Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

EA Games has decided to follow up its highly successful The Two Towers, with The Return of the King. Common sense would lead you to believe that it would mostly be the same game, and it would just cover the third movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, rather than the first two. Well you’d be wrong. While a lot of things stayed the same, quite a few have changed… for the better.

In The Two Towers, you were for the most part confined to playing the game with either Aragorn, Gimli, or Legolas. This time, you’ll still play as one of those three, but for the other two storylines, you’ll play as Gandalf and Sam. While the “Wizard’s Path” and the “Hobbit’s Path” are slightly shorter than the “King’s Path,” they are hardly extraneous material. Each path focuses on the different events that will all eventually coalesce into Sauron’s destruction (assuming you win). Having a slight man-crush on Gandalf, that was easily my favorite storyline, but each of the storylines are well thought out and tailored to their specific characters and abilities.

Modifications to the fighting engine went a long way to make fighting easier and more accessible. This is a very good thing seeing as you’ll be hacking your way through nigh on a million agents of evil, but you’ll find yourself doing a lot of the same moves over and over again. There are also more fighting upgrades to get this time around, as well as “Fellowship Upgrades” so that you can pay a little bit more and get an upgrade for everyone, rather than buffing up each player separately. In short, the gameplay is just more fun than it was in The Two Towers.

The game starts off at the end of the battle for Helm’s Deep, when Gandalf arrives with the Rohidian cavalry. The game goes a long way to making you believe you really are in the middle of an all out battle for humanity. The things near to you are understandably action packed, since you’re hacking your way through hordes of orcs, but the highly scripted background has just as much going on, if not more. Whether you’re meant to interact with the background by firing a catapult at an enemy position or it’s just there for aesthetics, it looks fantastic. EA did a superb job bringing the epic feel of The Lord of the Rings to the game. The character models themselves are largely the same as in the Two Towers, but the animations are much improved. The “that doesn’t look right” feelings are few and far between, and a lot of moves, the instant-kill ones in particular, look awesome. While the movie cutscenes look great, as you would expect, except for the scenes that weren’t actually in the movie. The clips that didn’t get the super duper ILM treatment for the film sort of stick out, but not so much as to break the mood or really for you to mention anywhere other than in a review of the game. The levels themselves are enormous. The shortest level in ROTK is twice as long as the longest level from The Two Towers. To compensate, there are much needed checkpoints scattered about at appropriate places.

The sound of ROTK is just about the most fantastic sound you’ll hear in a game. A lot of the epic feel of the game comes from the sound. The easily recognizable music from the movie is still great and fits each situation as it comes. You’ll have no trouble believing the different sound effects, whether it's the light steps of Sam on wet wood, or Gandalf running through a cave troll. Ian McKellan (Gandalf) provides an excellent narration of the game, and choice phrases from the other characters are sampled at the appropriate times. The sound earns itself an easy 10, and you would be advised to play this on a sound system worthy of such a game.

Once you’ve beaten the game you can go back and play any mission you like, with whomever you like, and fill out anything you missed. There are a few DVD-like extras and two extra levels you can unlock, but for the most part, once you’ve beaten the game you’re done. That said, the two player co-op mode can easily breathe new life into storyline. Things work as you would expect, it’s just that there are two of you now.

LOTR: The Return of the King is not for those unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or those who haven’t seen the movie and don’t want anything spoiled. The game expects you to know what’s going on, either from the movies themselves or from the previous Two Towers’ game. The fighting is not overly deep, but if you find yourself doing the same moves over and over again, you have plenty of other moves to try out. The game is pretty difficult, even on easy mode, so don’t be surprised if you die a couple (or more) times on your adventures. There are also some compromises made for the sake of gameplay balance, like Sam being just about as good at killing orcs as Aragorn, but playing as Sam and running away from everything probably wouldn’t be very much fun. ROTK is an easy recommendation for either rental or purchase, and if you’re a fan of the LOTR world, and you liked how the conversion from book to movie went, that’s a pretty fair simile for how the conversion from movie to game went.