Finished The Lord of the Rings: War in the North.You play either a Ranger (Eradan), an Elf (Andriel) or a Dwarf (Farin) in a team of three to face the lieutenant of the Dark Lord, Agandaûr, which decided to conquer the North of Middleearh for his master. In the course of the game, you visit some landmarks from the movies like Rivendell, travelling through Dungeons and defeat Orcs and Trolls alike.
All in all, not a bad game.
And that’s on the plus side. But the game has some flaws and one major real downer.
The gameplay is some rather fast pace combat hack & slash looter. But without a focus system, which gets pretty chaotic if there are many foes to combat with.
The story is so linear and full of cliché it actually hurts.
The surroundings are pretty nicely done and some places are really new and add to the universe, like Nordinbad, but every time you run against invisible walls. These are mere countless in the game.
Sometimes the designer treated their players like morons, e.g. when you click “Start” the game asks you “Do you really want to start the game?” or the embarrassing attempt to explain the setting and storyline in dialogues. Having played the Ranger my character goes into other NPC like this: “So I’m ranger hero fighting evil all day. Now tell me, who is this ‘Sauron’ you are talking about, and who are you ‘Gandalf’?” Now, this example is a bit stressed and not in the game, but these lines are not far off. There is a better way to introduce the player to the setting than to have the hero of a game silly lines.
Next, I played with a controller and there is no explanation of the movements. I actually learned by accident how to run and roll in the game far too late.
As already said, the story is a bit naive and very railroaded.
But all these flaws are pale in comparison to the one major: the game has no soul. It has no character. It’s a game which was made to have a game adaption of a big movie to milk money from the players.
As such: technically not bad and not a bad game at all.
But, … well.
6 out of 10.