We can say over and over again about how the licensed game is the cause of so many problems in the industry. The desire for profit and usually a timely release causes games to be rushed out or overall not carry any focus on doing anything but meeting an expectation as to what the game needs to represent its property, and oftentimes even that is too much for a publisher to understand or a developer to be able to handle.
Because of this common knowledge, then, it becomes all the more exciting when a game comes around to do justice to not just any franchise, but a franchise that gamers everywhere are bound to hold near and dear to them, especially with movies on the way as well to finally deliver an experience fitting of likely the greatest book series of all time: The Lord of the Rings.
It probably got even more tense at the time knowing that the tie-in games would have to go to a big name publisher, which ended up being EA. What kind of game would they even make it? An RPG? An adventure game? Well, with Vivendi Universal holding the rights to base games off of the books themselves, and going for a big-world exploration-based adventure, and EA getting the rights to depict the films for a hack-and-slash title closely following the events shown as they are in New Line’s movies. And it was, thankfully, awesome.
The Two Towers
The first game is named after the second part of the trilogy (Vivendi’s was named after Fellowship, and came out only two months earlier, still selling over a million copies), but still incorporates the prologue and first part, all the way up to The Battle of Helm’s Deep, which itself takes up three whole levels of the game. You’ll get through Fellowship pretty fast, by focusing strictly on the action sequences. Because that’s what the game does - hack n’ slash action. And developer Stormfront did a more than respectable job on that front with some really solid gameplay at the core of the experience.
The Two Towers follows Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas as the playable characters, each wielding a melee weapon and a ranged weapon. Even if the basic button presses were the only means of attacking, it would still deliver a decent hack n’ slash experience, albeit repetitive, which is the nature of the genre anyway. But the game is more than just Golden Axe where you go around and hit a guy, then hit a guy, then hit another, larger guy (howtoloseatvideogames greatly endorses the classic Sega franchise Golden Axe). Instead, not only are the three characters appropriately different in basic style (Gimli is melee focused, Legolas ranged, Aragorn balanced), but the game incorporates some very light RPG elements to reward smooth combat skills, allowing the player to level up the characters, and while there are no stats, experience can be spent on better health or attacks and different moves, which then, in turn, provide a better rating and amount of XP when used properly.
Wherein Legolas pulls one of his sweet-ass double impalements on a
big ol’ Uruk. Unfortunately, you can really only do this yourself on
downed enemies.
It’s a very simple dash of role-playing that could have easily become convoluted but is simple, streamlined, and there for you to take advantage of if you want to play better, with the option to mindlessly button mash still pretty much available to you. Of course, I really don’t want to give too much credit for the most basic of RPG elements being done correctly, but for an otherwise repetitive gameplay style and such a wide target audience, I really appreciate it for being able to appeal to a casual action gamer and a hardcore gamer who both like LOTR. It’s the kind of thing, that I was able to enjoy at eight years old or so without asking too much of my tiny brain, and can look back on now as a serious gamer and realize why it fit so well.
For a sixth generation, the character models don’t look anything more than decent, and it’s especially true of enemies, who look not just unpolished but are all exactly the same. It makes the current-gen Shadow of Mordor all the more impressive for being able to generate individual enemies that are never too much alike, like the movies did so impressively. Level design, though, is pretty good, being admirably close to the film sets, and the presentation, overall, is still stellar. Music is straight from Howard Shore’s fantastic score and FMV from the movie are incredibly welcome, as the movies are, of course, so excellent, and all the actors even did voice work and some pretty entertaining interviews to unlock (Viggo Mortensen even did Aragorn’s mocap).
A picture-perfect model of Viggo Mortensen’s face, only apparently taken twenty years after the movie was filmed.
The main criticism I can make for The Two Towers is that it fails in an incredibly vital area of hack n’ slash style - it’s only single player. The fact that all three characters are so complementary and are always present in the levels just makes the lack of co-op a huge oversight, although it would be remedied in the Return of the King game. Really, though, The Two Towers, while it may get characteristically repetitive at times, and is only as long as it can get because of the movie, is still probably one of the better games of its kind on the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube, and manages to hit its targets far better than its Fellowship of the Ring running mate, with varied missions, entertaining bosses, and a really good overall depiction of roughly the most action-packed of Jackson’s trilogy. It’s just a shame that you can’t bring a friend along for this one.
———————-
The Return of the King
Return of the King fleshes out most of the weaknesses seen in its preceding game, most notably the presence of cooperative multiplayer. That alone, adding in the fact that the gameplay is largely the same, makes for a better game, but there are still a couple of other things that it does to try and improve the formula.
The length of even just the basic game is far greater, with not just one, but three individual paths to progress through to represent the actions of the split Fellowship - the Paths of The Wizard, The King, and The Ring. There are also more characters and more ways to kill orcs and uruks, so in general, the gameplay was made appropriately deeper. The level designs also become better due to the more varied locations in the third part and the different characters’ actions all being represented.
Don’t think that these games don’t go all extended edition on your ass to pull out the best scenes for gameplay purposes.
While the length of the game is nicely padded and the game overall is an improvement, there is one glaring flaw of Return of the King that hurts its overall verdict: the camera. Unlike The Two Towers, where the camera followed the player, The Return of the King implements a Resident Evil-style camera which moves somewhat, but mainly just swaps angles when the player character reaches an imaginary boundary on the screen, switching instantaneously to a different view, which is very disorienting and often a hugely flawed angle compared with one that would better follow the player.
There is the one huge flaw, but otherwise the game is an improvement, a great co-op experience (and a hugely and appropriately cinematic one at that), and both games are certainly a worthy play for Tolkien fans, unless you somehow don’t find Peter Jackson’s adaptations any good, in which case I’m shocked you’re still reading this review.
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