Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Probably one of the greatest fantasy movies ever created is now one of the greater action games of this season-Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the second part of the LotR trilogy, and is said to be the most action-packed one of the other two. In this game, you fight in all of the major battles from Fellowship of the Ring (Balin’s Tomb, Amon Hen, ect.) and then you go straight into The Two Towers (Fangorn Forest, Helm’s Deep of course, ect.) Alright-enough of my senseless ramble (cause you guys probably already know about this shit anyway), let’s get inside the game!

Graphics and Sound
There’s always a certain pressure with making a game based on a movie. If it doesn’t look or feel like the movie-the game isn’t as appealing to those gamers that anticipated it-Well, this is not one of those flops, this is probably the best movie based game I’ve ever played-The graphics of the environments of the levels, the character sprites, everything resemble that of the movie almost flawlessly. Movements of the sprites are smooth and precise, and there is barely ever a hint of lag, even when fighting hordes of Uruk-Hai and the such. You honestly could not ask for better with this game in that category. And the music score is that of LotR’s so you decide if that’s a good thing or not-(course I decided it was perfect-hehehe). The sound FX are crisp and on-time, using sound effects from the movie and voice-overs from the actors themselves, honestly it couldn’t get any better in the G&S department.

Gameplay
This game is really just a badass Beat Em’ Up derived from an excellent movie, what could be better? You chose to be one of three characters: Aragorn the badass ranger, Legolas the sharp-shoot’n double blade totin’ prince of Mirkwood, or Gimli the dwarven demolition man. Of course their performance is based upon their actual characteristics: Legolas is faster but weaker, and can shoot arrows faster than Aragorn. Gimli is the slowest but can dish out more damage and take more hits, also his handaxe projectiles are stronger than Legolas’ and Aragorn’s. And of course, Aragorn is smack-dab in the middle with balanced speed, strength, and defense. The controls in this game are pretty simple: Speed attack (three hit combo), fierce attack (one big swing which can break enemy shields), parry, jump back, and stab (finish off enemies that are on the ground). In addition to these simple and efficient controls, you’ve got combos that have different effects, such as knocking someone down, breaking an enemy’s shield and striking him, even killing an enemy instantly!

The way to obtain them is through the accumulation of experience points. The way this works is when you kill an enemy, a ring begins to form around the experience bar, and the more enemies you kill without getting hit (getting hit resets the ring), the more the amount of exp you can obtain rises, AND-.if you complete the ring, your weapon glows, giving you more power and the max amount of exp you can get off of a defeated enemy. With exp you can buy new combos, new attacks, new projectiles, more health, the whole nine yards. Another aspect of the game is the ability to unlock production art and interviews with the cast-the only thing that bothered me was how the extras were meshed into the main game, it made the whole game look like a promo CD. But-no big deal right-at least I got to see who played as Gimli (awesome stuff). Also, there are secret missions with each character which can unlock a secret player and secret codes-dum dum duuuum!!

Overall
This game was perfect. Sounds, voice-overs, graphics, music, scenery, gameplay, you name it, this game blows any move based game out of the water. The only reason that I didn’t give it a perfect score, was because this could have been one of the best multiplayer games. Yes, it is formatted for one player, but it could have been so much fun to play with friends-But basically, this game is short, challenging, very entertaining, and with plenty of extras, so it’s up to you [the gamer] to decide if it is worth buying or not-So go play the game-oh! And while you’re at it-.SUCCUMB TO THE AWESOME POWER OF THE RING!!