Some gear belongs to "armor sets" that provide extra bonuses, but acquiring a set of gear is completely random and usually becomes worthless and forgotten by the time you get the next piece of the set. Your constantly getting upgrades that look like the same exact gear with a couple more stats. As far as gear goes, you get gear slots like most RPG's for every article of clothing you can imagine other than socks and underwear. It seemed like no matter what I ranked up on the talent tree, I still just used my basic attack 99% of every encounter anyway. For the dwarf for instance, you can get a battle cry that increases your health regen and your strength, then a bunch of passive abilities that boost that ability and certain types of damage, or you can get a spinning slash that does a small amount of AoE damage and usually doesn't do any more damage than basic attacks, etc. You also get a talent point that you can put in any of 3 talent trees that consist roughly of about 6 active and 16 passive skills. When you level you get 3 stat points you can put in Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, or Will. The more enemies you kill, the more experience you get like any other RPG. The whole leveling and gear systems are about as mediocre as a RPG gets. In many outdoor areas you can call down your eagle friend to come swoop down and cheap shot the toughest of enemies. Every now and then you get to man a mounted crossbow and just nuke the enemies with explosive bolts, but most of the time you are stuck just swinging as fast as your fat little dwarf arms can swing. The gate behind you closes and hordes and hordes of clones bum-rush you, and after a few minutes something happens to open the gates and you can move on to the next room where the same thing happens. Every encounter seems to involve you passing through a gate, only to encounter a closed gate. This leads to a decapitation or many other sorts of disembodiment. The only reprieve from the mindlessness is the cool "critical attacks" you can execute when a little yellow arrow appears over an enemies head. You spend countless hours just smashing buttons and hacking your way through hordes and hordes of the same enemies. You also befriend a great Eagle, whose awkward character model and hilarious voice acting puts a smile on my face every time. You meet Bilbo, Arwen, Gandalf, Elrond and his sons, and several other key players in the Lord of the Rings series, and are ultimately relegated to doing crappy side-quests for them for little reward that involve just picking up random things in obvious spots along your adventures, such as a quest for Arwen involves collecting herbs for her which are very obviously scattered throughout the next area you go to. This mostly includes about a million orcs, undead, trolls, and whatnots, all the while in pursuit of Sauron's "right hand man" Agandaur, who isn't much of a notable character other than the fact that he is kind of arrogant and dresses in Sauron's hand-me-down armor.Īs far as the lore goes, you do get to visit places such as Fornorst, Rivendell, the Barrow Downs, Mirkwood, the Ettenmoors, and several other places that are in the books or the movies. After speaking to a few people and finding Aragorn, you begin your adventure.įrom what little storyline I could handle paying attention to, I can summarize it as such: There are some really important things happening elsewhere, but while the big boys take care of all of that, your mission is to deal with all the rest of the rabble. The inn, as well as the rest of the small town, was very empty save a few key players and a handful of random NPC's. Though we do not see our hobbit friends, we do also begin our own adventure at the requests of Aragorn.The town was very reminiscent of the movie, very dreary and forever raining. The adventure begins in the town of Bree, who any good LoTR fan knows is home to The Prancing Pony inn, where the fabled hobbit adventurers meet Aragorn for the first time. Eradan, wielding bows and swords, can enter a state of stealth to avoid incoming attacks. Andriel wields a staff (and can later dual wield with a sword or axe as an off-hand) and has protective and healing magic such as a ward to deflect missiles and heal her allies. Farin, for instance, wields either a two-hander weapon or a sword and a shield, and can let out a battle-cry to boost his strength and health, burst through the enemies defenses, or release a spinning slash to damage all the enemies near him. Each of these characters have their own unique play styles, but ultimately all revolve around button mashing, with their unique abilities only a minor supplement to the hack-and-slash mechanics of the battles. You begin the game by selecting from three heroes: A hearty Dwarf named Farin, a mage, or "lore-master", named Andriel, and a Ranger, Eradan.
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