User Reviews (51 - 61 of 101)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Another mundane MMO

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: June 14, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Are you looking for an MMO with interesting game-play, innovative combat, and an immersive environment? Well LOTRO is the last place you will find it.

The Game-play is is much akin to World of Warcraft. Heard that a lot in reviews? Well it's true. The developers took the simple and mundane aspect of older MMO's quests and interactivity and made that the only aspect of LOTRO's game-play, just like world of warcraft. All quests and interaction with the quest giver is point and click and follow a simple instruction. There are hundreds of quests to cover for the fact that it took only a few minutes to write them. Of course all quests are simply a rewording of 'go get this, go kill this, go talk to this person, and escort someone here/there'. That's right, you will do thousands of quests that are nearly identical and you will stop reading quest dialog around your tenth quest. Fun eh? No.

The Landscape art is nice. It is better than any game I have seen if you have a quad xeon that allows you to run graphics at full, otherwise it looks pretty bad. The character art is horrid with the exception of hobbits, and unfortunately one elf looks like every other elf, every hobbit looks like every other hobbit, etc. The character creation is very limited, and changing the 'build' of a character only puffs them up or deflates them, like a balloon. Brilliant. The armor for the most part is horrid, except the heavy armor class around level 30 and up.

The sound is really a poor experience. The music is even worse. It's not that the music is horrid, but that it loops roughly 12 seconds over and over, for hours. The battle sounds are very repetitive, and the developers even managed to replace some of the okay sounds with much worse sounds, after the recent content update.

The classes are very restricted and are a copy of every other MMO. There is no configurable abilities or skill tree though, or anything involving unique character development except 'traits' which are nearly useless stat modifiers and a few mundane skills later on. They are a reward for killing the same thing over and over for most of them, and the developers must have thought they were clever when they named the rewards for mass murder things like 'empathy' and 'compassion'. Of course they mean little to nothing and you will play your class the exact same way as everyone else because there is no choice.

Combat is bad, there is little to say except that you will be staring at the combat bar the whole game because almost every skill is based on a 'cool-down', a time you wait before activating it again. Because the combat is button mashing, and has little to do with what your opponent is doing, you will pretty much be bored the most during combat. Yes combat is 90% of the game. All the combat graphics are pretty garish to add another layer of garishness.

Community. Well there are some Role Players, most have abandoned playing the game because it's so poor and just hang out in the only area with a decent environment, the shire. Role players make up the population that will actually group, and be considerate and mature. They are a very small minority. If you want to see what they rest of the community is like visit the official forums, you'll learn all you need to know (hint: look in the first impressions forum too). I guarantee the community is by far the worst part of the game. You'll also get a taste of exactly how the developers feel about their customers.

Of course people will buy it, it says Lord of the Rings on it and is made by a company with a cult like following. I suspect a lack of such a popular trademark would have this game cancelled before it was ever released, but you know, brand loyalty is some peoples lives. You will meet them in Lord of the Rings Online in large numbers.

Disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: July 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

It's sold as soloable which it is but once you hit later levels there is really nothing to do but group to advance and even most "solo" quests are put in areas making them unsoloable plus experience gained for killing mobs is minimal and need to do quests. Groups usually take forever to form also so...don't buy if planning on soloing unless going to be a very casual player or RPing as I see these as the only people that would enjoy this game with staying at lower levels of advancement.

Here's some random notes I've found since playing for just under a month

combat is BORING with no instant attacks and everything is queued based on your weapon speed so guess this helps the "slow reacting" players but bored me out of my mind.

Graphics are amazing on this game though and probably the biggest plus it has to offer.

Crafting system has little to no ability to make you good money in most professions since quest rewards are almost always better or very close in stats but easily obtainable

It just has so much potential with the obvious story line (although its all group quests too) and the graphics but they fall way short at least for now. Well, at least its still a young game and can improve.

LOTRO / Preordering

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 9
Date: March 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have been in LOTRO testing since Alpha testing in August. It . . is. . . fantastic. The game itself just gets better and better, with every addition. Kinship and individual housing is on the way (It won't clutter the landscape, they are going a different route), there's PvMP which gets rid of the negative portions of PvP, but has all the fun of playing as an evil race, as well as PvP. There is the epic chapter quests. There's the Middle Earth Lore (I've been reading the books since I was a child, and study Quenya and Sindarin, so yeah, I think I know what I'm talking about). Just a fantastic adaptation all around, for the MMO Genre. I've been playing MMO's since Meridian 59, and let me tell you, LOTRO, has what makes an MMO fun, fun.
[..]

