The Lord of the Rings: War in the North

Review from Cav - Wednesday, 14 December 2011 @ 11:10am

Since the more recent movies were released I have become quite a fan of the Lord of the Rings story, most possibly influence by my wife who watched them constantly for a monotone actor named Bloom. Although I have always been scared of the timesuck that LOTR online could implement on my life, I have ventured into other LOTR games like the Trilogy games that presented themselves from EA and the 2003 game the Hobbit from Sierra (which I quite liked). I also dabbled in Conquest, which I likened to the Star Wars Battlefront games, which I also enjoyed. So a few years on, with gaming evolving at a steady pace, I expected big things from War in the North.

Boy, was I wrong.

Press X, LB, RB from the Birdcrap of Bracegurdle attack
I felt like I was playing Two Towers again, just with a little extra ‘gore’ thrown in for good measure. Button combos, activate this lever, operate this mounted weapon, blah, blah, blah. Throw in some seasoned looking graphics and still this looks like a half hearted cash-in on a much loved franchise.

The game itself has some length to it, as I put in quite a few hours, by myself and with friends, so for those of you brave enough try War in the North, you shall be rewarded for your gusto. Co-op is a good feature for WitN, and its main selling point, but as with most co-op gaming, there must be no lone wolves in your pack. Yes, you can defeat the game by yourself, but co-op is where it’s at.

I found the inventory menus to be very fidgety, and applying armour, weapons and rune stones to them took a bit of learning to get right. This, of course will be a whole different ballgame on PC. Using potions and the like was also difficult, while trying to escape the attack of a horde of attacking Orcs.

Hey Dwarf! Did you drop this?

We were asked to do this multiplayer, and I did therefore dutifully play it so that I could back up Cav's review, and help him review it. But I also played it single player, to get more of a sense of the game, and get a bit more into the story than what we could accurately do while trying to find mutually playable times.

It becomes obvious when you do this why exactly it should be played as a multiplayer co-op only... because it's broken as all hell as a single player game. Inventory management between characters is non-existent, and there's no way to see what your party's gear and stats are like. So when you get new gear you can't tell whether to give things to them or not. And if you do, you can't get them back.

Um... ouch!?!

Well, you can. You can play as any of the characters, and switch between them. But not dynamically (how amazing that would be!). You can only change at the end of a chapter (or at the start menu). And when you do you have to assign all the stat and skill points. In my case I played a ranger for fully 9 levels before deciding to switch to the healy elfy. Now I suddenly had 20,000 stats to assign, and a bunch skill points to go in a trees where I didn't even know what the buttons did.

Overall as a game Lord of the Rings: War in the North is flawed and a bit sloppy. Invisible walls, terrible voice acting, questionable writing and repetitive combat. The skill trees are lacklustre and the presence of "durability" on the weapons and gear is a fun-spoiler. But the utter lack of party management options is the real killer here. Unless you have two (and EXACTLY two) friends to play this with regularly online, and you particularly want to play a Lord of the Rings game, there will be better options available for you to play.

That's a piss poor Assassins Creed costume you've got there, love.

Pros

• A nice parallel storyline
• Lots of 'loot' to collect

Cons

• More of the same
• Seems dated
• Lack of party management options
• Less than average voice acting