Bored of the Rings: The Snore in the North (PC Review)

During my brief break from Skyrim due to some technical issues, a good friend of mine purchased a few copies of Snowblind Studios "Lord of the Rings: War in the North" for us to play on the PC. The past experiences I have had with LoTR games have not been so pleasant, but it had been a long while since I had braved "The Fellowship" back in 2002, and I was ready to give it another chance. Besides, who can turn down a free game?

You begin the game by selecting from three heroes: A hearty Dwarf named Farin, a mage, or "lore-master", named Andriel, and a Ranger, Eradan. Each of these characters have their own unique play styles, but ultimately all revolve around button mashing, with their unique abilities only a minor supplement to the hack-and-slash mechanics of the battles. Farin, for instance, wields either a two-hander weapon or a sword and a shield, and can let out a battle-cry to boost his strength and health, burst through the enemies defenses, or release a spinning slash to damage all the enemies near him. Andriel wields a staff (and can later dual wield with a sword or axe as an off-hand) and has protective and healing magic such as a ward to deflect missiles and heal her allies. Eradan, wielding bows and swords, can enter a state of stealth to avoid incoming attacks.

The adventure begins in the town of Bree, who any good LoTR fan knows is home to The Prancing Pony inn, where the fabled hobbit adventurers meet Aragorn for the first time. Though we do not see our hobbit friends, we do also begin our own adventure at the requests of Aragorn.The town was very reminiscent of the movie, very dreary and forever raining. The inn, as well as the rest of the small town, was very empty save a few key players and a handful of random NPC's. After speaking to a few people and finding Aragorn, you begin your adventure.

From what little storyline I could handle paying attention to, I can summarize it as such: There are some really important things happening elsewhere, but while the big boys take care of all of that, your mission is to deal with all the rest of the rabble. This mostly includes about a million orcs, undead, trolls, and whatnots, all the while in pursuit of Sauron's "right hand man" Agandaur, who isn't much of a notable character other than the fact that he is kind of arrogant and dresses in Sauron's hand-me-down armor.

As far as the lore goes, you do get to visit places such as Fornorst, Rivendell, the Barrow Downs, Mirkwood, the Ettenmoors, and several other places that are in the books or the movies. You meet Bilbo, Arwen, Gandalf, Elrond and his sons, and several other key players in the Lord of the Rings series, and are ultimately relegated to doing crappy side-quests for them for little reward that involve just picking up random things in obvious spots along your adventures, such as a quest for Arwen involves collecting herbs for her which are very obviously scattered throughout the next area you go to. You also befriend a great Eagle, whose awkward character model and hilarious voice acting puts a smile on my face every time.

 

The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. You spend countless hours just smashing buttons and hacking your way through hordes and hordes of the same enemies. The only reprieve from the mindlessness is the cool "critical attacks" you can execute when a little yellow arrow appears over an enemies head. This leads to a decapitation or many other sorts of disembodiment. Every encounter seems to involve you passing through a gate, only to encounter a closed gate. The gate behind you closes and hordes and hordes of clones bum-rush you, and after a few minutes something happens to open the gates and you can move on to the next room where the same thing happens. Every now and then you get to man a mounted crossbow and just nuke the enemies with explosive bolts, but most of the time you are stuck just swinging as fast as your fat little dwarf arms can swing. In many outdoor areas you can call down your eagle friend  to come swoop down and cheap shot the toughest of enemies.

 

The whole leveling and gear systems are about as mediocre as a RPG gets. The more enemies you kill,  the more experience you get like any other RPG. When you level you get 3 stat points you can put in Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, or Will. You also get a talent point that you can put in any of 3 talent trees that consist roughly of about 6 active and 16 passive skills. And none of them really matter at all. For the dwarf for instance, you can get a battle cry that increases your health regen and your strength, then a bunch of passive abilities that boost that ability and certain types of damage, or you can get a spinning slash that does a small amount of AoE damage and usually doesn't do any more damage than basic attacks, etc.. It seemed like no matter what I ranked up on the talent tree, I still just used my basic attack 99% of every encounter anyway. As far as gear goes, you get gear slots like most RPG's for every article of clothing you can imagine other than socks and underwear. Your constantly getting upgrades that look like the same exact gear with a couple more stats. Some gear belongs to "armor sets" that provide extra bonuses, but acquiring a set of gear is completely random and usually becomes worthless and forgotten by the time you get the next piece of the set.

Now let's talk about Co-Op. The co-op experience makes the game slightly more bearable, as you and up to 2 friends sluggishly chop your way through the crowds of orcs and undead together! You get to sit and watch as the game leader chooses both boring and insignificant dialog options in their mass-effectesque NPC interactions. You can find extra loot as each character has their own individual "hidden locations" they can access, so for every friend you have, that's more loot for you. On the downside though, the game has implemented its own microphone chat system. And no, you can't turn it off. You can't adjust the volume. And yes, it sounds horrible. Just like Dead Island. Just like about a dozen other console ports. For me at least, everyone constantly cuts out or gets "staticy", there is no "push-to-talk" feature so you can hear your team members room-mates yelling at them or their screaming children, their bodily functions, or hear them munching on snack-foods and so on. And like I said, there is no way to turn it off short of unplugging your mic. Even if you could, and want to use another client such as Ventrillo, it turns all the background sound from your computer down to "barely-audible" and you can't hear your friends that way either. There is an in-game text chat though, so just not using a microphone tends to be the best way to go.

The amount of repetition coupled with the $50.00 price tag hopefully has doomed this game to rot in the deepest recesses of video game warehouses. But as with most games sporting a popular franchise's name, it will most likely continue to slowly creep out and taint everyone's gaming experience over the next year until they come out with the video game adaptation of the new 2012 film adaptation of The Hobbit.