The Lord of the Rings-
War of the Ring
review by Head Cheeze

I used to be a huge fan of Real Time Strategy games (henceforth to be known as RTS), especially during the height of their popularity with titles like Starcraft, and the original Command and Conquer series. However, the formula these games follow (gather resources/build buildings/make massive army/watch them die/repeat) grew stale and I got my gaming fix elsewhere. While titles like Warcraft 3 and Command and Conquer Generals have revived the genre with some spiced up graphics, more action oriented gameplay, and deeper, cinematic style storylines, none piqued my interest until Black Label Studios Lord of the Rings-War of the Ring. It's a no-brainer, really. What Rings fan wouldn't want to control the massive armies of Middle Earth? This game should be epic, no?

Sadly, it's not.

Instead, it's a typical RTS with a few Tolkien twists. You begin by choosing a campaign, either as the armies of good (Dwarfs, Elves, Humans) or evil (Orcs, Goblins, err..more Orcs), and are given a map of Middle Earth with glowing trees representing available missions. I chose the path of good, simply because I wanted to play as Gimli, and got my wish right out of the gate seeing that the first batch of missions involve Gimli stopping an Orc invasion of his land. From here on out, it's like any RTS you may have played. You start off with a few soldiers and worker types who you instantly set to work building a refinery (for ore) and a mill (for food/gold). Once you pile up enough ore and gold, you can then start to reinforce your kingdom by adding watchtowers, barracks (which are essential if you hope to build an army), and tents. The more resources you gather, the bigger your army becomes, until you reach your population limit or the refinery and mill run out of resources. As you move forward in the game, you are given more troop variety, including Elven flamebearers, Rangers, Riders of Rohan, and even get to control Ents. If this all sounds fantastic, it isn't, because, essentially, all of your hard work leads up to big battles in which so many troops cover the screen it's impossible to tell who's doing what, where.

Here's an example of combat. Drag your mouse cursor over your army, left click them to a desired location, stare in awe as they run in every other direction and die. It's infuriating when you encounter a stone gollum only to see that your troops most capable of dispatching the beastie are kicking ass on a hapless goblin archer while your unarmed workers are being pummeled by a stone giant. It's even more infuriating when you are told you are fresh out of resources as your camp is being overrun after more than an hour of building it.

However, the name of the game is strategy, here, and, after a fashion, one develops such a thing that will bring victory, whether it was Black Label's intention or not. For example, I would simply ignore all of the other troop types and just build massive armies of workers until my population was at it's limit. I'd then have my workers gather gold and ore until I couldn't harvest anymore, build a bunch of watchtowers completely around my base, and then charge my workers off to certain doom, where they would suffer brutal deaths in unarmed combat against Orc soldiers. Meanwhile, I'd be using all of my gold and ore to amass a huge army of the Elven archers and Dwarf Axethrowers, a couple of Rangers to see hidden troops, and a bunch of low-rent Gohan Swordsman. Then I'd just left click the whole bunch into the forest and kill everything in my path. It's not much of a strategy, but I beat the game, and that's all that matters to me!

The War of the Ring is based on the books, not the film, and therefore features a bunch of different voice actors ranging from great to horrifyingly bad. The person who voices Gollum sounds a LOT like Andy Serkis, but the fellow who voices Gandalf sounds a lot like Abe Simpson. The game features all of your favourite characters at one point or another, including the useless-in-battle Merry and Pippen, who, in the books, live nice long lives in the Shire. Here, they are almost immediately bludgeoned by Orc hammers and never seen again, lest ye hide them in a quiet corner somewhere until the battles end. Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, Gandalf, and Frodo are all extremely tough and can basically be counted on to wipe out hordes of enemy soldiers alone, but if they die, most missions end in failure. One such mission, Helm's Deep, is an exercise in tedium, as you basically sit there trying to protect Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli until Gandalf arrives with reinforcements. It's the ONE mission in the game where there AREN'T a million pint sized warriors duking it out onscreen, even though it's where it'd be most appropriate. Instead, you get a sideview of the Helm's wall, and click wildly on random things until Gandalf shows up and you move on to the next level.

As stated before, the gameplay is simply a lot of gathering resources and building up armies to watch them get slaughtered in a cloud of bloody pixels, clicking like a madman as though that would somehow help. If you have the presence of mind, you can even employ magic and special abilities from your heros, but that is totally dependent on actually finding them amidst the Where's Waldo like battles.

Graphically, the game is pretty nice. There are lovely water effects (that ripple when you roll over them with your mouse), flowing fields that actually part as soldiers trudge through, and spectacular if not entirely ineffective magic spells. The characters are tiny, but they are all have distinctive looks, even if you can't pick them out from one another once they are attacking en masse. It's not a visual masterpiece, but it serves the purpose of the gameplay.

The sound, on the other hand, is downright annoying at times, with repetitive dialogue and half-assed voiceovers ruining what are otherwise solid sound effects. The clashing of swords, hammers on wood and stone, bubbling brooks, and the footfalls of the massive Ents sound great, but when they all you hear are guys yelling "My life for Rohan!" and "You have my steel!" you tend to overlook their quality. The most annoying voice in the game has to be the fey Elf worker who, when clicked upon, says "What is it my Elf friend?". I enjoyed sending them off to their doom.

Epic only in it's ability to confuse, War of the Ring is a game with a great license, but that's about it, really. It's not a terrible game, just a repetitive, aggravating, and highly unoriginal one. If you are still playing games like Command and Conquer or Warcraft, and love every resource gathering second of them, by all means, this is a five skull game to you. However, if hours of tedium rewarded by seconds of confusing battle (clickety-click-click) doesn't sound like a good time, then avoid this one like a mob of drunken Hobbits.