Very good MMORPG.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: April 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have to strongly disagree with some of the previous reviewers. I was surprised and very pleased at the quality of this game, the attention given to the community by the dev team, and the attention to Lord of the Rings lore put into the game. The questing and gameplay are similar to World of Warcraft, but lack the redundancy and disconnected feeling I got from WoW questing. This is BY FAR the least buggy beta game I have ever played. The only bugs I have encountered are almost exclusively cosmetic, such as typos and some sound glitches. I have yet to experience any server lag or outages despite having played during the Stress Test and the Open Beta. The graphics are on par with Dungeons and Dragons Online, another Turbine game, which are (in my opinion) extremely good. Some people have said they think the graphics are bad, but this is a minority and is most likely due to the fact that they do not have the system needed to run any modern game at acceptable levels. If you play on Very Low settings, then yes the game won't look pretty. Stick to 2000-2004 games which were built for your older system. Overall, this is a great game and very affordable with the pre-order.

Feels like straight to dvd version of wow

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 10
Date: May 01, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Imagine someone reduced WOW world size by more than 50%, upped the graphics engine, removed the Horde faction, and only had wow pve servers to offer....tada...you have Lord of the rings online.

The game offers nothing new in terms of mmo mechanics. Its just an wow clone skinned with lotr theme. The graphics are gorgeous but thats pretty much the positive aspect to me. The game has really small number of run-of-the-mill classes aka Captain=Paladin, Champ=berserker, Guardian=defensive warrior, Burgular=Assasin or rogue, Minsterl=Priest and one supposedly caster class=Lore-master. The melee fight system is rather slow for my tastes as the required chain attackes depends too much on other skills cooldowns etc and the caster class is more of a control/debuff than dps. The character creation is profoundly limited and the armor etc looks very similar on everyone. You will get to see lots of clones running around every day.

The world in general feels small, compact and not atall 'massive' in size or scope. You just have to run a few minutes in a general direction and you will find your objectives. Run too much and you will move onto the next zone. Major cities and outposts are spaced way close to each other which sometime takes away the feeling of traveling in an epic and massive world. You will also painfully feel the compactness of the game when a bunch of players are trying to fight the same limited named mobs in a questing zone. Not since the days of EQ i have seen such a bad case of spawn and resource camping. This is quite apparent during peak days and times of the week. Also the game caters towards grouping moreso as you increase levels. The quests are the way to level up in this game and most do require you to be grouped as the mobs are spaced quite close to each other and you are bound to get adds. Within your teen and mid to higher twenties you can get by solo but nearing lvl 30 you will see that grouping becomes much more of a requirement as the mobs hit hard and its no longer that easy to deal with adds you get doing quests. So for a solo player this game might offer some obstacles at higher levels.

The Monster player vs players is an istanced version of WOW's battleground Alterac Valley. Its seperate closed area where players can pvp. You can take your own 'good' only character 'Freep' there once you attain lvl 40(though advisable to wait till max lvl cap 50) and go against specialized lvl 50 monsters called Creeps which any players at lvl 10 can access. The monsters are supposed to be avenue for people who prefer to be on the dark side of things. However, the monster are quite weak in the begining(a lvl 47 npc mob can take them down to 30% health) but even in there most upgraded form they stand no real chance against a lvl 50 Freep with all the best armor, traits and weapon upgrades. Creeps are setup to loose(per the lore) and also there is a huge disconnect as they just dont feel your own character. I rather be allowed to level up a darker character and take them to mvmp rather play a monster character who just dont feel like my own. Also the destiny points or buffs you get from doing quests in monster play are geared towards upgrading your monsters as players just get temporary buffs. So essentially the time spend in monster play upgrading your monster doesnt really benefit your pve side of the game in any major format.

I have a rig with 2gb ddr-2 ram, amd athlon 4200 series, 512 mb ddr2 vram nvidia geforce 7600 video card. However, even than i suffer real severe bouts of lags whenever I pass through a city or where lots of people are gathered like in craftman areas and farming/cooking area.

Well thats the end of my review. In a nutshell anyone who likes WOW or similar mmo's, the pve server aspects, is bored of that game, and likes the alliance side most probably will enjoy lotro otherwise just stay where you are and wait for Conan, Warhammer etc.

Doesn't completely satisfy MMO fans or LOTR fans

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: July 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I am both an MMO fan(played virtually all mainstream MMOs starting with Ultima Online) and a LOTR fan(having first read the books in the 70's).

I will first look at the game as a LOTR fan. The first thing that disappointed me about LOTRO was how close the initial races were geographically. The game fails to duplicate the epic feel of the books. The Hobbit locations are all packed together. Personally as a LOTR fan I wanted to take the game slow and be able to have to take time just to travel from hobbit town to hobbit town. Even if you walk your character the game fails to deliver the feel of the books. Then on top of that all the race locations are virtually next to each other. And finally the game does not have all the locations of the books yet. These will be added later as expansions. As a LOTR fan this is unacceptable. As a LOTR fan I don't want to wait. I don't mean waiting to level my character because that is actually relatively fast to do compared to other MMOs but I wanted to be able to level one character and explore all the locations the books have to offer. I felt LOTR could have even been used as a companion to the books and thought maybe even schools which have the books as part of their learning could use the game as a companion to. But since the game does not contain all of the locations in the books yet this is impossible. As it is I am leveling many different characters just to keep playing the game while I wait for the expansions.

