It's honestly impressive how coherent this game is given that it was made to help market and exploit the Lord of the Rings film franchise. Looking at the Wiki it looks like it was technically in development for 3 years, though the style of the game did shift from an RPG to action game. The game isn't complex but I appreciate how it's a callback to the old school Beat em' Up genre. It's very arcadey for lack of a better word which isn't a bad thing. You unlock moves and powerups as you progress through the linear levels that effectively jump from action set piece to action set piece from the film. They do pad out most of these set pieces, such as Rohan and Helm's deep, but they vary the encounters to keep them from feeling stale.

The combat doesn't feel as good as Devil May Cry or other classic action games. It can feel clunky and I personally didn't like how easy it was for you to get knocked on your ass. If there was ever a hoard of Orcs, chances are you're going to get closed-line unto your back almost immediately. This unfortunately breaks up the flow of combat, since getting back up takes a few seconds... you can get a move as Aragorn to attack while standing back up which is honestly a must get skill considering how much time Aragorn spends on his back. You have a parry button, and if you spam it you will basically block most things thrown at you.

Still, there aren't too many options to play as Aragorn, Legolas or Gimli and it delivers on that power fantasy reasonably well. The biggest issue I have with the game is the difficulty curve. There's an acute increase in difficulty during the Helm's Deep levels. The first level isn't that bad, but dear God mission 2 is brutal and stressful. You need to survive through 14 waves of enemies while defending a door from being destroyed. This has to be done in one attempt... no checkpoint. The last level is also fairly brutal but honestly not as hard as "The Breach." The last level also does that trope where you have to win, but in the cutscene you lose anyways... that never feels good to the player. You defend the door and then the fucking Troll falls on it and destroys it anyways...

Overall, this was a fun. I didn't have the desire to beat the game three times and unlock the secrets, but I'm an adult now and can just buy a new game. This type of replayability was appreciated when I had to do chores for a month to earn enough money to buy a game. You want to mine that game for every minute it's worth.

**Update: I replayed this game on an old tube TV. It made SUCH a huge difference. The details were better, which let me flow with the combat more. I also think after playing more retro games I am more able to wrap my head around some of these older mechanics. I do think that Gimli is tough to use compared to Aragorn and Legolas though.

My favorite mission has to be the one defending the wall of Helm's Deep

Changing rating to 4/5 Stars***

The overall formula for this game is a lot of fun, basic hack, and slash, level up, gain some new cool abilities, enter the next mission, rinse and repeat. I was really enjoying the game until I got to the last two missions.

In the second to last mission, you play as your character of choice, defending a door from waves upon waves of enemies, which normally would be a lot of fun; however, there are no checkpoints, so if you fail, you have to completely restart. What I found happening was I would breeze thru the first 2/3rds of the mission, and then I would get hit by a lucky strike, or get slowed down so the final wave of enemies took down the doors, so I would have to repeat, over and over.

Eventually, after quite a dozen or so attempts, I finally beat this level and rejoiced, only to find out the final level did the same exact thing only harder...

I think what particularly hurts these two missions is that two of the enemy types used Berzerkers and Trolls, are exceedingly hard to slay, at least in part due to some clunky mechanics. You see, both enemies can "counter" hits of the character, thru their own attacks. However, they attack rather faster than the combos you can use to actually kill them, so what I found was that whenever I killed them it was often due to lucky strikes, rather than actual skill.

There also were some issues with the constant mixed-in shield warriors blocking my combos against the tougher enemies.

I'm hoping the Return of the King version has polished some of these issues, as the core game was a blast.