[Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers]

After the large success of the book, a movie followed. Of course, it wasn’t as good as the book, but it was a big hit. EA is the publisher if it’s about adapting a movie into a game. The movie was a blockbuster, so EA made a game of it, but film games can’t often match the quality of the film and I doubt that it’s any different with this game.

The idea of the game is all right, a nice violent hack ‘n slash game. It’s not the most interesting part of the story though. It could have worked quite well, but EA made a mistake they make quite often: publishing the game very quickly after the release of the movie. This means that the game will be rushed, which is why the most things go wrong. Unfortunately, this is the case with the game. The other problem is that the GameCube version, which I tested, is a port of the Playstation version. This means that the controls are really bad, the graphics are sh*t (sorry, there’s no way to put that in another way) and the game is full of bugs. Luckily, the game has some positive aspects, so I was able to actually play it without getting serious brain damage.

That must hurt…. well, the graphics… ARGH, my eyes!

Lord of the Rings, the Two Hours
This game has a nickname: “The Two Hours”, and it’s true. You can get to the end credits, if you’ve trained a bit and really want to, in two hours or less. Firstly, because it isn’t very hard, secondly, there aren’t many levels to play in and the levels you can aren’t very big. Fortunately, they’ve added a whole bunch of movie material to compensate that: interviews with the people from the movie and other nonsense. For the hardcore Lord of the Rings movie fans only. It’s probably very obvious, but the interviews don’t add up to anything. They could have skipped this nonsense, and made a better game.

It maybe is not right to say that it’s an easy game, it needs some explaining. Most of the time, the game is really easy, but there are a few levels in which the difficulty of the game raises to nearly impossible, even in the easy mode. This normally occurs when you’re fighting a boss. But apart from that, the rest of the game is really easy.

Something that makes the game a little bit more interesting is the very simple RPG element. You whack enemies, you get experience and you can buy new attacks. It’s a very basic system, but it works quite well. It’s only very obvious that they didn’t had enough time to include more attacks. The list of attacks seems quite large, but most of them are just damage and health upgrades to the original attacks. They didn’t even take the time to make the attack look a little bit different. Also, all the playable characters have nearly the same abilities with just a different name, and sometimes a different look.

This RPG element is really the only in depth thing in the game. The game follows the well known story and sometimes the guys from EA even took the time to make up their own own.

Lord of the Rings, the Two Buttons
This would be a really nice nickname for the game. It’s a hack ‘n slash game, so you can clear it only using one or two buttons, and the control stick to move, that’s it. You won’t use the combos much because they take a little more brain power, and they probably won’t work. Yes, the few simple combos in the game don’t work smoothly.

The game also has some very basic bugs like invisible walls and invisible pits, making you get stuck behind walls or something like that, and getting you very irritated.

The camera in the game is very special, they’ve made a fixed camera… no idea why. There are points in the game where the camera hides the enemies that are shooting at you, sometimes you don’t even see yourself.

Legolas with some glow in the dark sticks

Lord of the Rings… The Two Towers
Except of the fact that the game has the name Lord of the Rings, there are some elements of the story in the game, probably because it would take to much time too make up a new story. Of course, they’ve used the movie version of the story and the movie characters. I personally have some problems with that (I think the book is better), but let’s say: I can understand it.

Now here’s the thing that makes it worth to play the game, next to the RPG element: the Lord of the Rings ambience. Of course, it’s also the ambience from the movie. This makes the game a “fan boy only” game, Lord of the Rings the movie fan boys that is. If you’re not a fan, and if you don’t like fantasy, this isn’t a game for you. If you are a fan, you will probably like this game, and you can add 1 or 2 points to the score.

Don’t get any illusions, you can’t play with Gandalf

Conclusion:
Sound: Songs from the movies, not very irritating, with some yelling trolls and orcs, not great, but also not bad.
Graphics: Nearly like the graphics for an early N64 game. Weird enough, the PS2 version looks better.. The 3D is bad, the game over screen is a large pixel in the form of Saurons eye, and the title screen is boring.
Gameplay: Playable, could be worse. It’s a pity the easy mode is sometimes very hard, but normal is very normal like, and expert is… expert like. The controls aren’t very smooth and a multiplayer mode would be nice.
Lifespan: 2 hours… nah, you probably will need a week the first time, but after that, it’s probably over.

Score: 5

« « Back: [Lord of the Rings: Return of the King] | Next: [Mario 64 DS] Ultimate retro gaming » »