A few flaws keep it from being great
User Rating: 7.7 | The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age XBOX
Lord of the Rings: The Third Age is actually a very ambitious project. The game designers set out to create a story, set in Middle Earth, that would feel a great deal as it should if written by Tolkein himself. Unfortunately, they didn't quite make it. Of course, there's a lot more to a game than just the story. The graphics in LotR: The Third Age are good, but not spectacular. All the character models for the games characters are well done, and the world itself is absolutely beautiful. Plus the animations for spells are, in some cases, really spectacular. The spell animations deserve a little extra praise for the way sound was incorporated. There's something very cool about mystical leaves blowing around your character as the sound of a high wind flows through the surround sound speakers. The character models for the major characters in the films are, at times, truly hideous. Legolas, who should be lith and willowy, was about the same size as Aragorn. Other characters come a good deal closer to being accurate to the idea behind their character. And speaking of the sound, it's really tremendous, though with one very annoying flaw. The music is licensed from Howard Shore's LotR soundtracks, and is absolutely beautiful and fits very well with the action on screen. The sound effects themselves are good, with little details like the way footsteps differ significantly based on the terrain being crossed. A lot of games don't bother with that, but it's done well here. The one major issue with the sound is this: The battles are loud. I mean LOUD. I live in an apartment and have to turn the volume down to arround the 10 setting to not disturb my neighbors, then back up to 20 so I can hear the cut scenes. An annoying issue that takes me out of the gameworld entirely. Another major issue with the sound is that so much from the films is recycled. You run into an number of major and minor characters from the films, and the dialogue for every one of them is recycled from the movies. How hard would it have been to have the guy who played Eomer come in for two lines? As it is, it's a minor annoyance. The gameplay is reasonably easy, especially for anyone used to Japanese RPG's like Final Fantasy...most especially FFX. The turn based combat is exactly what you would expect from an RPG. The big problem with the gameplay is that there is one strategy you can take later in the game that makes every battle impossibly easy. I actually almost fell asleep during a major boss battle the other night, just because there was no challenge. There's another issue that true fans of LotR are going to have: the game designers mess significantly with the games archetypes. I was shocked, and a little dismayed, to see that the game's Dwarf is a magic user. That's just wrong. In LotR, wizards, elfs, and rangers use magic, but nobody else does. And each type of magic has a very distinct flavor...which is totally lost in this game. All in all, it is a good game, but a few flaws keep it from being great. 
