Description Undertake a fantastic journey following the same path as the Fellowship in the book. Play as either Frodo, Aragorn, or Gandalf the Grey. As you take the fabled One Ring closer to its fate, you will explore the most dangerous wilds of Middle-earth from the Shire to the very edge of Mordor.
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Rating Reviewed by: RafiFreak(Unregistered User)
(Less than 40 minutes)
Review Date January 9, 2004
Overall Rating 1 of 5
Value Rating 0 of 5
Review NaN of 17
Price Paid:
$50.00
from at Best Buy
Summary: This game SUCKED! 1. i agree with the people who said the cardboard cereal box "collectible" is the best it gets. 2. All that loading for crap 3. the same stupid attacks. hi ya, ya, ya. wow, great. fun! I'm not a big Tolkien fan, but i was guessing playing this game might get me to know the plot of the movie better....i guess not...
Summary: This was a pretty good game, it seemed to stay pretty true to the story and didn't stray far. Though it seemed to have countless, endless, tasks that had nothing to do with the story, or if they did have to do with the story they would be impossibly hard. I never really got too submerged in this game.
Summary: This game is decent. The graphics are ho hum, but rather sluggish for no particular reason. I was impressed with the detail of environments like bag-end which were modelled right down to doornobs and little quill pens and pots. unfortunately, you can't actually *interact* with any of these niceties, so they are effectively there to put out a teeny bit of eye candy, and reduce your gameplay experience to a crawl.
The side quests in and around hobbitton were cute, but puerile and simplistic...Hardly necessary. I assume that the developers figured sticking a couple of shoddy "quests" into the game would help it come off with some of the positive attributes of an RPG. They were wrong.. I didn't get much of a kick out of blasting some dude's wind-thing with a rock....Only to find that i had somehow solved two quests at once (the windthing contained an item some other dude needed).
The sounds are generally good, but Aragorn sounds nothing like the actor in the film..He's far too gruff.
In terms of sticking to the plot of the book / film, the game makes very little attempt. I could list example after example after example of places where dramatic licenses were taken, that ended up destroying the suspense of a particular scene, or the continuity of another..but i won't bother.
If you're a 10-14 year old then go wild. This game will be the most revolutionary piece of software that you have ever laid eyes upon.
If not, or if *like me* you were looking for something unique to honor the tolkien legacy, then don't even bother looking at this game.
Something about it reminded me eerily of the low-budget hairy potter title that came out shortly after the movie.
Oh ,and i have beef with the Aragorn model. He looks NOTHING like the shagmaster in the movie, with his unshaven beard and long straggly hair. This guy just looks fruity, and weird. The kind of person who would *enjoy* hanging around with kids.
Summary: Make sure you rent this game before you buy it (why anyone would buy it is beyond me). I first tried the game on the PC, and it was fun: albeit very stale when it came to combat. I was seriously considering buying the PC version, but after getting an Xbox I just rented it. The Xbox version looks a bit better in some places (like water), but the controls are much worse than the PC version.
Summary: You're getting this right from the horse's mouth. I'm just the type of person a game version of TLOTR is waiting for. I played 'The Hobbit' back on my old Commodore 64 and I was even foolish enough to buy Interplay's dismal attempt at TLOTR on my Amiga. I even made the jump from PC to console in order to play this game. Yes, I bought an X-Box for the simple reason that I thought that the technology was finally in place for a half-decent wander around Middle Earth. Needless to say, I am bitterly disappointed yet again.
When you read on the sealed box that it contains "a collectible card - some are very rare" and you open it to find a piece of cardboard that looks as though it was cut straight off the back of a cornflake's box, you kinda know that you aren't in for much of a treat. And this little freebie of cardboard junk is about as good as it gets.
I hope that Vivendi has the good sense to never employ Black Label again and that they themselves fire most of their staff. I'd love to know what their budget was on this game and who is planning on retiring early. I mean, how hard can it be to get this game right? People have only had 50 odd years to come up with ideas on how to do it. Simply recreating Middle Earth and allowing people to wander around and explore a la 'Morrowind' would be excuse enough for every Tolkien fan to buy a LOTR game. Who wouldn't like to have a scamper over to the Grey Havens or to visit Laketown while leaving the main quest on hold for a while? That is what this game should be like and that is exactly what Bethesda managed to do with 'Morrowind'
This, on the other hand is a giant leap backwards. I'm not sure what the demographics are for most X-Box owners but I doubt very much that the average X-Box owner is less than 10 years old, which is about the age this game seems to be targeted at. And they even had a "Tolkien expert" to advise them because this version of the game was, unlike the film, going to "follow the book". So how come just a few seconds into the game Frodo is unable to open anything in his house because he doesn't have a lock-pick! I don't remember that bit. The moment he steps out of Bag-end he is attacked by bumble bees - I don't remember that bit either. In Bywater he has a chat with "Angelica" - who's she, the lead programmer's daughter? I mean, isn't TLOTR chock full enough with unique characters and places that Black Label feel that they have to make things up? And this is just the beginning. It gets worse - a whole lot worse.
You follow a little path with no chance to explore, a bit like Supermario but he has more freedom of movement. The clipping is awful and caused my X-Box to freeze on 5 occasions in the space of 10 minutes. It feels to me like an unfinished PC game waiting for a patch - something I thought I had left behind when making the transition from computer to console. The fighting is worse than on a PS1 game, the enemy's AI is laughable. The character voices are like a bunch of Californians trying to mimic a bad Gloucestershire accent with ther worst lip-sync I have ever seen. And the load times....why?
Graphics: Who cares - the game is awful.
Sound: Who cares - the game is awful.
If you want a multimedia experience, buy yourself an encyclopaedia on CD-ROM - this is supposed to be a game. What do the graphics or sound matter when the gameplay is so very poor? Nothing, that's what.
What a waste. A decent LOTR game is a license to print money but this has just been an exercise in wasting it. I'm sending my game back to Vivendi. Not because it doesn't work, just because it is crap. I'd urge anyone else unfortunate enough to have splashed out on the game to do the same. Even those of you thinking of renting would be better off seeing the movie again. Somebody, somewhere PLEASE make a LOTR game that does justice to the novels.
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