The Backlog, Entry 9: Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I spent a lot of time going back and forth on whether or not I thought War in the North was a game worth buying. At some point, I finally decided “hell with it” and picked up the game for the 360 (and coerced my brother into buying it as well) and we set off on a journey into Middle Earth, where I fully expected the story to be some bastardized Quest of the Ring lite where your character and his companions are sent to destroy a different ring of power that they have to throw into Mount Bad Stuff or something.

As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Your characters were some of the Rangers guarding the Shire, you get messed up by this crazy dude named Agandaûr, who has been tasked with subjugating the Northern Kingdoms by the Witch King of Angmar. So, Aragorn (who looks like a creepy Pinocchio marionette man, also of course Aragorn is your boss) tasks you with fucking up the plans of Sauron in the North in order to keep attention away from a super important mission that he can’t tell you about but it is totally a secret. So that’s cool, and a pretty solid foundation upon which to build one’s Lord of the Rings fanfic, which is more or less what this stuff is. We enjoyed playing it for a while, and then for whatever reason we didn’t play it anymore.

Until this week.

This week, a little game called Shadow of Mordor dropped, which is basically the greatest LotR game to ever be created, from what I understand. You might think that I started playing War in the North again because I didn’t want to drop the money on Shadow of Mordor right away, and War in the North would be just good enough to help me get through the excitement of the initial launch and safely wait until the inevitable sale. That’s not why I started to play it again, because I bought that game at launch and played it obsessively whenever I had a chance to do so, because the hype is real. Go play it, then come back and finish reading this, because duders, it’s amazing. I’ll wait here for you.

Welcome back. I was right, wasn’t I? That shit is bananas: B-A-N-A-N-A-S (that’s a good thing, right?).

Anyway, Shadow of Mordor is entirely the reason I decided to go back to War in the North, partially because I realized that I had done nothing but play Destiny and Shadows of Mordor all week and so I didn’t have a game to write about this week, and War in the North provides a combat system that is somewhat similar to SoM.

A few things I forgot about War in the North: firstly, that it was developed by Snowblind Studios, who also developed the excellent Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, a game that my brother and I beat multiple times across multiple difficulties and was the first game purchased upon obtaining a GameCube. War in the North, then, shares a lot of DNA with that excellent hack’n’slash game of yore, but with a pleasant Lord of the Rings veneer. Two, Rivendell has some pretty disturbing looking elves in it, namely Arwen and Elrond. Arwen looks as if she was sculpted out of butter and stood too close to a flame, and Elrond just looks creepy. It doesn’t help that sometimes Elrond’s hair glitches and becomes a bunch of lines that more or less can track Elrond’s movement pattern. Three, the dwarves all have excellent beards.

Visually, the game looks… all right. It is interesting to see the movie aesthetic applied to locations, armor, and enemies that weren’t present in the movies themselves, but stunning visuals were definitely not on the top of the priority list when this game was in development. The gameplay is tight and the controls are crisp and responsive. I’ve never found myself shouting at the game because I died; any time I die, it is because I allowed myself to be surrounded or didn’t dodge out of the way of a troll swinging an axe. It is entirely possible to keep going as long as one of the three heroes is alive to revive the rest of the party, so even defeat is generally very temporary. There are no finishing moves like you’d find in the Gears of War series to keep you from reviving a compatriot, just the risk of the reviving fellow getting killed in the midst of aiding a fallen ally. The game is also pleasantly violent, with limbs and heads flying off with an alarming regularity and plenty of black goo everywhere to remind you that you’re fighting orcs.

In the end, this game is a gem that pushes all the right buttons for me in terms of subject matter and gameplay. It reminds me of those many hours that I sunk into Dark Alliance and that, to me, is a great thing to be reminded of. When I do finally finish this game (and I totally will, it’s become part of my weekly rotation at this point) I am going to be sad to see it end. I’ll have to try and remember to play something else from my backlog for this week, though, because between this game and Shadow of Mordor I might forget to play anything else at all.