The Lord of the Rings: War in the North (2011)

When I heard about a couch co-op ARPG LOTR games I hadn't played I got excited! Turns out there was a reason why I hadn't heard of it and missed it during it's initial release. What I had hoped/expected was something similar to the Two Towers and Return of the King ARPGs that were a lot of fun. While technically, this is sorta that, it ultimately feels held together by duct tape and padding.

If you're going into this expecting reverence and attention to detail around lore, you will be sorely disappointed. Nothing about this is canon and not particularly done well. It's filled to the brim with fan service, which fair enough. But I ultimately found it to be unintentionally campy and occasionally funny when it wasn't trying to be. Right out the gate it's absurd that there's casually another Dúnedain just vibing around Middle Earth who happens to also be traveling with both an Elf and Dwarf. Already they were struggling with originality with the set-up alone. This conceit didn't bother me to be honest, I found it more amusing with its absurdity.

Each of these "classes" ostensibly play differently. The dwarf focuses on melee combat, the "loremaster"/mage focuses on spells (so you would assume a ranged focused character) and the Ranger is a hybrid with a bow and melee weapons. That's fine in principle, but in practice all enemies either barrel towards you with reckless abandonment or obstinately plant their feet and refuse to move, even if they can't possibly hit you with their ranged weapons. One of the funnier moments of the obstinate archers was towards the end of the game where my friend and I fought on an upper platform, the archers spawned at the lowest point, and refused to move. So they kept launching their arrows towards us, but a wall was between us. They didn't care though. They were still going to try to hit us through a solid wall!

The game is a button masher with heavy focus on melee combat. So even as a Loremaster, who I expected to be focused on magic, still needed to melee as their primary mode of combat... which honestly sucked. I would try to focus on magic, but early game that's impossible due to limits to your mana pool, limited mana pots and your spells hitting like a wet noodle until you level up a decent amount. Even once I hit a point where my magic felt decent and I had plenty of mana pots and some passive mana regen, the mage fantasy felt pretty lackluster. All my spells are basically just white orbs of light. That's it. Sure maybe one spell lets you fire rapidly, another let's you charge for one powerful shot, another is slow moving and explodes, but they all are white orbs of light... why not have a fireball, a lightning bolt and an ice blast? Making each spell have flavor. And even then, you still need to mash the melee button a ton as bruisers bull rush you incessantly. Another issue with this is stat balancing. As a mage, you want to level your magic stat, which is supposed to increase the mana pool and power, but your staff still scales off strength... which feels so off. That you need to level magic, but at the same time you will mostly melee, so ignoring your strength means you won't deal a lot of damage. It's very odd design.

The dwarf in contrast doesn't have these problems. Strength is the main stat you need to level since melee is the focus. Stamina is helpful for health and to wear better armor, but the mage also has to levels these... so the dwarf feels like the best choice. The mage does get some really powerful support spells. Such as creating a defense bubble that blocks all ranged attacks and can passively heal you rapidly. Which honestly is pretty overpowered. Aside from this broken spell, the rest of the mage's tool kit is quite lackluster.

The game is loosely inspired by Diablo, in terms of it being a loot pinata game loot. It is nice getting a new powerful weapon and the game does shower you with loot, but your gear choice is pretty simple. A few pieces of loot will have special abilities, but the only really powerful affix we found was ice damage. We gave it to our NPC ranger and suddenly he became useful! With one swing of the ice sword, he would freeze enemies. Sure he wasn't doing damage, but the crowd control was legit good. The issue is that randomly the NPC decided he didn't want to use the ice sword anymore and it disappeared into the void... we never found another ice sword.

The AI of your NPC companions is pretty terrible. They can die which will cause a game over if you don't rez them in time. They do a decent job of rezzing you, unless there's a big swarm of enemies. It is kind of annoying you need to exit the game and reload as a specific NPC to level them up, but that's not the biggest issue the game has.

Aside from these weird design decisions, the real problem with the game is the repetitive combat. You fight goblins, orcs, trolls, undead, Nazguls and spiders. While that is technically a bigger variety than the Two Towers or Return of the King, all enemies fall into similar archetypes and are fought in exactly the same way. They all blindly charge you. Some hit absurdly hard, such as the dual wielding berserkers who will shred through your health in seconds, and even the spiders function similarly to Orcs and Goblins. It's a pity because the spiders could have spat webs or used webbing to create environmental hazards to shake up combat. But nah. They do have a ranged attack to be fair though.

By the end of the game fighting 2-3 trolls at once got pretty tedious. The game starts fun, but then after a few hours you realize you've seen all the ideas the devs had for the game. It's weird too. They start off with some simple side quests, mostly running around town talking to people, and a few side quests you can accomplish while out questing, but for the last half of the game, there ceases to be side quests. Just odd to present them and drop them so swiftly. There was also another half-baked mechanic around "secrets" specific to each character. A conspicuous wall will appear that the dwarf can smash. Or an arcane ruin that the mage can open for extra loot. But even this superfluous mechanic is just dropped entirely in the second half.

Each level also feels very arcady. Not a bad thing in itself. The game will throw up periodic glowing barriers, which were likely in place to active loading of new enemies. Making the game a bunch of stitched together gauntlets, rather than a seamless world you explore. Another odd aspect to the game is the mission map. On it you can see nodes all over Middle Earth, implying that you will trot across the whole map, but instead, you never really pass the grey mountains. Thus you're restricted to half of the map. Just weird to waste resources on making the entire middle earth map and have you loop around only one half.

There's a few other wild narrative decisions made by the devs. There's another Dragon in Middle Earth apparently! And the main baddie is another totally important nazgul! We just didn't know about him because of the heroes of this game doing their job. Apparently Frodo owes a ton of his success to this group of three.

Again, while this feels held together by duct tape, it is fun enough with a friend. I doubt I would have finished this solo with how repetitive and shallow the combat is though.

If your medium is based on an existing setting one of the worst things you can do is lazily copy and paste stuff.

The most egregious example in video games is probably The Old Republic, in which the Hutts have dozens of people frozen in carbonite. Not only is it lazy, it's also extremely stupid because they freeze Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back to test if a human would survive that.

There are also lots of examples in movie, notably the Star Wars spinoff movies. The one i hated the most was The Hobbit 3, which literally copied events and lines from the LOTR films. Example:

• Gandalf in TTT: "You father loves you, Faramir."
• Thranduil in B5A: "Your mother loved you, Legolas."

WITN is equally unimaginative and, as stated in the title, they copied stuff lazily. Being a fan of Tolkien (like me) isn't a reason to play this. At all.

Other than that, it's almost a parody of the kind of stereotypical console game i hate. Byzantine menus, clunky controls (you have to hold Alt to shoot...), crappy UI, boring combat, invisible walls coming out of your ear. It's an "action RPG" in which you only have 3 abilities and 3 attacks (normal, powerful, ranged). And HP/mana regenerates at an almost unnoticable rate so the best way to play it is to make coffee or a sandwich after each fight so you can recuperate. You don't even regenerate fully during cutscenes or when entering new areas.

I played this for a couple of hours hoping for it to get better, but it only gets worse. They clearly want you to go back and replay each area with the other two characters, because each character reveals different secret areas. It becomes a boring grind all too soon. The combat executions are brutal and entertaining but sadly the only highlight in this tacky tie-in.