The Lord of the Rings is a hot commodity these days, particularly in the world of video games; The LotR universe has been host to nearly every genre imaginable. The most obvious genre for this property however, has yet to be touched: real time strategy. Sierra has decided to fill that void by releasing War of the Ring.
War of the Ring is built around the same engine that was used to make Command and Conquer: Generals. As a result, any person who ever played a RTS knows what they are supposed to do. Or so you think, sucker. In your usual RTS, left click is used to approve and right click is used to cancel a command. Not so in War of the Rings. This game has a strange setup.
So, here I am, getting my little worker to do his thing. I click on a building, good, then I left click to place it and…it vanishes. What is going on here? I try again, and the same thing happens. Am I doing something wrong? Do I need a foundation or something like that? Nope, I just need to right click to place it. So, off to the options I go to change the control setup. After the change, the controls are nice, smooth, and easy to work with.
The basics of the game are the same as any other RTS. Gather resources, construct buildings, train and upgrade units. You then assemble your army and go out to beat some heads; that really is about it. Apart from the Zerg rip-off Army of Mordor, where you have to corrupt the ground, there isn’t anything special here. There are hero units which, taking a page from the Warcraft III book, gain experience and have special powers all their own. Gandalf can bring down a firestorm, Aragorn can hack through enemies with his magic sword, a Nazgul can poison its enemies, and even Gimli can cause an earthquake to slow his foes.
The game also features fate powers. If you kill enemies, you gain a point in fate power, and if you gather enough points, you get to use the powers. They are rather limited in scope to creating a wind that helps your archers, powering up heroes to beyond their already ridiculously powerful level (at the cost of resurrection), dropping some vines, and summoning an Ent. The dark side also has some powers, like healing and summoning a Balrog. The fate points can also be used to gain extra powers for hero units; Gandalf can’t use firestorm unless he first buys it with fate points, for example.
What I really didn’t like was the total lack of unit variety. There are all of two dwarf units, three elf units (one of which cannot be built), three human units, a Beorning and a Huron. The Orcs are just as limited, with slashers, archers, and warg riders the only units available. It would have been nice to include a larger number of sides, such as men, elves, dwarves, and orcs, each having a multitude of different units and buildings, instead of just meshing them together because the developers couldn’t think of anything else to use.
Outside of the fate points, which feel like little more than another form of resource gathering, War of the Rings is just your everyday real time strategy game. There is nothing new or exciting, just the same old junk with Frodo included.
Even the online portion of the game is nothing special. You jump online, pick one of the two boring sides, and duke it out as usual. Net connection is decent in this game though, and so as long as the other players aren’t slow as hell, everything is fine.
Graphics, like any so-so title in the PC world, are War of the Ring’s strong point. Every detail is rendered with loving care…which makes me wonder why they skimped on the gameplay. The texture work is astounding, the effects are eye-popping, and the unit animation is impressive; nothing is as cool as seeing a Balrog stomp off to battle with his flaming sword.
Sound, on the other hand, isn't all that impressive. Since Vivendi owns the rights to the books, not the movies, you are not going to hear any of the voices of the actors from the movies, just a collection of really bad hacks. Luckily, voice-overs are few and far between as they are limited to a very small, pre-conflict description and one or two in-game speeches. Other sounds are reasonably well done, but standard for an RTS affair: Sword slashes, rock crunches, and death throes; in other words, nothing to write home about. The background music doesn’t even seem to be there. I know it is there, but it is so unobtrusive, I can’t remember hearing any.
Ultimately, War of the Rings is a gigantic blob of ho-hum. There is nothing new or special about the gameplay, and the sound is just sort of there. The graphics take up some of the slack, but there is only so much that they can do. The complete lack of innovation, uninspired online play and the inability to have a variety of units (why lump Dwarves, Elves, and Men into the same side?) cause the game to lose a lot of its luster.
