The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

"The way film - game conversions should be. And better again!"

Return of the King on GBA picks up from where The Two Towers left off both story wise and game wise. It is really just a port of the original Diablo with the characters from LOTR. You have a good variety of characters to choose from these are: Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, Eowen and Frodo. The story generally progresses as the movies do except for a slight change to suit the game better. For example there are quite a few battles on the paths of the dead even with the undead king.

The controls are fairly straight forward and easy to use. To perform a standard attack you press the B button and to use your selected active skill (which will be explained later) you use the A button. The right shoulder button is used to pick up items while the left shoulder button is used to cycle through your active skill. It is very easy to pick up and play and does not require much thought while playing.

When you first begin the game you have the basic weapon of your character and a basic defensive garment. It is all very predictable really –especially if you have played Diablo -, kill an enemy, they drop an item, you pick it up, it is no good, you chuck it away and kill the next enemy. You level up by gaining experience from the monsters you kill and when you do level up you are given 5 points to distribute among strength, accuracy, health, defense and courage. You are also given one point per level to learn/upgrade a passive or active skill. These skills vary from doing more damage against orcs to creating a shield so you become invulnerable. All skills have five levels except for one ultimate skill per character. Some of these skills are shared by characters as well.

After you have completed the game with a character you go back to the beginning of the game with your character still on the same level and all the weapons/items he (or she) have collected throughout the game. The game is very replayable with multiple difficulty settings and a ranking of your performance when you complete the game. It is very enjoyable and rewarding to have a fully maxed out character and you can do an entire cycle of the game without dying (or taking a hit). But if that is not enough for you then you can go ‘artifact’ hunting.

There are 8 artifacts in the game and can only be discovered by certain characters which I will not reveal to you for spoiler reasons. As well as that there are bonus levels including Helms Deep and Moria (which are really good if you are stuck because you can level up on them and go back to where you were in the game). All but one of these bonus maps are replicas of those from the Two Towers which adds to the game as well as two bonus characters who are hard to unlock.

The Heroes look loyal to their on screen counter parts and during the cut scenes (which are too few and too far between) there are some wonderfully compressed images from all three films as is the soundtrack. It is all of Howard Shore’s original works compressed for the GBA tiny speakers.

While it does not offer much more than the Two Towers did, I strongly recommend all to take a good look at this game.

Graphics: 81 – not bad for the little hand held but far from the top.

Audio: 92 – verging on brilliant. Howard Shore’s tunes are great.

Story/Lastability: 87 – has a lot to explore.

Overall: 86 – a solid buy especially for LOTR fans.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/26/04, Updated 04/25/04