This focuses on Lord of the Rings: War in the North, and while I've not played the game I'm a big enough Rings fan still and researched as much as I could. Even enjoyed a few let's plays on YouTube.


This game made me excited - at first. Then my inner fangirl started to rage pretty hard. Essentially, War in the North (not to be confused by the MMO Lord of the Rings: Online) is an original story set along the same time as the storyline told in the movies and books. The references to the story as well as some familiar characters like Gandalf, Arwen, Elrond and Aragorn are some of its good points. The graphics are very good, co-op mode looks very good, but it has a lot of cons for me:


-first, this is a FICTIONAL story, none of it actually occurs in canon. Kind of bugs me. There's a lot to play with in these books that I don't feel they had to go and make up a fictional story with fictional heroes and a fictional bad guy.


-we have a human, an elf and a dwarf traveling together. If you read the first book or saw the first movie, you would realize just how UNLIKELY this setup is. Not so much between the human and elf, the human character is one of the Dunedain and familiar with the elves, but an elf and a dwarf? Considering all the bad blood between dwarves and elves that's on display both in LotR and The Hobbit? I'm sorry but I don't buy this setup. This story starts pre-Council, so it's not like you can use Gimli as a fall-back arguement either. In the world of Tolkien, the odds of this happening would have been smaller than a hobbit child. Not to mention, there is no ingame setup as to how these three even met and became traveling companions. Complete lack of believability here.


-One review I read commented how the characters came across as kind of bland. I have to agree, they are pretty boring. The elf Andriel is very proper in her dealings with the characters but unemotional and very robotic. I haven't found let's plays from any other character's point of view, so I can't comment on that. But the interaction in the cut scenes is tolerable at best I found. It's very hard to get attached to these characters in the same way we were rooting for Tolkien's.


-I didn't like the idea of a new bad guy, instead of using something already in the books.


All in all, this story feels more like commercialized fanfiction, and I don't have much of a desire to go much further to check it out than I have aside from watching Jesse Cox's let's play of it. Usually watching someone's Let's Play of a game has inspired me to want to get the game itself (Skyrim, Terarria, Amnesia: The Dark Descent are just a few on my to-buy list). This, I think my interest is more due to the players. There is SO MUCH to explore in this universe, that making up a fictional story with non-existant heroes just seemed silly. Compare it to the Star Wars franchise, which pulls from a great amount of the overall history in their games. If companies are going to do more LotR games, I'd like to see them explore more than just the Third Age. Heck, do one that ends with the big and last war of the Second Age! This felt a lot more like pre-The Hobbit hype.