Fans of Tolkien must still wait for the day when a game comes out that does true justice to the Lord of the Rings...
The story in War in the North caters to those who read the book. The are references to characters and places left out of the movie, such as the Barrow Downs and ghostly figures there. Yet, the game is made with so many book references, it doesn't carve out a narrative of its own. Every cut-scene seems to feature a main character from the book or movie, that you are not playing as, making references to the main plot, rather than the adventure of your own companions. The end of the game is a joke, attributing the success of everything to the main plot line, rather than your own efforts. Voice acting is stiff and emotionless, not everywhere, but certainly in places where it definitely should not be. The three playable characters hardly interact with each other in terms of dialogue, all of it is focused on non-player characters that are inconsequential to your own journey, rather there only as fan-service it seems. Ironically, all the appearances by famous characters in the books are hardly service to fans who would like to make their own story in Lord of the Rings.
The gameplay in Lord of the Rings is hack and slash RPG. You hack, you slash, you collect, sell, buy and repair items, than upgrade your character's abilities. As simple as this sounds, it works quite well for the first part of the game. Having a three player max limit to the co-op sounds limited, but it makes characters that much more complimentary, and it makes playing split-screen with only one other player less negatively affected for not having a full team. The combat gets repetitive as the game wears on, and it tries to cure this by adding waves and waves of foes that are simply too annoying to fight. A cave troll appears in the first half of the game as a boss fight. Near the end of the game, you will be fighting three trolls at once, which is an exercise in attacking, rolling away, attacking, rolling away to dodge again, repeat process. This is especially true for many other enemies with attacks that are unblockable. You simply memorize their attack pattern, so you attack, roll away (to dodge the unblockable attack) and repeat over and over. Since the game rewards you for getting high combos (consecutive hits without taking huge hits yourself) by going into "hero mode", these enemies with unblockable attacks, which make up the majority of enemies by the end, make the game tedious. The function of "hero mode" makes you attacks move effortlessly from one foe to the next, performing critical strikes, and doing slow-motion limb severs. Unfortunately, this is buggy as hell. Sometimes you won't be directed to the enemy as you should in this mode, and find yourself swinging your sword against air five times. Other times, your character will lock on his attack to an enemy 50 feet away, when you are trying to target an enemy directly in front of you.
The bugs don't stop there. The save system is a nightmare. The game is extremely strict in disallowing players to progress if they join the game of a player too far ahead of them. This results, unfortunately, in a myriad of save desynchs, which will make it impossible for you to save anywhere. On multiple playthroughs, this resulted in checkpoints not loading, and one game I had to start over ENTIRELY with a new character, because the save file got corrupt. After a couple patches, the same problems persist, but now one character is invisible, and another is missing his face. Since the studio behind the game was pretty much gutted, one can't expect these problems to get fixed anytime soon.
I can really say little else about this game without beating a dead horse, so excuse the short review. Avoid this game.
Overall Score: 4.0