The system of gameplay is solid and intuitive, but there's a persistant feeling of that which is dull and hollow.
As soon as you have watched the opening video clip, no later than that, you are placed on a grid-based map, in which you can progress through combat in movement and action phases. Unlike traditional turn-based strategy games, this one uses a somewhat intuitive movement system that makes both teams move and act co-operatively. It's no new system, by all means, but definitely adds a sense of strategy since you must now learn to anticipate the movement of enemies and plan accordingly instead of just reacting to the enemy's actions.
While there seem not to be any definite classes in Lord of the Rings Tactics, there are definitely certain divisions of users. There are powerhouse units like Gimli, ranged fighters like Legolas, well-balanced in fighters like Aragorn, and magical adepts such as Gandalf. Everyone has default melee attacks, default ranged attacks and some default spells while obviously not as powerful as those who specialize in those respective aspects.
Every new map (in which number about twenty four) is introduced with a movie clip to help create a transition from level to level. The audio in the movie clips is a bit iffy at times when it comes to understanding what's going on, luckily, there's an option to turn on subtitles to get a better grasp of what's going on. As with most strategy games, each map has a general objective to complete, which usually involves killing all the enemies on the provided map, killing a specific enemy, surviving for a certain number of turns, or doing whatever you must to relocate your party to a certain location.
Upon completing these maps, your party will be evaluated for their in-battle performance, and granted experience, gold, and occasionally some equipment upgrades. Reaching a certain amount of experience will yield level ups that boost player stats. In addition to this method of development, you can purchase upgrades from the out-of-battle menus. These upgrade range from permanent stat. increases, to techniques to devastating summons spells, and there are a whole lot of them. For someone rushing straight through the games without replaying any maps, it would be impossible to gain an adequate amount of the extra techniques on one run... and there's, of course, a number of optional maps. There's definitely a fair amount of content in Lord of the Rings Tactics to keep the gamer occupied.
For the Lord of the Rings purists, you may notice a lot of the happenings, and players usable in certain maps don't exactly make sense given the actual storylines in Lord of the Rings movies. Luckily, everything else meshes well. Graphics and landscapes are well-detailed, spell animations(especially summons) look nice, and the larger inhabitants of Middle-Earth, such as the Balrog and the Ents, all look great, despite some persistant slowdown in the later levels. Howard Shore's music from the movies makes an appearance here, but a lot of the more intense songs that truly intensify the scenarios are absent in truly dramatic battles where it's much needed to set the theme correctly.
With so much emphasis on this rarely used strategy RPG system where you must learn to think and act efficiently since you never know what the enemy will do, it's no surprise that this game comes off as challenging. Luckily, there is a tutorial for those who can't quite get how differently this plays from other Strategy RPGs, and you can choose between whatever mode of difficulty suits the way you want to play the game (Easy, Normal and Hard).
As if this painfully unenthusiastic review hasn't made it clear yet, this game simply lacks a true sense of excitement. The soundtrack contains a few low, haunting themes, and chants/choirs aplenty but is mostly just ambience. The storyline is existant, simply from the fact it's been ripped from the Lord of the Rings movies, but nothing seriously intense was emulated in this strategic re-enactment. This makes it very hard to feel anything for the characters, or to consider them anything more than hollow shells awaiting your command. It really brings down what's actually a very solid and well-balanced system of play with a dull, hollow feeling that makes this feel like a strategic dungeon crawler.
Lord of the Rings Tactics is a very well-done Strategy title for the PSP, but doesn't do a very good job of reproducing the intensity of the scenarios it needs to.