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Tremendously Disappointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: April 12, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I found this game to be very disappointing. It is more in the nature of a "traditional" game-box type game, which will disappoint anyone looking for a game modeled on the RPG experience. The characters played in the game never advance and never change (aside from acquiring slightly upgraded weapons, e.g., Aragorn exchanges a basic sword for Narsil). However, the game fails miserably as a traditional game as well--I would much prefer to spend a few hours on SMB or LOZ on my old NES. The game offers virtually no real challenges. The puzzles, such as they are, seem simplistic, and the combat sequences have virtually no tactical elements. The non-cynical view of the game-designers' mentality would be that they set out to design a game that would be playable by children for an age range of 8-25--which is impossible. The cynical view would be that they set out to "cash in" on the movie hype by offering a game that under any other title wouldn't make it on to the shelves.

Some further specific criticisms of the game:
1. Game play only lasts 10 hours, start to finish. 10 hours!
2. The game controls do not work as described in the manual. For instance, although missile weapons supposedly have a targeting feature allowing you to cycle through multiple enemies and then lock on them, this feature never manifested for me despite several efforts. Instead, your character just locks on the closest enemy, even if it's not the one you want to shoot at. Of course, the whole problem of "multiple enemies" doesn't come up much -- see the "boredom" criticism, above.
3. The camera perspective is maddening. The camera focuses so closely on the character that it tends to hide even enemies standing quite close to (and probably advancing on) your character. I frequently had to turn tail and run just to "see" enough of the field to aim my attacks (melee and ranged).

Needless to say, I won't be buying either of the subsequent games ("Towers" or "King").

Lord of the... what? Oh, I'm sorry I wasn't paying attention

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: March 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Let me start by identifying myself as a Tolkien freak. I read and re-read the Silmarillion, followed by the Hobbit and the LOTR. I know all the characters, I watch and re-watch the extended version of the movie, I.... *sigh* have no life.

That said, I feel that there is a little weight behind my decidedly low opinion of this game. The plot loosely follows the book, rather than the movie, and although thatýs not necessarily a good thing it is nonetheless the only good thing I can think of to say about this game. (I suppose I could say ýIýd rather be playing this game than walking barefoot in a barrel of cockroaches,ý but when you really get down to it thatýs not glowing praise.)

The animation is clunky: even in the animated cut scenes the characters are boxy and move unnaturally. The voice work is bad: I could pick any four men, accented or not, and have them COMPLETELY redo the voice work (in falsetto for the very few times a woman's voice is needed) and the result would be better than what was published. Perhaps if the people supplying the voices sounded the slightest bit interested in what they were doing...

For some reason, the designers make up stupid little side quests that 1) don't advance the game at all and 2) just aren't interesting. They seem to be designed to lengthen the game, and they don't succeed. The extended version of the movie is just over 3 hours long... it didn't take me that long to beat the game.

The battles rendering is terrible: each character has his own style of fighting... no not really. Just keep hitting the button until everything is dead (unless youýre a hobbit, then itýs best to just let someone else deal with the enemies). Trying to sneak past the Nazgul at the beginning is harder than fighting them in the final battle (I don't remember that in the book...). Fighting the Balrog is mechanical and boring - and it glitches, making it more frustrating. TOM BOMBADIL IS IN IT, and he kicks about as much [butt] as any other character by, of course, singing at enemies (no, you don't control him).

You find little pick me ups (cram, lembas, etc.) lying around for your health, but you never learn any new skills, never improve. The bosses, it seems, get progressively easier, rather than what I feel would be normal. .....

This game was at best...decent.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: December 08, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I was one of those people who saw and loved "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring!", the classic movie. I thought the video game would be much of the same. Fun, great story, good graphics and overall just something to spend time playing. Well, I was wrong. This game is nothing like the movie, and in my opinion was a very over-hyped game. "Why?"

