slash mild adventure game that you already experienced before with much more immersive experience from the films, I can’t think of a good reason to play this game at all. It has a butchered Co-op mode, I suppose which is fairly fun, and it was the reason that got me through the game. Even if you are an avid Lord of the Rings fan, this will be an awesome dust collector.
There isn't much to say about this game since it’s all about fighting and the extra twist of the story, following the Fellowship, but that isn’t actually that engaging at all. It’s not that this game is bad, but this game happens to be done in a not very interesting way, without effort of trying. Its games like this that you know it’s all about getting money from fans of a popular franchise. Well done, EA.