The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

November 11, 2002

Platform: Sony Playstation 2
Developer: EA
Publisher: EA
Reviewed by: Slusy

Gameplay: [8] Graphics: [8] Audio: [8] Replay: [5] Overall: [7.8]

Licensed games are often cause for worry as far as quality is concerned. Especially when a game is based on a movie, and is shipped to coincide with the movie’s release, that often says that the game is put out more to make money by capitalizing on the movie’s popularity and name recognition than to provide a quality gaming experience. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, released almost two full months before the movie is slated to premiere at a theater near you. I was skeptical, yet strangely optimistic, given this unusual turn of events, and what I found in The Two Towers was both satisfying and disappointing at the same time.

While there are certainly a number of directions that EA could have taken a game based on the second in the Lord of the Rings series, the form of The Two Towers, contrary to what one might expect from a game based on a fantasy epic, is a mission-based beat-’em-up game. You play as either the human Aragorn, who is the average character, the elf Legolas, who excels at ranged attacks but is lacking in melee skills, or the dwarf Gimli, who is extremely strong in close quarters, but can’t hit the broad side of a barn at long range. You guide one of these characters through a series of twelve missions which generally involve hacking and slashing your way through a horde of ugly, nasty enemies. One interesting thing to note about these missions is that only about half of them are based on The Two Towers; the first five missions actually tell the story of The Fellowship of the Ring.

To add a bit of role-playing to the game, each character earns experience as he kills enemies. Kills are ranked as Fair, Good, Excellent, or Perfect, and each has a certain experience value. This experience can be used to buy extra abilities, such as additional combos, special moves, increased damage, or extra health. As you gain enough experience to gain levels, more abilities are unlocked for purchase. This is an interesting concept for a beat-‘em-up game, but it does present a bit of a problem in that each character earns experience individually. Thus, if you’ve played through most of the game as Aragorn, but you want to play a certain mission as Legolas, you either need to replay all the previous missions with Legolas, or go into that mission at a disadvantage. So, while you have the option to play any character for any mission, the reality is that you’ll likely only play with one character all the way through, especially since there is no multiplayer option. That in particular is a great disappointment, since this could have been a great Gauntlet Legends style cooperative game were a multiplayer option provided.

The missions themselves are fairly varied, for a beat-‘em-up type game, and while they all generally involve killing hordes of enemies, there are secondary victory conditions that shake things up somewhat. For example, in one mission, based on the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, you must kill a set number of Nazgul in order to cover Frodo’s escape from the forest; even if you reach the end of the level in one piece, if you haven’t met your quota, you still fail the mission. In another mission, one of my personal favorites, you find yourself defending a wall, and not only do you have to kill the enemies attacking you, but you have to kick down the ladders they use to climb the wall. My only problem with the way the missions are set up is that the actual objectives are rarely spelled out; this can lead to unnecessary frustration when you fail a level despite surviving to the end.

The other big problem with the missions is that there simply aren’t enough of them. There are only twelve missions (plus one “secret mission”), and none are all that long, nor particularly difficult (until perhaps the last two or three). That means that you’ll likely either beat or get bored of The Two Towers within a single rental period. That’s not to say that it’s not a good deal of fun while it lasts; it’s certainly a lot of fun to play through the missions, but the end comes much too quickly for my tastes.

I found the control to be a bit overwhelming, but easy enough to master once you get the hang of things. What it all boils down to is that there are a lot of buttons that more or less accomplish the same thing, and really all you can do is attack, block, or fire a ranged weapon. That said, there are buttons for quick attack, heavy attack, parry, kick, etc., but you’ll basically find yourself button mashing anyway. I found the combos to be less than useful, especially the longer ones, since you’d often get hit in the middle, interrupting the combo, and even if you can get all the button presses in, the timing can be difficult to master and often not worth the effort.

Graphically, the game is quite impressive, by PS2 standards. One good thing that EA did with this game was to take full advantage of the DVD format, interspersing actual clips from the two movies with scenes rendered in the game’s engine. What’s really cool about it, and I don’t think it’s an effect I’ve seen in any game before, is that the game will actually morph from the video clip directly into the rendered scene, and if you blink you’ll miss it. The game’s graphics, while dark, are well done, and while you may occasionally have a hard time picking your character out of a crowd (an aura or arrow or something to help keep track of where he is might be nice), all the characters move fluidly. There is a bit of slowdown here and there when there is a large horde on the screen, but nothing too terrible.

My only real complaint with the graphics, as usual, concerns the camera. There is no camera control to speak of; each level is broken into segments that take place from a fixed perspective. This is normally fine, except that transitions from segment to segment often have your character moving in a different direction than he was moving when he left the previous segment. Needless to say, this can be quite disorienting, and while one can imagine that this is a necessary evil when a game is set up this way, it still can add unneeded frustration.

Sound is also well done; voices seem to be taken directly from the films, though it should be noted that most of the voices that are spoken in-game (outside of the full-motion video) are one- or two-word exclamations at most. Other than that, sound effects and music are fairly average, as far as current games are concerned. The music, when it is noticeable, fits the situations nicely, and none of the effects sound out of place.

Overall, The Two Towers is a good game to rent for a rainy weekend; you’ll certainly get $5 of fun out of the game, and you should be done with it one way or the other by the time it needs to go back. A purchase should be avoided by all but the most hardcore LotR fans; while there are some unlockable video clips and other goodies, the play value really isn’t there to justify spending $50 on this game. The Two Towers is above average as far as licensed games go, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth paying top-dollar for.