Lord of the Rings The War of the Ring – interesting game

We have to deal with the first strategy game from the universe created by Tolkien. At first impression the game does not seem to offer nothing more than a common strategy, but placed in a special world - play impressive game.

War of the Ring is divided into two campaigns of ten missions giving you the opportunity to see behind scenes the epic conflict between good and evil. In the good campaign it will be explain to you how Legolas, Gimli and Boromir manage to reach to Rivendell just in time to join the brotherhood of the ring, and the evil campaign tells you how the forces of Sauron escaped from Mordor and got Minas Tirith.

The game complies with other strategy games you have played until now, so you will start with a handful of units with which you have to do your base and collect resources (wood and hours). Then you start to advance to technologies and to remove army. When you have enough troops you begin to explore the map and attack the enemy. It’s a classic formula that works, and when you destroy the enemy is very satisfying.

The problem with the game is the AI. In fact the easiest way to win is to make more units than the enemy and advance technologies as much as possible. So you can successfully complete any mission flawlessly.

At the normal difficulty level the AI is very weak, at least in the good campaign. In most missions the opponent takes a few minutes to send a handful of troops who you will face without problems. But what is strange in skirmish mode, on the same difficulty level the game becomes more difficult, and your opponent can get you out if you are not careful. You get the feeling that the producers have done this intentionally to be fairly easy to attract more gamers. But despite the fact that you can easily finish the good campaign, the evil campaign is much more difficult as if it was made for veteran players.

In terms of graphics the game suffers because it is made on a pretty old graphics engine, one that was used in Battle Realms. The producers have changed it a little, have brought water reflection and grass movement where units go, but this is too little, from my personal point of view.

As for sounds, they are good, although the voices of the actors are not successful. Although Electronic Arts has taken the license from the movie, Vivendi bought the license from Tolkien family and so War of the Ring has nothing to do with the movie or the actors in the movie.

But in the end, you can not realize that War of the Ring is nothing but a Battle Realms with hobbit. But for fans of the series Lord of the Rings will definitely be a tittle that they should not miss.