The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

"Really, really quite bad."

I'm not going to finish this game. I started playing it, and partway into what I assume might be the third level I can't take it anymore. I love Lord of the Rings- don't get me wrong- but this is just a bad game. I only got far enough to use Frodo, so I can't comment on much past that, but what I have seen so far is enough for all gamers to take heed.

Controls- 2/10
-Combat: Abysmal. Mashing the attack button (note, that's not plural) for Frodo results in a kind of limp twig-swinging. He has a few moves that rarely ever hit anything, and one charge attack (hold attack button) that requires him to stand still. Combat is a mess of watching your 50th swing at the same rat miss for no reason as the camera swings to keep you from seeing the action. The moves in your combos are so spaced out and unable to find targets that Frodo himself seems to give up and you find your character just standing in place for no reason while you're telling him to attack.

-Non-combat: A mess. There's an odd menu system that arranges icons to either replace your one melee weapon with a throwing item (attack button) or change an item that is either to be used or applied if you happen to be in a quest-specific position (black button). You cannot switch items from your inventory screen so pulling out a health item during battle is an absolutely mess of managing the poor combat system while punching controls for the item menu. Clunky, ineffective, bad.

Camera- 1/10
This is the worst in-game camera I've ever had the displeasure of using. It constantly obstructs action, so there's no point in the game when I haven't had to have one thumb moving it. Worse yet, it automatically moves to 'help' show the action, which means no matter how often you move it, it will drift back into its own territory.

Graphics- 1/10
I can't imagine how a modern game company could crank this out. All face models in the game are generic, featureless, textureless, and drab. Hobbits have faces you'd expect to see on humans. Galadriel (described everywhere as one of if not the fairest of the Elves, shown during the game's introduction) looks a little like a haggard old British lady (no offense to the British!). The Shire, the lovely hobbity homeland that's supposed to be full of farms and flowers looks like someone laid poor astroturf and covered everything in a mottled sewage brown. There is absolutely no excuse for a developer to make something this bad-looking with the modern technology available to them.

Sound- 1/10
Volume levels don't match, and the voice acting acting seems straight out of the rejects from the lowest level of cartoon voice-overs. The hobbits sound like the developers just walked around their neighborhood with a microphone and asked random people to read cue cards for them. There are several points when it seems the actors were mulling over their cue cards like they hadn't seen the material before. It might go something like this: "Oh... hel-lo... S-am. How are? You today." Atrocious.

Gameplay- 2/10
I was playing Frodo, and my main concern was how poor the battling system was. Frodo is a hobbit who absolutely hates battle through the part of the story I was in. Nowhere in either the LOTR books or movies was Frodo battling much of anything at this point in the story. And this game seems just about as equipped for the job. Objectives also center around "find this for me" and "run this there". Things couldn't be more generic.

Overall:
Inaccurate to any and all source material on several levels, derivative gameplay, horrid everything. 2/10.

*rant follows*
In my opinion, this is one of the worst games I have ever played in my life. Short of the fact that it didn't crash, everything else was terrible. I seriously suggest you never buy or rent this game, and hope that this advice will serve you well.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 06/05/04