Warner Brothers and Snowblind Studios put out the very first “M for Mature” rated Lord of the Rings game with Lord of the Rings: War in the North, a third person hack and slash loot-fest set in Middle Earth. Does the Fellowship scratch your loot whoring need, or should the game be thrown into a volcano like the Ring of Power?
One Ring to Rule Them All
“With his far reaching rich hand Sauron might have done great evil in the North. Yet all that has been averted because a handful of heroes stood in his path.”
It is that single line where the developers at Snowblind Studios came up with the idea for War in the North, where the player follows a trio of heroes in their quest to help screw up the plans of Sauron in the north. Your trio of heroes is first brought in to run interference while the Fellowship helps guide the Frodo and the Ring of Power to Mount Doom. However, as they progress, the three heroes discover one of Sauron’s dark lieutenants, Agandaur, is running a power play in the north to help gather the forces of evil to Sauron’s side that must be stopped.
Hell of an interesting idea, but you really need to be a true Lord of the Rings fan to appreciate the storyline. The storyline really can’t stand on its own, and if somehow you’ve never seen the films or read the books, then you’ll feel like everyone is talking over your head about places and events. I’m sure to the die hard LOTR fan was losing his mind talking with Aragorn at the Prancing Pony or meeting Gandalf for the first time at Rivendell, but to the average gamer, it’s going to look like high-falutin’ swords and sorcery.
That being said, my not being a big LOTR fan, by the time the game was over, I was cheering my team along towards that fateful final encounter with Agandaur.
The Other Fellowship
The game at its core tries to be similar to the style of games that Snowblind Studios has been doing for awhile: a top down, button-mashing, loot fest 3-player co-op, only instead of Baldur’s Gate, they have the Middle Earth as their backdrop. Instead of the isometric zoomed out view, the camera goes into third person, which I found to be very similar to Gears of War. A little bit of a shame, as things get cluttered on screen quickly with all the goblins and trolls running around, but it works well enough.
You can choose from one of three class/race combinations: the Human Ranger, the Elven Loremaster (wizard) and the Dwarven fighter. As the game is steeped in storyline, you can’t make changes or create your own character to use; you pick one of the three named characters and you play through as them. After selecting your champion, your other two teammates are run by either online players in drop-in/drop-out multiplayer or the unclaimed characters are handled by some very smart and attentive computer run AI.
Hack and Slash Button Mash?
Button-mash hack and slash is just that: button mash. Your first two hours will be mashing on the same attack button over and over again, killing the same goblins and uruk-kai until you start leveling up your characters. The leveling system allows for you better customize your own champion’s gameplay. If you want your Ranger to be skilled in melee attacks, you can completely neglect leveling up his Dexterity or adding any bow skills to your talent tree, favoring the melee tree instead. You are able to redo your character and get all your talent tree points back if you suddenly want to focus on another aspect, but there’s a steep gold coin cost involved.
That’s One Big Ass Corridor
While the game tries to fool you with large maps and environments into move around in and travel to, the game is fairly linear. You run from the checkpoint to the area boss fight, with a few sidesteps here and there to find hidden treasure caches. Side quests are something taken from characters in town hubs, but you’ll generally find that you can complete most of the side quests by just following along the main quest path.
Pawn Stars
The loot is plentiful; barrels and crates line your path to be cracked open and searched, usually only yielding a few coins. It got to the point that there were so many things to break open that the thought of a few coins wasn’t worth the energy expended to crack the crate open in the first place. The big chests are nice, usually giving up a whole bunch of color coded loot based on its rarity. Items are all randomly generated, so if you replay a section and find a chest, you’ll find an entirely new stash of gear waiting for you…of which you’re regularly micromanaging your inventory with the latest and greatest, which is always a good time.
Stiffly Swinging
The gameplay controls feel tough. I understand my heroes are all running around in chain mail and leather, but I didn’t feel like I was working on a 360 degree plane. I felt very specifically as if I was stuck on a pair of X and Y axis and diagonal movement was out. I regularly found myself stuck in attack animations while enemies would surround and pound on me. Meanwhile, animations that looked like solid hits would whiff right by their intended targets. You do receive skills that specifically support hitting multiple enemies with one strike, but its disconcerting to watch your dual blades look like they’re cutting goblin steel only to whiff harmlessly past.
There also is no way to speed up your travel. You plod along slowly, jogging in your full armor from one “room” full of baddies to the next, and the only way to slightly pick up the pace is to roll forwards. When I was playing with two other humans, the three of us looked absolutely ridiculous all grunting and rolling forwards nearly at the same time.
Sting’s Bite
I could sit here and pick apart the game from one angle or the next, but I ended up seeing my journey through and defeating Agandaur. Every time I would turn on my PS3, I would want nothing more than to put my Uncharted 3 disk back in. However, once I got into War in the North and started mashing my attack buttons with one or two other human players, I found that I was having an enjoyable time. The game seemed to have all the right things going for it on paper, but the gameplay mechanics felt rough all the way around. While War in the North elevates itself above the lowly “movie tie-in game” status, it just barely clears that hurdle.
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