1. The gameplay: It's just boring. You start off spending an hour in the Shire, trying to do various tasks, which are rewarded very lightly. For example, you have to give the lady who's buying your house a letter, which takes 15 minutes to find (usually more). There is no map of the Shire, no hints of what to do. Everything has to be figured out by yourself. So after you find the little paper or letter, you walk back to give it to her. But nooooooooo wait, you have to find another item without any help and ring a bell because she believe there are "Wolves" in the shire. That's another 15 minutes if your lucky, 30-45 minutes if your not. You also have to complete close to a dozen tasks to get your "Corruption" rating up. If you become to corrupted (it's a second bar above your health), you just die. I had to start over several times because of that. So say that somehow you do get all this done, get stocked with supplies, talk to everyone, and are ready to go in less than 2 hours, you must escape the black riders. I did this, and it is extremely difficult, and yet in parts so easy it's stupid. There is always a certain area you can go where the black riders can't get u. And yet at the end, u must make a run for it. No where to go, no where to hide. And the black rider you must at the end escape from, is on a horse. Well, if you get past all that in 3 hours, without dieing, your lucky. Most people don't. And the whole process is just boring. No excitement, no real rewards. I hated the first part.

Well, once your out of the Shire, you head into a forest. The forest is full of creatures, which are all so easy to kill. You must find your 3 companions who came with u, who somehow git lost in 4 different parts of the forest. This alone took another hour, and if your not lucky, you'll get lost forever (literally). Once past that, you are caught by a willow tree, when u are suddenly saved by a fat, short man named "Tom Bambaldi" or something like that. You must then find 15 lilies, which takes another 30 minutes. At this point, I had died 5 times, had not found anything I liked, was bored, and was just sick of the repetitiveness of the game. That was my wonderful experience playing this game (luckily I rented, and returned the next day).

Graphics: This would get probably 4 stars. The graphics are pretty goood, but are PS2 graphics. It wasn't what it could have been. For example: The black riders are in total 3D, and look really cool. But their capes for some reason are flat and are in 2D. Very dumb. You can't go in the water, which once again, looks very bad. The leaves you can quote "Run through" you can only run through once. And they are very are, only a few for each part of the level. But in many aspects, the game was good. You can break many things, and that's always fun as they fully destruct. The Shire is brought to life well, and in many ways, this game was fun to look at. But with the horrible gameplay, this game could not be saved.

3. Sound / Lasting Appeal: Well, the voice acting was fantastic, and the one point where this game was 5 stars. It was always fun to listen to people talk, and the cut scenes are very well done. Unfortunantly, this was the only fun part of the game. As for the lasting appeal, none. It takes 5 hours just to get a chapter into the story, and the whole thing, I'm afraid, just bored me.

If you think you can stand all this, then this is the game for u. Persounally, I think a game should start out easy and become challenging later on, and let u do something cool and interesting within the first hour. Some may like this game, but I sure didn't. Over-hyped, and over-bought, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the XBOX and PS2 was a disapointment in my mind.

Oh, the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is coming to the XBOX on January 1st. I'd go for that, as it's by EA Sports, has a lot more action, and you play through both movies; The Fellowship and the Two Towers. Thx!

GREAT GAME

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: October 16, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I really love this game. It's treally neat because it was not made or liscensed by the movie, so if you havent tread the book, you might not enjoy this game as much.
It starts out all happy, and you think, why did i buy my little sisters game? (your worst enemy is a bumble bee) But it quilcly turns very dark. The wraiths are very intimadating. I would highly reccomend it to most people, The game play is great, the graphics superb, And just a fun game
isaac

A disgrace to the name of Lord of the Rings

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 14, 2003
Author: Amazon User

When you first here LOTR Fellowship you think that this would be a good game. Well, you would only be able to think. This game is atrocious! As Frodo, you're running around with a stick(later becomes a migit sword, and then Sting), and rocks. Puny, pathetic rocks. Once you get to the forests you have to fight these spiders..well using the stick is pretty much suicide, so u have to use the rocks. In one place, if u keep throwing rocks, they dont move and they get pounded! o ya....about 250 rocks for one spider...... 1 spider down....159 more to go. TOO LONG! Once you are Aragorn, which is about 10 minutes long,(Frodo about 3 hours and Gandalf about 1 hour) and yes, 10 minutes, you can use good weapons and kill these drunk lunatics, which isn't the most exciting thing to do with a Ranger. You would hope that the cool guy would be longer to play as... with fire arrows and a sword that looks cool, but its just about 10 minutes. With Gandalf, which is the only reason that i gave this 2 stars, you at least fight things that stand (which are orcs and goblins) and you can use this powerful magic. Well here are the major pros and cons. The beautiful graphics are the only good thing in this game that give Lord of the Rings a bad name.

