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Wow, wow, wow!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 167 / 173
Date: November 08, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This is a killer game. I've been playing almost nonstop for two days and this is the most fun I've had in a long long time. The art is rich and the environments lush. The units are full of character and each of the heroes are unique. I was really surprised, I was expecting a more-of-the-same Warcraft III, but this thing blew me away. Warcraft III came off as a big bloated over budget yawnfest. This game is a lean mean, hit and run, "screw them before they screw you" kind of game with some of the smartest AI I've seen yet.

I didn't know what to expect because I didn't want to play a game with the visuals that the movies have. I like the movies alot, but I don't want to look at a mishmash of browns and grays on my monitor. This game's art style is not that at all, it's just simply really cool. The colors are rich and it looks like you're in a painted graphic novel. The special effects are wild and the voice acting is great. The single player missions are awesome with scenarios behind the scenes and including the main storyline. The campaigns that take place in cities are cool with rich details like damaged buildings, rubble, and a bridge you have to demolish to hinder the enemy. Helm's Deep and Osgiliath are simply amazing.

This game really shines in multiplayer too. For the good side, you have Gondor Swordsmen, Rohan Riders, Elven Archers, Elven Lightbringers, Dwarven Axethrowers, Dwarven Shieldbreakers, Huorns (Ents) and Beorning (wildmen that turn into Bears) For the evil side you have Orc Slashers, Orc Archers, Uruk-hai, Wraiths, Haradrim, Troll Stone-hurlers, and Troll Bone-cleavers, Warg Riders, and Spiders. Also, each of the heroes are designed so that you have to adapt your strategy according to which heroes the enemy has in play. Gimli can steal your towers and temporarily stun melee units near him, Frodo and Gollum have stealth capabilities, the Witch King can convert Wraiths into Nazgul, Legolas can increase allies mobility and protection from ranged attacks, Saruman and Gandolf are just killer wizards that can turn the battle and Aragorn, man, Aragorn is the KING. He just becomes the melee unit of all melee units the more he gains levels.

In addition to all this are the Fate Powers, which you can use by accumulating Fate Points, which are acquired based on how much damage you inflict on your opponent. The Fate Powers are unique spells that can easily shift the tide in a battle. With Fate Powers, the Evil side can summon spells that can do things like slow enemy units down, or a giant cloud of crows that protect the evil side's units, etc. There's an evil Fate Power that summons a giant obelisk that bursts through the ground and absorbs damage for the Evil side. The ultimate evil Fate Power is summoning a Balrog with a flaming sword that just makes mince meat out of anything in its path. The Balrog's fire effects are just stunning! On the Good side, there are Fate Powers like Blind, and a spell that creates a field of brambles that damages enemies running through it. The ultimate Good side Fate Power summons a giant Ent (Treebeard) and he attacks by throwing a massive boulder at enemies.

I would really recommend this game to the experienced or novice game player. Have fun!

True to Tolkien and fun gameplay

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 57 / 59
Date: November 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I picked up War of the Rings just the other day and have been playing it since. It has a tremendously realistic feel for all Tolkien fans out there. The graphical sets for each of the missions are very much how I pictured them from the books, as well as true to the movies so far.

The setting is Middle Earth and the Good Campaign chronicals all of the major heroes in the literary work. You are tasked with many different missions, some pre-requisites to others, and follow the books well into the story. Example of this are the Battle for Helm's Deep, the battle for Lothlorien, tracking Gollum, that battle for Gondor, etc.

The graphics and storyline pay the game off extremely well, but the gameplay itself is typical of most RTS games; easy to learn and simplistic in nature (think WarCraft series). The r-click, l-click dilemma is solved in WotR with it being an option to choose, which is a nice added touch. The game came fully working and, unlike 95% of RTS game's first releases, had no noticable bugs for my system (2.2g, 512MBRam, Win XP). A very pleasant surprise.

Anyone that's a fan of RTS or Tolkien would do well to pick this game up. It's simple to learn, fun to play and very immersive since it has such a prolific history. I can't wait to start the "Evil" campaign and get back into the storyline!

This War of Middle Earth is Great

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 43 / 44
Date: December 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Reading reviews from all over the net it is pretty clear this is the type of game you are going to love or hate. I personally love this game so I thought I would categorize the reasons why to help others with their purchasing decision.

