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| Your LotR Third Age GBA review; WTF is wrong with you guys by Mysterio #2849 02/25/2005, 11:42am PST | ||||
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| This is the freaking elemental fractal of the internet, a place full of cheeto spewing linux freaks and 10 well-balanced people, with something like two dozen things worth reading and fifty pages of insults. Better to see 1 blowjob Planescape Torment review from Bildungsroman than 1 forum page of nothing but in-joke insults.
The review: One thing you have to know about this game is that a bunch of very dorky-looking people put a lot of work into it. If you watch the "making of" videos for the Third Age console RPG, you can see them creaming themselves over how much detail they tried to put into the game. More importatly, you can see them...playing with LOTR miniatures, rolling dice, and writing the results on a legal pad as they were "designing their battle sytem". This is basically a bunch of programming nerds who were given money by EA to come up with a in-house, effectively non-playtested game engine. And that reflects the GBA game, too. You get to play pretty much everyone that was in the movies, including the son of Theoden who was already dead the first time we see him (in the movies). Everyone has beautifully captured/drawn fighting animations, and the battlegrounds have a living-forest feeling to it. The leaders (Aragorn, Gandalf, Saruman, etc) have an pretty shitty exp based upgrading system. As a strategy game it pretty much sucks. I only exposed myself to it cauz I was a LOTR fan. Playing it made me feel like a Star Wars fan (I'm sure he exists) who played Force Commander just so he can experience all the SW games. The battlefield is split up into 3 flanks and you get so many moves per flank per turn, but the moves per flank is randomized over ONE DICE, so it's possible to have your leader's flank get anywhere from 1 to 4 moves per turn. Enemies you attack don't strike back (removing part of the strategy). The game feels unbalanced--it tends to flood you with more powerful enemies as you pray for more moves per turn. Defensives positions are worthless since damage is also pretty randomized. Ranged attackers have ONE rating for their attacks, which get exponentially weaker as the distance increases starting from zero. The game in essence wants you to use ranged attackers for melee. It's Fire Emblem without the fun. Story: a moron blurb before every mission that reads like a children's story book. Lemme type up the entirety of the 1st one: The days had grown long and the nights cold, and still there was no sign of Aragon in Rivendell. "He has not been seen for some months now," Elrond admitted to his friends."We must scour the outlying lands in search of some sign that he lives yet." Nothing original here, just replaying scenes that may or may not be from the movies. Summary: go download the rom, play a few hours through a few missions, but don't count on having fun unless you're OCD and have to finish both this and the console Third Age game. The same review can be applied to the console Third Age RPG. |
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Your LotR Third Age GBA review; WTF is wrong with you guys by 02/25/2005, 11:42am PST  [obligatory derisive comparison to Mysterio #2848 "now THAT guy was funny" here] by 02/25/2005, 12:37pm PST Bonus Third Age RPG review by 02/25/2005, 4:18pm PST finally, thank you by 02/25/2005, 4:18pm PST Hahaha, that must have really stung you then. by 02/25/2005, 4:26pm PST rim my ashcroft, asshat by 02/25/2005, 4:26pm PST |