PROS:
- Play as Gandalf and he has magic

-Long game

-Good Graphics

CONS:
- Loading times between EVERY DOOR! Each loading time is about 45 seconds to 1 minute.

- too many rocks to kill 1 darn SPIDER!

- Frodo is the player the majority of the time

For you people who dont care about the loading times and love frodo and roaming in the shire for 2 hours trying to pick mushrooms and feed pigs, this game is for you. If you want real LOTR Action, and if you want to be able to choose your character between different times, then get Lord of the Rings: Two Towers because that is just a beautiful game.

*Note* as Frodo, you can use The Ring, but it isnt too great unless you like to run away (which is almost impossible in this game).

DONT BUY IT!!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: October 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is the most miserable excuse for a video game I have ever played in my life. If you expect it to be anything like the movie your going to be let down terribly. Saying it follows the movie at all is a bit of a stretch. I beat the game in about 6 hours time. The loading time is too long and too frequent the only thing I found even slightly entertaining about this game was plugging a bad adaptation of the Cave Troll with arrows. The graphics were acceptable but with so many great games out it's not about the graphics as much anymore. The game play is slow and the character control is clumsy and annoying. There are no cool features or great weapons just a ton of mushrooms (life restoration) that you don't even need. I read some of the other reviews on this game and I swear those people must be getting paid hype it up because I laughed through there reviews. This is truely a testament to why you should always rent a game before buying it... I'm out to try Two Towers next but anything would be better than this game.

Sad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: December 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

First, if you are thinking about buying this, DON'T! I kno people on here have been saying it is really fun and all, but it isn't. I am a teenager, so maybe these others are younger then me. I was so excited to see this game, I mean it was LOTR how could it not be good? Well after about 5 minutes of playing it I saw how it could be. The graphics, number one, aren't that great. What makes it even worse, though, is how it has no action at all! I played for about an hour, got to Tom Bombadil, and was bored out of my mind. There just isn't anything to keep your intrest in the game, you just wander around trying to find pipes for the mill owner or a bell ringer to warn the people. I advise you to not buy this unless you enjoying falling asleep while playing a game. In my opinion it shouldn't even be allowed to be called LOTR because LOTR is awsome and this is no where near that.

Mediocre Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 17
Date: October 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I wish this game were based on the movies instead of the book because then you take advantage of the years of work and millions of dollars put into making the films. All the artistic vision, sound effects, design, and Howard Shore's musical score could be put to use in a game.
Since this game is based on the book, the developers had much more flexibility in creating the characters. Unfortunately, the characters end up looking stupid. Aragorn has a strange-looking hairless face, Frodo looks like cartoon character and Gandalf is skinny and also looks like a cartoon. Tom Bombadil looks like a cross between Santa Clause and Papa Smurf!! The graphics are pretty good, but nothing really impresses me.
The gameplay was not to my liking because there are too many pointless puzzles and objectives like finding some bell and collecting lilies... The action was quite repetitive and pales in comparison to games like Onimusha 2. There is just too much running around, performing errands, talking, and annoying puzzle-solving. I'm anxiously looking forward to the Two Towers game by EA Entertainment. They know how to make good games, and they collaborated with Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema to make an incredible game!
Universal Interactive, the maker of this game, has not made any good games...

A GREAT GAME FOR LORD OF THE RINGS FANS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

THE LORD OF THE RINGS : THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING FOR THE XBOX IS PACKED WITH A LOT OF ADVENTURE AND ACTION. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY SOME OTHER REVIEWERS GAVE THIS GAME LOW RATINGS. IT GOES ALONG WITH THE BOOK VERY WELL , HAS GREAT GRAPHICS , SOUND , GAMEPLAY , AND AN EXCELLENT STORYLINE , SO THEREFOR I GIVE THE LORD OF THE RINGS , THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING FOR THE XBOX FIVE STARS , A HIGH RATING , INSTEAD OF A LOW RATING AS SOME OTHER REVIEWERS STUPIDLY GAVE IT.

Excellent but hobbit sized

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game has excellent gameplay awesome graphics but is far too short i bout mine on a monday and finished it the same friday and played it for 6 hours total in that time you could say that this game is physically the size of a hobbit and has a big of heart as one too!

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