Lord of the Rings: Two Towers

PS2

EA - 2002

Now we are going to talk about the Two Towers video game. I personally, being a huge Tolkien fan, had to wait until after I saw the movie to justify reviewing this game. And here, I'll give you my review in merely 8 words: I hated it, you will probably like it.

So I guess I should probably explain myself. Ok. I promise I will not rate this game as a Tolkien fanatic, or else everything will be really bad, as the plot of the book is hardly there correctly at all, Samwise, Pippin and Merry aren't in it at all, yadda yadda yadda. But I said I wouldn't do that. I'm reviewing it as an action/adventure game. So here goes.

The game felt like two different people were making it at the same time, and development ran out of time, so ordered the game to be combined together real quickly. One developer liked old hack-and-slash games where you take on as many villians as possible (think Mark of Kri.) In fact my roomie suggested that the game would have been better if you could target multiple enemies at once, and I'm partial to agree with that. The second developer liked games where you focused more on perfecting combos instead of mindless button mashing. So needless to say, but I will say it anyways just in case you are a stupid moron, the game has crazy amounts of learning to, well, learn for combos, but too many enemies at any given time to perform these attacks well on since the enemies gang rush you.

The game has some good stuff. In fact, I will probably buy it again when it becomes cheaper. If you can learn the fighting techniques, it becomes pretty fun. Attempting for perfect attacks (the game rates every kill of enemies) is fun, basically you learn the enemies weak points and focus on that. EA spent a lot of time mixing from movie cut scenes to in game scenes, and for the most part it turned out pretty well. It makes me want to see videogames in 3 years though, where in game scenes look like in movies. The music is great (probably because it is the music from the movie plugged in the game). They got all the voice actors from the movie to add some more spoken dialog, although this is mostly just "Aragorn. Aragorn. Help! Aragorn!" There's a lot of extra features, like a DVD has, with interviews and making of the game stuff. Makes you feel that buying a game with 7 levels is worth it I guess.

What liked: The music, the voice acting, the extra features.

What disliked: The fighting system. The cheap bosses. The gameplay basically.

What to expect: 1/2 hack-and-slash and 1/2 refined fighting system that don't work well together.

What not to expect: Tolkien's book.

What's so different from this and other games of it's genre: Probably still the best movie-to-game adaptation at this moment (Aladdin for the SNES and Genesis being the exception.) Best Lord of the Rings game for any system as well. Please never touch that Lord of the Rings for SNES or I will personally come and rip your spleen out and give it to my friend Jen.

Ratings on:

Control: 7 - Acceptable.

Graphics: 8 - Pretty good. The character models are nice and the mixing the actual movie in was pretty cool, although I don't think they did it as well as they could.

Sound: 10 - Great soundtrack and actual actors for voices always gets at 10. Problem is that it isn't "their" soundtrack (ie EA's) but the movies. Acceptable though.

Style: 5 - I don't know how to rate this at all.

1st hour: 7 - I don't like that they throw you into the fighting without a warm up.

5th hour: 8 - Wait, that was a warmup? So now what do I do about these ringwraiths?

2nd day: 4 - They really should have told me to burn the ringwraiths. Woulda saved a lot of continues. Now the cave troll officially sucks.

4th day: 2 - Gave it to my roomie. I'm bringing this game back.

#1 reason why I hate this game: Too many enemies to learn combos effectively leaves you just feeling rather pissy.

by Hawke