The War of the Ring is based on the literary works of J.R.R. Tolkien, what does this mean exactly? First it means this game is not based on the Peter Jackson movies so do not expect things to look or feel exactly as the big screen version. However that said the developers of this game actually had more material to work with, just take a look at all the indexes and appendices (not mention main story elements) that were left out of the movies. War of the Ring does an excellent job covering both the main story line and events only glossed over within the book. This makes the game seem familiar yet fresh for diehard Tolkien veterans.

The graphics in this game are superb. The backgrounds are highly detailed and just interactive enough to keep them interesting. The first time you send 80 elven archers through a field of blowing grass and watch it realistically react to their presence will have you in awe. From Mind bogglingly beautiful waterfalls to nightmarish fortresses this game has a graphic style that surpasses Warcraft III in its majesty. The individual units are a little under whelming unfortunately. They seem to be just a few polygons shy of acceptable. That said this is an RTS game and 99% of the time you will be zoomed out so far that it is irrelevant. From a distance the units look great and the massive battles will make you a true believer.

The audio portion of the game is a mixed bag. The music and voice acting is top notch. A symphony orchestra keeps the pace as booming voices please your ears. However unit sounds leave a little to be desired. For example the gigantic Stonehurler makes merely a muffled noise as it rips giant boulders asunder from the earth, not exactly anything to get excited about. In all fairness most of the games unit audio is great from the elves shouting a battle cry to the noise of their arrows whooshing in the air. This high standard makes the bad or missing sounds that much more noticeable however and it does really detract from the immersion factor.

Game play is where this title will live or die for you. If you love fast paced, simple real time strategy, with little or no micromanagement you will cut off your ring finger for this game! Simple and sweet is the name of the game. The best way to describe the mechanics is to imagine a simplified Warcraft II. Only two resources proper exist they are easy to acquire and plentiful to harvest. Scavenging the map for resources is usually not necessary. Places of power can be found on each map that also act as a kind of resource, controlling a place of power gives your units a special bonus and weather you or the enemy control these can make the difference in a prolonged campaign. Speaking of the enemy the enemy and friendly AI in this game is beautiful. Archers smartly stay back from a battle if melee troops are in front of them. Units do not stupidly stand by if they are under attack. The enemy occasionally tries to lay ambushes and uses scouts to great effect. This makes the single player campaign very enjoyable.
Building units is very straight forward, and the tech tree is mercifully short. The recent innovation of adding hero units to real time strategy has been carried over to great effect in this game. Hero units use fate to gain more abilities; this caveat alone keeps you in the action as you have to fight intense battles to earn fate points. I could go on about how fun the evil campaign is, or how cool the Lord of the Nazgul looks. This review is long enough now so consider everything else just icing on the cake. To put it bluntly this game is just fun. Not perfect and defiantly not for the detail and stat freak this game easily scores 4 stars by me.

LOTR War of the Ring - A fairly decent strategy game!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 31 / 35
Date: January 04, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Currently living in a state where "The Lord of the Rings" is in all "things" these days and having seen this one on the shelves at one of the local stores and liking the occasional pc game, I thought it would be an interesting purchase. As it so happens, this is a very interesting purchase that makes for a fun time filler being a game that is replete with much of the rich "history" that is J.R.R. Tolkien's world, although not exact mind you, but it does provide and interesting "aspect" to that world and in doing so, makes for a fun game.

Overall, this is a fairly good strategy type game that is fun to play and includes some very interesting additional features such as fate points which lead you to some very interesting spells that can, at times, turn the tide in your favor!

There are two sides to this game, just as in the novels; the good side and the evil side. Both of which include the familiar heroes from the novels and movies, such as Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and even brings in a character or two seen in "The Hobbit." The evil side even has Gollum and Saruman.

Given that this game is of the strategy type, and the very interesting aspects of the individual unit's skills, one can use stealth at times to achieve their individual or overall goals. One can also just go full boar into battle mode with enough units and let the melee begin when attacking your opponents. Just as with many games of this type, you can gather a very large force and attack your opponent's strongholds but beware; upon doing so, maintaining command and control over your forces during such an attack just turns into a melee as your forces go wild, doing what they do best, killing and being killed!

