The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

"The king may stand after the battle, but will this game?"

Electronic Arts has pushed the envelope with their games based on 'The Lord of the Rings' franchise. While 'Fellowship of the Ring' wasn't much of anything to write home about; 'The Two Towers' came around and made a huge splash in the gaming world. Electronic Arts took everything they did right with 'The Two Towers', gave it a little polish, improved, and sent it on it's merry way.

To our benefit.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is as good as it's predecessor in every way. The addition of a co-op mode only adds to the game. To the misfortune of a lot of gamers Electronic Arts saw it fit to make the online mode exclusive to the Playstation 2, even leaving it out of the PC game.

Story - Huh? These movies were books?!

The game allows you to follow the path of Gandalf, Aragorn, Sam and Frodo among others. I can only guess that the game stays fairly true to the movie, and does manage to keep the books mostly intact. They did good for what is essentially a n hour recap of a fairly large book.

Gameplay - More of the same?

Quite frankly, if you hated 'The Two Towers' you will hate this game. It's essentially the same, with new levels. The co-op mode is a blast to play with a buddy though, and anyone looking for a good hack 'n slash for some boring Friday nights would do well to look here.

Graphics - Was that his head?

I can only review the PS2 version of the game, but I imagine the others are fairly close if not better. Regardless, the graphics are very nice indeed. Even on the Playstation 2's aging hardware the game comes out looking very nice, and the transitions from in-game to live action movie are very well done.. sometimes even eerie on how well they match and look.

Sound - Dude, did you just throw something at me?

The inclusion of THX certification has made the sound in this game shine. Arrows whizzing overhead, sword fighting in the background, all very nice. Some of it is repetitive, but that's to be expected to a degree. Very good overall.

Conclusion -

This game has very few glaring flaws, some minor camera angle problems where the camera doesn't move fast enough to keep up with the action. I found a couple of sound glitches, and even had the voice acting cut out entirely at one point, which cleared up after the level was completed.

I can highly recommend this game to a lot of people. If you are a fan of the movies, books, or just simple hack n slash games you'll find something to like here. While short, it does have quite a few bonuses, and enough characters to level up so that you'll at least get a little replay out of it.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/11/03