Video Games: Buy The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Online

Average Rating:

I'll admit it was fun, but WAAAYYY too easy. After I got past Lorien in 4 hours, I thought I might slow down. Entire game beaten in under 5 hours - and I was taking time to enjoy it.

Getting past the ringwraiths in the beginning was tricky, but easily done after you see the patterns. Fighting never got harder after the first enemy. My biggest complaint is that it seems as though they may have rushed it to get it released before EA's Two Towers. There were only one or two cut-scenes that were high-quality animation, and those stuck out as unusual because the rest of the cut-scenes were of the same polygon animation style as the gameplay. Gameplay was way too easy - hardly every had to use Gandalf's spells except with the Balrog. And just as you thought it was going to get to a tough part of the story, like crossing Caradhas (sp), a cut-scene would pop up with Gandalf just narrating, "So after a failed attempt of crossing Caradhas, we entered the mines of Moria."

Not very good as an RPG, should have had choice over which character you wanted to use when, would have liked to have seen (or even have control over) the whole fellowship at once, way too easy, and WAY too short. They ought to have just waited and make one long game of the whole trilogy. But, the fan that I am, I will probably go out and get EA's Two Towers soon. I hear it's much better, and covers the important parts of FOTR anyway.

1. The gameplay: It's just boring. You start off spending an hour in the Shire, trying to do various tasks, which are rewarded very lightly. For example, you have to give the lady who's buying your house a letter, which takes 15 minutes to find (usually more). There is no map of the Shire, no hints of what to do. Everything has to be figured out by yourself. So after you find the little paper or letter, you walk back to give it to her. But nooooooooo wait, you have to find another item without any help and ring a bell because she believe there are "Wolves" in the shire. That's another 15 minutes if your lucky, 30-45 minutes if your not. You also have to complete close to a dozen tasks to get your "Corruption" rating up. If you become to corrupted (it's a second bar above your health), you just die. I had to start over several times because of that. So say that somehow you do get all this done, get stocked with supplies, talk to everyone, and are ready to go in less than 2 hours, you must escape the black riders. I did this, and it is extremely difficult, and yet in parts so easy it's stupid. There is always a certain area you can go where the black riders can't get u. And yet at the end, u must make a run for it. No where to go, no where to hide. And the black rider you must at the end escape from, is on a horse. Well, if you get past all that in 3 hours, without dieing, your lucky. Most people don't. And the whole process is just boring. No excitement, no real rewards. I hated the first part.

Well, once your out of the Shire, you head into a forest. The forest is full of creatures, which are all so easy to kill. You must find your 3 companions who came with u, who somehow get lost in 4 different parts of the forest. This alone took another hour, and if your not lucky, you'll get lost forever (literally). Once past that, you are caught by a willow tree, when u are suddenly saved by a fat, short man named "Tom Bambaldi" or something like that. You must then find 15 lilies, which takes another 30 minutes. At this point, I had died 5 times, had not found anything I liked, was bored, and was just sick of the repetitiveness of the game. That was my wonderful experience playing this game (luckily I rented, and returned the next day).

Graphics: This would get probably 4 stars. The graphics are pretty goood, but are PS2 graphics. It wasn't what it could have been. For example: The black riders are in total 3D, and look really cool. But their capes for some reason are flat and are in 2D. Very dumb. You can't go in the water, which once again, looks very bad. The leaves you can quote "Run through" you can only run through once. And they are very rare, only a few for each part of the level. But in many aspects, the game was good. You can break many things, and that's always fun as they fully destruct. The Shire is brought to life well, and in many ways, this game was fun to look at. But with the horrible gameplay, this game could not be saved.

3. Sound / Lasting Appeal: Well, the voice acting was fantastic, and the one point where this game was 5 stars. It was always fun to listen to people talk, and the cut scenes are very well done. Unfortunantly, this was the only fun part of the game. As for the lasting appeal, none. It takes 5 hours just to get a chapter into the story, and the whole thing, I'm afraid, just bored me.

If you think you can stand all this, then this is the game for u. Persounally, I think a game should start out easy and become challenging later on, and let u do something cool and interesting within the first hour. Some may like this game, but I sure didn't. Over-hyped, and over-bought, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring for the XBOX, PS2, and PC was a disapointment in my mind.

Hope this helped, and I prevented those who would have hated this game from making a VERY tragic decision.

Thx