Great action game, with or without the LOTR license.
The presentation is excellent. The sound is great, and has great visuals for PS2. It also does an excellent job of bringing the lord of the rings universe to the game world. Other than the stupid cut scenes that are just tacked on bits from the movie itself, the actual gameplay is a perfect recreation.
The Gameplay is great too. It's a beat-em-up game, and it has a cool feature. There's this hit meter that increases every time you hit an enemy, the higher the meter is when you kill each enemy, the better your kill rating. It goes fair, good, excellent, and perfect. You have to be quick though, because while you are not hitting enemies, your hit meter goes down, and you will lose momentum so you have to keep hitting! If you get it all the way up to perfect, it stays there for a few seconds, and you can get a lot of experience points for doing this. It's kind of a short game though, so I think it would be better for a rental, it took me about 8 hours to beat it. It has an extra mission after the main game is done though, you have to get to the top of the tower of orthank by clearing each floor of the tower, which get progressively harder. It's definitely worth a rental, i suggest you do a game/movie thing where you watch the movie, and then play the game. Your LOTR desires will be fulfilled trust me.