Image credit: Aspyr Media
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North has had a strange journey: it was originally released in 2011 but pulled from sale by WB Games when its licensing rights expired. Aspyr Media, a division of the massive Embracer Group conglomerate responsible for porting many other games to modern platforms, such as the poorly received Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection, picked up the game for a re-release on basically all platforms as the ‘Legacy Edition’.
The re-release of War in the North is ultimately a curiosity: a game given a new lease on life and far more attention than it got on its first go-around. At the time it was just another game trying to latch onto the Lord of the Rings story, with bland characters and mediocre gameplay, but now… well, it’s very much that, but now it can appeal to a whole generation’s ingrained sense of nostalgia. If it weren’t for Return to Moria, you could call it the first Lord of the Rings friendslop game.
Wow, it’s nothing like the movie!
In War in the North, you play as that now well-established expectation of a Human (well, Dúnedain), Elf, and Dwarf, mirroring one of the major groups from The Lord of the Rings without any real regard for what an unusual gathering it’s supposed to be in the lore. War in the North is more interested in playing with pieces of The Lord of the Rings than really understanding them, so by the beginning of the game, your group already exists to spy on Nazgûl and the growing forces of Sauron at the behest of important figures.
Your group is sent off by an off-brand Aragorn to go and fight against the forces of darkness alongside lore figures that aren’t of too much importance to the wider story. You can fight alongside Elladan and Elrohir, Elrond’s sons! They never showed up in the films, so they can fulfil whatever role the game needs.
Occasionally you’ll intersect with actual important lore characters so they can just dump exposition and out-of-character trust at you, but it’s all ultimately unimportant. The Lord of the Rings is merely set dressing and aesthetic to the War in the North, inviting you in to just smack away at whatever enemies the original developers could manage to justify in their world.
Back in 2011, it might have been quite a deep lore pull to have actually talking Giant Eagles and allow you to explore the ruins of Fornost, but in a post-Lord of the Rings Online world, it really just feels like the game is grabbing at whatever it can to justify its own existence. This isn’t new for Lord of the Rings games of the era, but other games like the strange turn-based RPG The Third Age seemed to do so with much less veiled intention.
Single-multiplayer weirdness
The War in the North is meant to be a multiplayer hack-and-slash game, though you can now play it in single-player. At the time, it was likely reminiscent of the classic Return of the King game, but it’s got a lot more in common with Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide. The three characters each act as their own class with unique abilities to strike through as many goblins, orcs, trolls, or wights as the game can throw at you.
The Dwarf Champion is a heavy hitter and tank; the Dúnedain Ranger focuses on swift strikes and excelling at range, and the Elven Loremaster mainly provides magical support and area-of-effect damage. They’re all different enough in theory, though most combat basically comes down to the same thing each time anyway – swing your weapons as fast as possible until you can land heavy critical hits on foes.
The combat can sometimes be gratifying, especially when a crit allows you to enter a flow state where every single one of your hits does extra damage, but that’s only really when things go well. I was playing by myself, which made the experience of dealing with harder fights pretty miserable. Your allies will constantly fail to block and dodge and will waste their resources, which means that you’re often dealing with a fight meant for three as just one.
That’s when the combat is actually going okay, but there are moments where I was just staring at the screen, dumbfounded by the choices in War in the North. It wasn’t long into the game when I was in a turret section, manning a ballista with infinite ammo, shooting down goblins running at me with bombs strapped to their backs as I turned the never-ending horde into flying giblets. The game isn’t just often boring and clunky and frustrating; it pains me as a Tolkien fan.
Ugly then, but so much worse now
This is a problem across a lot of different Lord of the Rings games, but for some reason I just couldn’t get over it with War in the North. At least when Shadow of War is playing silly-buggers with the very essence of Middle-Earth, it’s in service of something I could actually call fun. War in the North isn’t fun, though, nor is it particularly appealing.
It struggles with being a pretty standard game with minimal actual art direction from fifteen years ago, which simply translates into an ugly game today. There’s some hope in the dark, rainy town of Bree, but that all disappears on your first missions. There’s so much grey and brown to fit in with its ‘gritty’ understanding of the source material, and when the sky literally started glitching out, it was like the game itself was telling me to leave.
The voice acting was about as fantastic as you’d expect from a game that was clearly made as part of a franchise cash-grab nearly a decade after the actual Lord of the Rings films. There are some pretty big names in here, but it’s none of their finest work, as most characters are doing their best impression of what they think stoic or aloof sounds like.
War in the North was a mediocre game when it first released, and it was unlikely that time was going to heal that particular wound. Yet, in a way, it doesn’t even matter whether the game is good or not. Those who want to play it will likely be drawn in by the novelty, or by the chance to recapture a memory of when they played the game over a decade ago. However, those players are going somewhere I simply can’t follow.
FAQs
Yes, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North can be played multiplayer online, provided you can get a group together. There isn’t any matchmaking.
WB Games bought the rights to make games based on both the Lord of the Rings films and novels in 2009, but eventually those rights would lapse, and the game would have to be pulled from sale.
Lord of the Rings: War in the North is about 15 hours long, including the main story and associated side quests.
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