One Console to Rule Them All
The Lord of the Rings: The War in the North is being re-released for modern consoles. I remember playing this back on the PlayStation 3 and not having a great deal of positive things to say about it, little did I know the game captured a cult following and many were happy to see this new chance to revisit it.
Many Lord of the Rings games have been unable to be ported to modern consoles due to being stuck in a licensing battle of one kind or another. So with this re-release, it seemed like a good opportunity to revisit all the titles on the PlayStation 3 and see which ones were worth the journey.
Lord of the Rings Conquest
This is a game I spent a lot of time with when it came out, especially with my friend and contributor Jon where we could play the local co-op together. It is basically just Star Wars Battlefront, which first became popular on the PlayStation 2 but re-skinned for the Lord of the Rings.
Just like Battlefront, each level starts right in the middle of a battle that is currently underway, you choose your character and spawn point and then complete a series of objectives. If your character dies you simply re-spawn with a new character in a new location, the only downside being enemies can make progress against your objectives whilst you wait for this respawn.
You can choose between a warrior and archer which are standard Lord of the Rings character types, a scout, who can use stealth to kill unseen and you can also choose a mage. Correct me if I am wrong but I am unaware of any rogue mage characters in the Lord of the Rings universe, let alone them being part of an army, but whatever, they have cool spells.
One of the best parts is taking control of the heroes when offered. All the big names are there like Gandalf, Aragorn, even an Ent and from the evil side you can be a troll, a Balrog and Sauron himself. It is such fun to play as these heroes (and villians).
It is a faithful Lord of the Rings movie game. The iconic movie locations are brilliantly replicated. The very first level has you play in the battle of Helms Deep and whilst the scale might be noticeably downsized, it still feels like you are taking part of this great battle in a location you know well.
This game is personally painful for me as there are a large number of trophies that are only accessible through the games online multiplayer which has long since shut down and the platinum is now unobtainable for me - I only had two trophies left!
Still, a pretty good game for fans, a really good couch co-op experience but does come with a surprisingly hefty price tag these days of around £15!
Lego Lord of the Rings
I’m going to have to assume that the reader has played at least one Lego game in their time and this entry is all the same formula and I don’t mean that in a negative way.
The comedy is there and the faithful replication is there. As with a lot of later Lego titles, there is an open-world hub which serves as the level selector but is an interesting area in its own right with lots to explore. For this, it is the whole of Middle-Earth, not to scale with the characters, but you can walk from the Shire to Mordor, it is so satisfying.
This is one of the first games I ever received a press pack for in my early days of video game journalism and it was so exciting to get it through the mail with a few little extras.
The game has a really straightforward platinum trophy run too and can be played co-op as well. It’s also one of the cheaper ones in this list being available for around £10.
Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest
This is a very odd title. I didn’t manage to pick up a copy of this to re-play but I did rent it back on release. It was around this time in video game history, 2010, where the world was starting to go mad with motion controls again. I feel like Aragorn’s Quest was very much trying to capitalize on this with the Wii being one of the primary supported consoles.
It’s also surprising to me that Sean Astin reprised his role as Samwise, who acts as the narrator for the story.
It feels a bit like it’s Lord of the Rings for kids. The art style is very odd, the characters are small, simplified, game-like but then they have these weird maps of the actual actors faces overlaid on top.
On the PlayStation 3 the game was developed for use with the PlayStation Move, although not exclusively. The Move Controller itself was used to perform your sword attacks and then the regular controller or the Navigation controller was used for movement.
If you are looking for games to play with the move, it’s not terrible, it uses it quite well and in less of a gimmicky way than some but I find the overall art style not to my taste and it doesn’t expand on the Lord of the Rings universe in a way I find interesting. It’s no wonder that this is the cheapest of the bunch coming in under £10.
Lord of the Rings: The War in the North
The War in the North was developed by Snowblind Studios who had previously worked on Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, a local multiplayer RPG that I actually really liked. The studio merged with Monolith studios after the release of War in the North and eventually went on to work on more franchise titles such as the Shadow of Mordor which met to much more critical acclaim.
This game was one of the first in a while to explore a new Lord of the Rings story using part new material and part inspiration from Tolkien’s rich world and it also takes and leaves certain aspects from the styles the Lord of the Rings movies established, unlike Conquest and Lego which remained much more faithful.
It was a complete disaster and I still don’t know if it was avoidable or if they have fixed it on the remaster but it was hilarious at the time watching him die in one or two hits.
The game is a third person RPG played with three players in the party, when playing online all three party members can be played by humans but when in local mode only two local players can play. Nevertheless this marks another Lord of the Rings game having some version of local co-op mode which is pretty awesome by my books.
The game didn’t review too well on release. I personally found it to be underwhelming to say the least. The game doesn’t look particularly pleasant, the graphics are a bit muddy, the voice acting is not great, the fighting mechanics were fairly basic and the enemies were sponges. I distinctly recall seeing some enemies so filled with arrows they looked like a hedgehog.
Surprisingly to me the game garnered a bit of a cult following over the years, I guess in hindsight I can see why, it’s one of the last Lord of the Rings titles to come out over the past two decades and it’s an RPG and it has multiplayer.
There are a few side quests for you to do along your way alongside a fairly standard skill tree and upgrade path. Your characters gain experience from killing enemies. I first played this game with a friend who jumped on and played one of the characters. After he had left I continued playing until near the end of the game. When they came back over we decided to finish off the game together. What we discovered was that his character remained at the experience level as when he first played, the NPC had not leveled up whilst I continued to play and whilst I had continued to get stronger. It was a complete disaster and I still don’t know if it was avoidable or if they have fixed it on the remaster but it was hilarious at the time watching him die in one or two hits.
If you are interested in this one I would strongly recommend looking at the remaster as it fixes a lot of the performance issues and it is probably cheaper with copies for this on PlayStation 3 currently going for around £25-30.