The Good Side:

Weighing in for the forces of the free people of Middle Earth are the following units:

Workers, Gondor Swordsmen, Dwarf Axe throwers, Dwarf Shield breakers, Riders of Rohan, Rangers, Eleven Archers, Elven Light bearers, The Beorning and The Huorn. Available heroes: Frodo Baggins, Gimli, Legolas, Aragorn and Gandalf the Grey! All of which combine to make an excellent force against the forces of Sauron!

Weighing in for the forces of Sauron:

Goblin Workers, Goblin Spearmen, Goblin Slave masters, Orc Bowmen, Orc Slashers, Warg Riders, Giant Spiders, Wraiths, Haradrim Slayers, Black Riders, Bone cleavers, Stone hurlers and Uruk-Hai. Available Heroes of Mordor: Gollum, Grishnakh, Salem, Lord of the Nazgul and Saruman.

Overall, this is a fairly good game that should provide hours and hours of interesting and challenging entertainment whether playing either side in the War of the Ring, the battle for Middle-Earth itself. {ssintrepid}

I'm a Rings fan, but not much of a game player...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 25 / 26
Date: December 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I haven't played many computer games, particularly a real-time strategy such as this. I'm more of a LotR fan (the books primarily, and the films, of course).

I had fun playing this game, even though I'm pretty pathetic at it. It wasn't hard to figure out how to play (although it helps if you've got some friends who know strategy games--they can give you tips on the finer points of what to do to actually try to win). Thank goodness it doesn't require the eye-hand coordination of a teen-ager (which I don't have!!!).

It was interesting to see how Middle Earth was envisioned in this game. It's different than the films, which is a good thing since I can always see the films for that version--and there are other games which more easily can fit the look of the film version. I loved wandering about places like Mirkwood, where the trees were huge and your elf characters (along with Legolas!) hunts for Gollum and have to deal with nasty Giant Spiders and Orcs.

It was also fun to play Dwarves and build a Giant Catapult or roll boulders off cliffs to fight off orcs.

I was also surprised to really like playing the bad guys. When I figured out more about the game I could play some skirmishes and actually get some bigger units, like the Trolls--which were cool to see lumbering about.

Even more powerful stuff, like getting Fate points and calling Gandalf or Ringwraith into being were harder for me, but still possible for a mediocre player.

It should be possible for nearly every level of player to enjoy this game. When I set the levels to Easy, it was possible to see enough of the game not to be frustrated. I could even win every now and then! And as I learned more about how stuff worked, I got even better at it--just by playing the game.

So take my advice with a pinch of salt: I'm not that familiar with computer games--particularly these kind. But as a casual player, I enjoyed it. As a LotR fan, it was great to see different interpretations of the world and the characters and to be able to play with the various kinds of units: elves, Gondorians, dwarves, Beornings, Orcs, Uruk-hai, Huorns, Rangers, Haradrim, etc., etc. The graphics are brighter and cheerier than the films which should appeal to younger kids, as well as adults who don't want everything to be gritty and grey.

Bash the Living Daylights Out of Some Evil Minions

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 18 / 18
Date: December 28, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Bwa ha ha! Feel the wrath of Gimli paired with the mighty Gandalf and Aragorn! Fear Anduril, flame of the west! Oops, sorry, I get carryed away.
It's not hard to do with this game, though. It is incredible. The game is played in a sense of Warcraft meets Battle Realms (which was a game I always happened to like despite public opinion). It has the potential for clever strategy in combat or, if you're the bashem' up type, that works too. Point in mind is that the game is focused around battle. Finally, a war game focused around what its name suggests. Resource management is only a footnote in the game, something to keep the balance.
Sure, that sounds good enough already, but there's so much more. The two sides (yes, only two, but no big deal) of the game are good and evil, respectively the alliance and Sauron's dark forces. Two sides are good enough simply because of how much you can do with them. So much research was put into the development of the game, making sure that no pivotal characters were left out. As the alliance, the player can recruit elven archers, various dwarf units, the Riders of Rohan, and other book-specific units as well as heroes such as Aragorn, Gimli, and others. Evil is much the same with various orc and troll units available (the trolls are massive, not to mention pretty cool) as well as the evil legends such as Gollum, The Witch King, and Saruman.
Combat in the game is fast, but not frantic like it can be in other games. You have enough time to use the special abilities you worked so hard to get. A thing I liked about such unit upgrades was the fate points (a ying-yang system like in Battle Realms). You get fate points, your heroes can become more powerful. Or, if you're in a tight spot, you can cast a "fate spell", as I like to call them. This will deter your opponents in some way varying from summoning a blinding flash of light to calling forth the powerful and rather intimidating (even on a video game) Balrog.
Lord of the Rings fans will love the game if they aren't to hardcore about sticking to the book. Of course the movie and game adaptations are going to leave out some parts of the book, that's life. Even none LOTR freaks will like this game a good deal. Give it a shot, it won't let you down.
Now I'm going back to bashing the bejesus out of some of the scum of Middle-Earth, if you don't mind.

