Looks and Personality
On a technical level, the co-op mode works fine, which speaks to how far things have come since the days of PS2 online gaming. We almost take that for granted now. Some things will never get easier or harder in game-making, though, like telling a good story.
In keeping with the move to a more cinematic dungeon hack, this is very much a story-driven game – lots of voice acting, lots of realtime cinematics, some BioWare-style conversation trees to keep the dialogue from coming out the same every time. The practical reason to do all this is to give the player another reason to keep on hacking and slashing. Loot is a fine motivator up to a point, but it never hurts to add some more incentive, to make us fight on in hopes of seeing happens next. So does the story here help pull things forward? Well…
One of the irritating conventions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is that only hobbits, of all the Speaking Peoples as they’re called, are allowed to have a sense of humor. They can smile and occasionally crack jokes if the situation calls for it. Elves, dwarves and humans are typically not so blessed. They have to march through their adventures with a permanent expression of grim-faced determination.
Aside from a couple of shopkeepers and the like, plus a short hidden cameo for old Bilbo Baggins, War in the North doesn’t have a lot of hobbits in it. There is, as a result, hardly a line of cheerful, entertaining dialogue in the entire game. It’s all momentous epic fantasy mush, like the King James Old Testament crossed with a day-old bowl of oatmeal. Radagast the Brown lends a daffy charm to his single scene (he’s a Wizard, and so exempt from the aforementioned rule), but he’s gone almost as soon as he shows up.
It’s irritating, because the cinematics in between stages and quests are often lovely to look at. The great mythic beasts are especially cool – giant eagles, giant spiders, a hellishly impressive dragon. (That dragon also comes with a cool little misdirecting plot twist attached.) The bits where people start talking, though, put an itch in the finger that sits over the “Skip” button.
Again, it’s important to point out that this is more a problem with the license than the actual efforts of the writers behind the game. They had to work within an unfair set of constraints, constraints that Peter Jackson’s movies actually cheated on a bit (the films include a surprising amount of comic relief that was nowhere to be seen in the novels). Chances are they could have come up with a more well-rounded script if they were working in a milieu that let them throw in more personality – the Conan stories, say, or Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery yarns. Something where a writer’s permitted to sometimes lighten up the mood.
Hear No Evil
After all these complaints, it’s important to recognize some of the fine engineering and artistic work in this game. Design problems it may have, but for the most part War in the North looks and sounds great.
Put an exclamation point on the “sounds great” part, in fact. Whoever put together the sound design here earned their money. The effects are rich, powerful, crunchy. Their timing and positioning give a great sense of feedback. You don’t really need to look very closely know you landed a good solid hit on a target — the cracks and thuds and meaty slicing sounds get the message across. Likewise you don’t have to see a wave of enemies to know that it’s coming. The bellows and screams of those orcish hordes in the distance are nice and scary.
Which is not to say that they don’t look scary too. War in the North has the benefit of being able to work with the art direction from the Jackson pictures – Warner Bros. now has the rights to the pictures, which previously belonged to Electronic Arts – and the modeling of the orcs and trolls is a spot where that especially shows. They have that ragged, primitive, almost animalistic look that the costuming in the movies did so well, and the animators made sure it worked well in motion. When a troll rears back and puts its giant club through the floor, you can just about feel it.
In the end, though, there’s only so much fun to have admiring the spectacle. This isn’t something we just sit down and watch in a dark theater for two or three hours. If War in the North is going to expect us to fight through something towards 20 hours worth of quest – plus extra challenge missions that sit outside the central plot – it has to come up with more ways of holding our interest while our hands are on the controls.
In another game, set in another fantasy universe, Snowblind just might be able to give us a game that does that. Here’s looking forward to the possibility, at least. Punt this figure up a few imaginary points if you definitely have some friends to play with, but all things considered War in the North earns a 60 out of 100. We played it on the Xbox 360, and it is also available on the PC and PlayStation 3.