I haven’t been enjoying Shadow of War as much as others, partly for its diversions from Tolkien’s tone/universe, a take which has got me thinking about Lord of the Rings video games I do like.
Younger
readers may think of the series in recent years as being all about
making friends with orcs, or for those with slightly longer memories
about under-appreciated RTS games and cancelled epics.
But Tolkien’s influence on video games stretches much further back. Fans have been playing games based on The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit)
for almost as long as there have been video games, and for every
misguided flop there has been a game that has been surprisingly OK for a
licensed product. And in some cases much better than that.
Here are five of the best of them:
THE HOBBIT
Australian studio Beam Software made a number of LotR games, but their first remains the most important. The Hobbit,
released in 1982, is an absolute adventure game classic that helped
push the genre forwards in a number of ways, from its inclusion of
illustrations to a complex text-entry system that let users string
together long sentences (instead of just typing “open door”). It even
had a primitive physics system.
THE RETURN OF THE KING
The
second of EA’s brawlers based on Peter Jackson’s film trilogy was the
better game. It married a competent action system with fantastic recreations
of the movie’s key scenes, and (for the time) had some incredible voice
acting, including appearances by key actors like Ian McKellan and John
Rhys Davies. It was also one of the best-looking games of 2003.
THE THIRD AGE
Yes, I mean it. This game has one of the dumbest boss battles of all time, but that tends to overshadow everything that came before it. This is one of the best Final Fantasy
clones around, even if it is a bit simpler, and its alternate telling
of the saga is one that still feels at home within Jackson’s take on the
novels. And like most of EA’s other Lord of the Rings game,
the production values helped really sell the license and make more of an
impact on fans than the game might have were it to have been set in
some random other universe (with more zippers).
BATTLE FOR MIDDLE EARTH II
The massive battle scenes of Lord of the Rings
were always going to lead to strategy games, but the question was how
those were ever going to stretched out over entire singleplayer
campaigns. EA found the answer in using hero units to let players act
out smaller moments from the trilogy, while still allowing the scale to
fight battles like Helm’s Deep. Both BFME games are good, but
the second might be slightly better thanks to a campaign that didn’t
have to skew as closely to the main storyline, and could thus engineer
some better mission design.
SHADOW OF MORDOR
By far the better of WB’s two Lord of the Rings
games (to date), Shadow’s focus is much tighter, its nemesis system
more refined. I’m not the biggest fan of WB’s take on the license—it
feels more like its own IP dressed in a veneer of Lord of the Rings—but the thrill of its stealth murder and orc friendship system makes up for this.
SPECIAL MENTION: THIRD AGE: TOTAL WAR
This is a mod, not a standalone game, so I couldn’t officially
include it on the list. But here’s a shout out for it anyway, because
nothing has ever captured the scale and fury of the series’ biggest
battles like this Total War conversion, which transforms Medieval: Total War 2 into the ultimate Middle Earth combat experience.
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