The Lord of the Rings: War in the North

Evidently War in the North was not a commercial success for Warner Bros. Releasing it a week before Skyrim (and on the same day as Uncharted 3) probably did not help but the game itself also lacks in about every aspect to have even hoped to sell millions of copies. It is still an enjoyable little action RPG that has some added value from the well-established setting it used.

A ranger, a dwarf, and an elf walk into a bar

The game is aimed for three player co-op but can played solo as well with the computer controlling two of the characters. You will miss a whole lot of secret areas unless you replay maps or do a new game plus, however, as the areas always require one specific character to unlock and the AI apparently does not care for them. Neither are your AI companions very competent but at least on normal difficulty they did not cause too many problems. And they do upgrade their gear on their own. I am not sure where exactly they find it, though.

I played the whole game as Andriel who is an elven loremaster from Rivendell. Sometimes dialogue options were rather awkward for her because surely as a loremaster she would have general knowledge of things in Middle-earth and not need to ask about every uncommon word mentioned. I guess I got to actually roleplay a bit in trying to avoid picking such stupid questions. I, too, have some level of knowledge of the setting, having read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion couple times each.

Andriel sounded so much like Liara from Mass Effect that I thought she was voiced by Ali Hillis. But it turned out to be Laura Bailey (Rayne, Alex Denton, Jaina Proudmoore among others). It is odd that I did not recognize her even though I played through Hunted: The Demon's Forge so recently. I totally failed to recognize Jennifer Hale as an NPC, too.

Faithful to the film adaptations

You get to meet most of the fellowship (none voiced by their movie actors) that has just been formed in Rivendell. Some of them sound less and some more as their movie counterparts. Look so as well. Like about everything in War in the North. Although not the music which was composed by Inon Zur.

In my opinion the tunes from the movies would have fit this game rather well. I did not really get to even listen to Zur's soundtrack as turning up the music volume drowned out everything else and I had to keep it barely audible to be able to hear the somewhat muffled dialogue.

A five-year-old Xbox title

Apart from the quite sharp character textures, graphics-wise WitN is not too impressive. I even played it super-sampled to 4K* because I finally bought a 1080p monitor and thought this game would not be too taxing to render in so many pixels.

(*The UDH-1 standard apparently is not actually '4K' as it has only 3840 x-pixels. Maybe they should have called it 4X instead?)

I do wish Steam overlay would not scale down with the resolution, though. Using DSR at 1600x900 already made the overlay quite small. But at 4K it became unreadable even on a 4 inches larger monitor. The FPS counter is barely visible even with high contrast color. I assume it was at 60 all the time; the game always ran smoothly without hitches.

Simple but not too easy

Gameplay starts off simple. One button is for light attack and another for heavy. The heavy attack is slow and is better saved for when a small yellow triangle appears over enemy. Heavy attack on such an enemy will cause a critical hit that deals more damage and grants more experience. There is also dodging and blocking, though the latter is once again not as useful as the former. Blocking serves better as one of the three stances (normal, blocking, and aiming) to which active skills are divided to have enough buttons on a controller.

I decided to play with keyboard and mouse for a change, though. For that I had to detach my controller as the game would not show correct key prompts otherwise. HUD actually changed slightly after that to suit the keyboard better. That was a bit surprising and shows at least some effort was put into the PC port. Inventory did not feel very responsive with mouse, however. It often took multiple clicks to register input. But at least combat worked flawlessly. It was nice to play again with the speed and accuracy of mouse-aiming.

The combat can be challenging at first. But it gets easier once you learn to concentrate primarily on avoiding attacks and not committing too much on a single enemy. I focused on melee combat and rushed to the dual-wielding talent. Later on Word of Command and its follow-up, Sundering Command, would slay all lesser enemies with single cast. Picking Sanctuary and its healing upgrade was also important as the bubble blocks enemy projectiles from hitting your party entirely (as long as they are inside or behind it).

Minor gripes

A tiny detail I liked is how orc-bane weapons glow blue in combat. A thing I did not like is gear degradation. That mechanic could have been left out for no loss. Snowblind Studios did not even feel like adding a button to repair all worn items with a single click.

The eagles speaking also felt silly. Is this Narnia or something? Though apparently they are capable of doing so in the books even if I do not recall that. And finally, I question the name of the game. 'War' seems bit of an exaggeration for when it was merely someone gathering an army that once tickles a dwarven mountain hole and then gets stopped by three adventurers and an eagle. Or maybe it implies the events are a part of the War of the Ring in the North.