Review By

Daniel Weissenberger

Fellowship Of The Ring got it right just one time. I was playing as Frodo, and after two hours of Moria mine-crawling, I was stuck in a lava-filled room. In order to proceed, I was forced to climb a long stone tower. Suddenly arrows began to thunk into the stone beside me. An Orc was firing arrows at me from fifty meters away. Making it to the top of the tower, I hopped onto a narrow bridge and sprinted along it, wincing as arrows whizzed by my head. As I reached the end, I leapt off the bridge and engaged in a quick, brutal swordfight with the Orc archer that had been trying to kill me.

And that was the story of the one time I really had fun playing Fellowship Of The Ring.

Mike really hit the nail on the head when it comes to most of the game's problems. In fact, if anything, he didn't go far enough when it came to the shortcomings with the game's combat system. This game features one of the most ill-conceived targeting systems I've ever encountered. Someone thought it was a great idea to assign both weapon switching and targeting to the left trigger. This makes it impossible to switch weapons without losing a target lock, which turns combat into much more of a chore than it should be.

Worse though, is the way the gameplay has been "balanced." No matter which character is being used, the enemies' abilities are raised or lowered to provide a consistent level of difficulty. It makes sense that Frodo would have to struggle against even a single Orc, but why isn't Aragorn able to slice his way through hordes of foes, sending heads and arms flying willy-nilly?

I have to disagree with Mike when it comes to the game's graphics, though. I felt that the designers did an excellent job of crafting great-looking levels that evoked the almost travel-guide feel of Tolkien's descriptions. From the rolling hills of the Shire to the winding paths of Weathertop to the darkest corners of Moria, I always felt that I was exploring Middle Earth as it should look. Sadly, the levels themselves are criminally under-populated by enemies and items. The most egregious of these is the Tom Bombadil level, in which Frodo is required to run around huge areas for half an hour, looking for flowers, with almost nothing else to fight or find. In a six-hour game, that's just too much time to spend treading water.

Both Mike and I were very hard on this game, and not without good reason. The game's myriad of problems seems to stem from a rushed schedule, and a narrow vision of what the game could accomplish. The game did, however, allow me to lose myself inside it for at least one moment, so while it isn't doesn't deserve a free pass, at least it's earned a little bit of consideration.

Review By

Erin Bell

The long load-times weren't an issue in the PC version, but this is no cause for celebration when stacked against the game's overwhelming number of other serious flaws. Most of these run parallel to those Mike mentioned, but the adaptation to PC brings a few unique problems of its own over and above the fundamental problems that already exist.

Before even delving into the game itself, there's the issue of technical glitches and bugs. More than once I was treated to dead bodies floating in mid-air, or characters that would sink quicksand-like into the ground. The stones that Frodo uses as his ranged weapon can bounce off both land and water indiscriminately. Boss battles are ill-conceived, and one is so bad that I can't help give it its own special shout-out: When Frodo battles Old Man Willow, he is supposed to be limited to a certain circular area by tendrils that jut out of the ground to contain him. It's possible, however, for Frodo to get pushed outside the barrier so that the tendrils now prevent him from re-entering the fighting area and subject him to repeated cheap-shots until he dies.

Graphically, Middle Earth is rendered as a drab and boring place that's rife with clipping (being able to see through things you shouldn't, such as walls or hills). Even out of doors, the environments give the impression of a perpetually overcast sky, and it's useless to try to navigate the pitch black night-time levels or interiors like the Mines of Moria without the brightness on the monitor turned all the way up. Towns such as Hobbiton and Bree are confusing because all the buildings look pretty much the same, and there is no navigational aid beyond a superfluous world map that serves no purpose except to mark game progress.

Combat and the simple task of navigation are both chores, and probably moreso on the PC because they involve using a combination of mouse clicks to attack and the ASDW keys to move. When trying to move, it's easy to mistakenly hit Q instead of W, which pulls up a menu. The supposedly over-the-shoulder camera goes hopelessly wonky sometimes and will sink into the floor, move too close to the character, or latch onto a wall instead of the character. The characters use impractical "milking the giant cow" sword moves, which leaves them open to enemy cheap-shots that can happen over and over again. Hit detection is poor, and the finishing moves described in the instruction manual actually execute maybe 25% of the time. Companion aid is iffy at best, and most of the time they'll just stand around facing in the other direction or will get left behind.

Whenever Frodo or Aragorn use ranged combat, the game switches to first-person perspective and the controls inexplicably invert so that up really means down and down means up.

Given the piss-poor control and camera, I couldn't believe the game's audacity in making it possible to fall off ledges and take damage.

Like Mike, I too was frustrated by the linearity of Fellowship. I don't mind a game being linear if the focus is meant to be elsewhere, but Fellowship obviously couldn't make up its mind about whether to have an all-out explorative environment like in The Elder Scrolls, or to restrict players to an obvious path. As a result, it teases by allowing characters to walk part-way up a hill, then throwing in a lame invisible barrier right when we think we're actually going to make it over the top.

Such a desolate game would never have made it to store shelves had it not been flaunting the Tolkien name.

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