Awesome for Tolkien fans, Good for beginner RTS players...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 20 / 21
Date: April 13, 2004
Author: Amazon User

But this game won't do it for experienced RTS players. For the Tolkien fans, the game gives you an overview of the history before the Fellowship of the Ring came to be. If you ever wondered what Gimli, Boromir, Aragorn, Legolas and company were up to before the Elrond's council, here you go! Gameplay is not difficult at all for players new to the RTS genre. All you need to do is point and click the good guys in the right direction and they usually know when to engage the enemy in battle and when to back off. I'm not a huge RTS fan and I was able to walk through the first couple Good missions with relative ease. More experience RTS gamers will probably like the Evil campaign better, as it is a bit more challenging. But overall this game is almost too easy to keep an experienced RTS player interested.

What is really confusing to me is while it seems like the game was designed more for Tolkien fans and not PC gamers, the System Requirements want you to have a system that is more in line with a hardcore PC gamer. You must have a pretty up-to-date system and video card just to run the game.

For me, the Tolkien fan, the game is fun even though it has a hard time running on my lacking computer. For more hardcore gamers, War of the Ring is probably too bland to keep you interested.

Focus on War.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: December 22, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The War of the ring is the game people really want, it's the game that FOCUSES on the war for the ring of power, and only focuses on that aspect alone.

This game allows you to control the Allience or the Dark Armies.And you can attack the other army, it is the way tolkien meant it, raw. You can kill everyone and run your towns.

This game is just like the Age of Empires Series but witht the added element of Tolkiens emagination.

Overview:

Fun- 10/10 A lot of fun to destoy the opposing forces.

Gameplay- 10/10

Graphics- 8/10 a little on the sketchy side.

Difficulty-9/10

Overall-37/40

This game is a lot of fun to play, but i wish the graphics were better, like the PS2 games' graphics. But this game is a lot of fun with or without the graphics.

Try out this game. You can't be dissapointed.

War of the Ring preview by George Bethanis

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 13 / 18
Date: November 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

War of the Ring is a great game but there are some problems.

Graphics: Very good graphics but not as good as Warcraft III.
The landscape looks nice but the units look a little
bad compared to games like Warcraft 3 fortunately you
can build larger armies and thats a positive aspect.

Performance: This is the tough part. I played the game in a
Pentium 4 2Ghz processor with 712mb ram and a
Gforce 4 128mb graphics card and it wasnt running
as smoothly as I expected, I was disapointed. i do
not know about how the game will run with ATI graphics cards but I tell you, if you have nVIDIA this game is just not for you.

Sides: Of course you will be playing either as the Good guys or
as the minions of Sauron but reducing the game
in only 2 races sucks.

Conclusion: The game is good but if I were you I would
wait for the Battle of Middle Earth from EA
games and enjoy something more elegant than
this or go and buy Warcraft 3, Cossacks etc.
I certainly cant stop you from buying it but
it is not the kind of lord of the rings game
you want to play. If it runs of course because of its extreme proccesor requirements and believe me it is not 300 mhz that the box says.

Good for some with enough power.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: October 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I like this game alot and it has in my opoin great grafics. But you must be warned this game is a huge power hog, while i don't think the reccomened CPU speed is right this thing needs alot of video power (32MG it aks for)With an onboard card even around 64MG i found it to be laggy. I can run ut fine on my Sony Vaio with 128MG seprate card. Also this program reccoumends 256Mg's of RAM alone not accounting for you OS and anyrthing already coming up. Please also note that you must be runnung the latest DirectX 9.0. It does higly recomend that you do not use a intoagrated video card. To get an idea of the power this thing needs download the demo first at http://www.warofthering.com/

Now to the reviw, i really like this game and find it a great way to relax. But like most games's of this style it takes alot of time to get ressorces and make them into warriors.

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