Looking at the game as an MMO fan I was disappointed to. First off the game has limited content which was the same problem Turbine had with DDO and combined with the relative ease of leveling characters is going to cause a lot of players to leave who like the game instead of having to grind character after character just to warrant the monthly fee until new content is added. There are many elements similar to other MMOs and few things that are unique to LOTRO but don't feel they establish a niche for LOTRO. The rabid MMO fans will level quickly and you better have a lot to do when they do and LOTRO fails because the endgame is stale, although admittedly WOW endgame was stale until they implemented all the PVP elements they wanted so there is hope that the LOTRO endgame will improve also.

Overall I still like LOTRO. Graphically the game is stunning and had all the locations in the books been implemented from the beginning would be amazing. The problem is many fans of the books are not likely to have the high-end gaming machines required to fully appreciate the great graphics. If you do have a superior gaming machine then LOTRO is worth the purchase for the graphics alone. You can play the game on lower settings but that is really a let down.

The crafting and monster play still need some refining but I can see a future where these might be some of the better things in LOTRO. The combat system could have been better and really isn't better than MMOs already in existence but is sufficient for LOTRO. The quests are nice and range in length from short to long and fit in nicely with the lore of the books, and there are a lot of quests. Many of the quests you won't even do with your first or second character but they are still in the same limited terrain. The character creation is better than most MMOs.

In the end I thought Turbine should have tailored the game to fans of the books instead of trying to satisfy both fans of the books and MMO fans. Ultimately MMO fans will move on and LOTR fans will be left and because of that felt they should have duplicated the epic feel and distances of the books. As an MMO fan I honestly can't recommend LOTRO but as LOTR fan I do recommend the game if you have the patience to wait for all the locations in the books to be added. If you are a fan of the books and can't wait for all the locations, I would suggest waiting a year and revisit the game. Turbine has a good reputation for improving on their games and many of the locations in the books will be added by then. Also by that time many people will have the gaming machine to fully appreciate the great graphics.

Tolkien meets MMO

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing MMO's since the days of EQ1. MMO's have undergone various transformations since EQ1. Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars: Galaxies, Shadowbane and Everquest 2 - there have been many pretenders to the throne originally held by the original Everquest. Then along came World of Warcraft - and other MMO's paled by comparison. World of Warcraft is still sitting pretty at the top of the MMO mountain, but Lord of the Rings is making a game effort to get there.

However, there are some weaknesses in the game. Tradeskills are tied to professions as opposed to being standalone entities. As with all MMO's, grouping is a bit hit or miss, although the loot tables are significantly beefed up compared to other games.

All in all, LOTRO really does cater to the casual gamer better than any other MMO currently available. However, as the game matures and new content is released ... that may change

Very Good Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

An excellent job of bringing Middle Earth to life in a game - if you liked the books and/or the movies, its great fun just to be in this world and see the sights. Character models are just OK, but the rendering of the world (if your PC can handle it) is very beautiful. The quest-based advancement is very well done. Some of the quests are a bit tedious, but this is, overall, a very good game. Worth picking up, worth playing, worth giving a little less time to that OTHER online RPG. The story is woven into the game, and though you are never a central figure, you get to play your part.

What an opening vid!!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: June 30, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I started playing this game on Beta only a month or 2 before it came out. It is a great game with story lines and questing that follow the book series. Visit all the places that make The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobit a literary legend. This game also fits well with the movies of this same ilk. I really enjoy all the questing that is done in the game, I did rate it a 4 for fun and overall only because they really don't have a great crafting system as yet, there have been some promises made on improving that part of the game and I hope those changes are sooner rather than later. The Graphics on this game are Mondo!! and your system will have to be a good one just to walk around in town so check the system requirements carefully. Even my 6800 extreme is a little choppy but playable with a p4 prescott core w/ht at 3 ghz. The questing is wall to wall and scenery varies widely from Shire to Bree and beyond the Misty Mountains..ohh.. and there is unlimited ammo for your bow... enjoy!!

Great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 03, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I've played this game for a year now since it was in beta. I have a lifetime subscription for $199.

This is a fun game, I've enjoyed it very much. The graphics are awesome, better than most game as long as you have a video card that is fast and can support the higher resolution graphics... otherwise you have to lower the graphics quality if your card is older.

The gameplay is very good. There is a death penalty in this game, but its not a bad one like a lot of other games. You don't end up feeling like you just wasted hours playing due to having died like many other games do.

I see negative reviews most likely from WoW fanboys. They try to claim this game is a copy of WOW. Well its not... for one thing this game has 100x better graphics than the cartoon graphics of WOW. All of these online games will take ideas from other online games... I'm sure WOW got most of their ideas from Everquest1, which was the original king of Massive Multiplayer Online Games

Another nice thing about this game is they give out a LOT of free content updates, unlike other games that charge you for every single update. They have one yearly major expansion that requires you buy the expansion. All the free content updates, along with the great lifetime subscription costs, show that Turbine is a great company.

No game is perfect, but this game I have enjoyed playing most.

Review Page: Previous 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Next 

Actions