Platform | Release Date
PC | November 1, 2011
PS3 | November 1, 2011
X360 | November 1, 2011

Developed by Snowblind Studios
Published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

The Pitch:

The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is a co-op Action RPG that immerses you and your friends in a brutal new chapter in the War of the Ring. Snowblind Studios is in the unique position of drawing inspiration from both the literary and film rights to world of Middle-earth, allowing players to bloody their axes on a wide range of deadly enemies and traverse both established and never-before-seen locations. The result is a journey that is both epic and intimate, familiar yet unexpected.

Snowblind Studios proved handily that action role-playing games can work and can be great on a console with their PS2 era titles Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and Champions of Norrath. These two licensed titles put you in direct control of a hero on a quest to kill bad guys, sometimes with friends, and get all sorts of loot along the way. They were quality titles that provided great, mindless action but other than a similar Justice League branded title and the followup to Champions, Snowblind has since only put out Death Tank, a ported Scorched Earth clone they didn’t even make, on Xbox Live Arcade. Now they’re back with War in the North and at first glance, it’s a pretty boring game.

I’ll freely admit that first impressions often aren’t the best way to judge a game, but you’ll need to set your tolerance meter to high to push through most of the first chapter. You’ll walk along some generic environments, find some monsters, dispatch them, then continue along while breaking boxes to see if there’s money or loot inside. You even do the turret thing and the protect-these-dudes-while-they-open-a-door wank. I pretty much knew that’s what this game was about, but due to early limitations, it was a very button-mashing, repetitively boring pair of hours.

There isn’t an overabundance of bad loot, or loot in general, but each part of your body can accept a different bit of gear and each is modeled appropriately on your in-action dude/gal. To assist with getting rid of some tedium, there are areas after big encounters where you can sell off junk loot. Strangely, you have to travel back to town to repair decaying gear which you can also do at these locations. Why not just allow repairs without the extra walkyloading? There are other weird design choices too like separating buy, sell, and equip interfaces completely and eschewing any sort of real loot compares, but it’s all unoffensive, albeit lazy.

Instead of an isometric, pulled-out camera, you’re up close with three archetypes that come straight out of the original Fellowship. This zoomed in camera doesn’t do the visuals any favors. Based around the aesthetic from the movies, you’ll visit some recognizable areas (Rivendale, Bree) and meet the same ‘actors’ from the films (Mortensen, Bloom) but their character models are kind of the early generation gross that I thought I was done suffering. If you’re playing on a PC, there’s nearly nothing to show for it other than text chat and in my opinion the game is best played with a gamepad. I do miss the water effects from Dark Alliance though. Man would I run around in the water for days… Before I trail off into nostalgia, at around level seven or eight in character progression, you’ll have more skills, more gear, and a giant, bad-ass, eloquent eagle who’ll eviscerate your enemies. Things really come into their own.

What makes the game work well is that as you get better at playing, you actually earn more experience points and your character performs better. Your improved skills do what they’re intended to do – make you feel like a gigantic bad ass. This is all tied to the combo system which grants a multiplier for each successive hit without taking damage. Along with the multiplier, your character gets into a heroic rage, moving faster and dealing more damage after a critical strike. Consequently, the better I played, the more fun I had. I’d almost equate the system to the ‘FreeFlow Combat’ within the Arkham Batman titles, complete with proper transitional animations, but instead of KO’ing thugs like a sissy you’re killing tons of fantastical creatures by lopping off their arms and heads. Yes, you do a lot of the same stuff over and over, but that’s kind of a trapping of the genre and not necessarily a problem with the game itself. In many cases it was cathartic.

To top off the entire thing, WitN was designed to be a cooperative experience from the ground up. You’re always part of a three-man, defined team if you’re playing alone or with others and it supports drop-in/out multiplayer on all platforms as well as a vertically split screen on consoles. Glad to see the split screen support, but honestly, it’s really tough to play. I’d often start my session from where I left off last and allow others to join in over the Internets at will. Humans are typically smarter than the AI controlled teammates, except for that one guy who was playing the magic user during a boss fight and couldn’t heal me. Just drop Sanctuary and we’ll be solid next time, OK pal?

The story told here isn’t anything great. A simple, manufactured tale that throws plenty of fan service at the player and based on some minor quote from Gandalf or someone. Whenever you hit a safe location, the typical outcome is “well, the Fellowship is going this way, but we need you… IN THE NORTH!” Contrived, but it works and isn’t important. Here, the hacks and slashes are what matter. Did you like those Snowblind games I mentioned before? Yeah, you’ll be cool here, just give it a little time before it really clicks.

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