Nerd Mentality

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Posted August 8th 2006 by Adrian DeHerrera.

Now that all of the hooplah surrounding Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy has died down, we can see that a few things have happened: The first is that a movie, regardless of its fantasy background, can be a contender for the most prestigious award in cinema, the Academy Awards. The second is that a great movie is completely capable of inspiring a great videogame, as is evident with EA's 2003 effort The Return of the King, a surprisingly fun, if not short, Middle Earth adventure. Lastly, we also see that Star Wars dorks have been overshadowed by Lord of the Rings geeks in both costume mastery and incessant quotations from the movies. Now, if we could round them all up and toss them into Mount Doom with all the Matrix nerds, peace might be restored to the planet, but since these fans are single-handedly keeping the videogame industry alive, maybe we should go easy on them.

If you'll recall, back in 2002, for EA's spectacular Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the developers decided to go the distance and actually do their research on what made the movies so grand: bigger than life characters facing impossible odds using a lot of cool weapons and making your eardrums bleed with sound loud enough to make you sterile. In Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, fans of the previous game know what to expect, although to make all us hobbits happy, EA has added more feral orcs, giant trolls and thankfully has abandoned the hundreds of scenes in the movie with Frodo mugging wistfully at the camera. So how does EA's LOTR: ROTK compare to its predecessor?

Visually, there aren't many developers who would go to such lengths to capture the essence of the movie they were creating the game for. Luckily someone at EA was on the ball and understands that if you are going to create a videogame based on one of the most popular movies ever created, you'd better do it right, unlike the developers of Reign of Fire [Kuju Entertainment, in charge of Advance Wars: Under Fire – Goodwin] who decided that since the movie was crap, they'd use the development money to play laser tag instead.

The characters themselves look pretty awesome in action; each has his own animations for special moves that are smooth and fun to watch, and what is more impressive is the number of enemies that can be seen on screen all at once. If you're not paying attention you may have 10 or more separate creatures all trying to rip your larynx out, and to our benefit, EA understands that there needs to be more than one type of enemy on the screen at one time – you got your dragons, cave trolls, giant awesome oliphaunts, ghost-warriors, ninjas (well, they look like ninjas) and all sorts of other individual baddies in line to get an axe in their skull.

To boot, the environments are gorgeous and EA isn't afraid to take you into all types of terrain from atop castle walls to misty caverns to inside an active volcano, and what's more is that it all looks so impressive. Dust kicks up when huge creatures crash to the ground, debris explodes blindingly all around you, the mist threatens to swallow you under – everything just looks so... good. There's not really much else to say except that upon close inspection, the character models' faces looked like Joan Rivers after a botox party; I felt more detail definitely could go into our heroes' faces and expressions, especially poor Gimli who looks less like a dwarf and more like he's been cursed with a spell of Eternal Constipation.

What else is there to say about the sound except that in LOTR: ROTK, the music is simply pants-soiling. I don't throw complements around very easily so when I say that the THX-Certified sound in this game may make you lose control of your bowels, I mean it. Don't believe me? Put on some headphones and crank it up and tell me you don't feel like you're in the middle of the War of the Ring. Expect a whopping plate full of amazing sound effects like swords (of different weights) clanging together, explosions, screams of anguish, , giant bell crashes, and of course Gollum calling you a fat hobbit pig and trying to chew your eyes out. Like Factor 5 did with its Star Wars games, EA has mixed everything that is audibly wonderful about the movies, mixed it with the shards of Narsil, spread it evenly in a non-stick baking pan and what you have is a game soundtrack worthy of salivation. To top off my food metaphor, the icing on the cake comes from in-game voicing done by the movie actors themselves, and what's more, some of the dialogue is completely new! The sound director of the game definitely deserves a round of applause because I'm still licking my fingers.

Gameplay follows the path of the original. Essentially what you have is a hack-and-slash killfest involving tons of different weapons while utilizing dozens of different attack moves. Just use your direction stick to guide your warrior the way you want him to go and slash away. Even though mass destruction like this is good enough for me, EA has decided to allow for special moves that will either raise your character's strength/attack or allow for more points at the end of the level, which opens up the ability to buy more powerful moves and magic items. The good thing about these combo moves is that they are often visually impressive; the animations done to complete combos are entertaining and very well-done. On the bad side, many of them can't be completed with enemies all around you, so if you want to use a super-powerful Gandalf-style magic spell, you're going to have to wait for most of the enemies to scamper off because if even one bites your toe, the combo is off.

Your characters plow through different missions, some involving evasion with sporadic fighting while others are simple smackdown showcases with a few objectives thrown in for good measure. One of the best parts of the game was a challenging level where you had to use special moves to take down well-shielded enemies and later destroy more than a few oliphants while making time to take down one of the Dark Riders before they tore your comrades to pieces. It's the perfect illustration of how eye candy, great controls, superb music and challenging objectives form together to create something memorable.

This game gets an N-Philes score of A-.

Not everyone is going to adore this game, and I'll tell you who it's not for: gamers wanting an expansive exploration quest, and people who disliked the Lord of the Rings movies. Don't expect to go wandering off into the woods and find houses with unlocked doors to rummage through or go on side quests that result in a deep, emotional change in your characters. Also, don't expect that game to be a huge change from what you saw at the movies; EA has worked hand-in-hand with New Line to best emulate the feeling of the films, so don't look forward to seeing Tom Bombadil make a surprise (and horrifying) entrance, because it's not going to happen (thank the gods for that).

But if you are of the Peter Jackson persuasion, and you enjoyed the last Lord of the Rings game, you're going to treat Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as if it were your ‘precious'. That is, without the whole "killing your friends" to have it thing.

Posted in: Reviews

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