The Lord of the Rings: War in the North App Reviews

This game was really god till I got to a point where the only way to move forward is to shoot arrows from your main character and the controls to shoot didnt do anything. I tried changing the control and still got nothing.

Great game for the first 5 chapters then becomes unplayable due to lag. Fix it and it would really good.

Running on a 2012 iMac this game works great, runs smoothly and has a lot which can be done! Gameplay is smooth, no freezes or trouble spots so far and for those wondering if it supports a gamepad, just plug in an xbox controller and it works great! Edit: The latest update should fix the lag issues which some on here have noticed, there was one particular chapter on my iMac which I found would lag if the camera was pointed in one direction, so I proceeded to email Feral and received a quick reply about the problem and asking for more information. Within a few days I found out that Feral was already working on a patch to fix the issue and would soon have an update to resolve the problem which I was experiencing. The customer service of Feral alone is worth a 5 star rating, most developers wouldn’t take the time to fix the problem so quickly but they did and it appears the problem has been resolved in this new update.

The game stops working after chapter 5 and the makers must obviously know this as everyone on here is experiencing it. To continue to sell a faulty game and not fix it is fraudulant and immoral. I intend to either get my money back or sue them.

Very good game. I had lagging at chapter five, then the update came out. I updated and ever since no lag. Thanks for fixing. My son and I had a blast with this game in multiplayer, combatting side by side.

I can play on Max setting with very little gameplay lag, however the loading times are longer, especially the first. It said my Mac wasn’t offically supported, but it works great. If the gore is too much or you have younger kids who watch/want to play, there is a sensor gore option. Grab it while it’s on sale!

The lure of Lord of the Rings mythology drew me to give this a try. But the boring hack-and-slash style of the game quickly wore thin. It was fun to meet Aragorn in the tavern in Bree, but there just wasnt anything special beneath the pretty artwork veneer.

this is a decent game. looks nice, and is a great hack and slash game, which doesn’t require a whole lot of thought to getting thru the game. it also kinda tickled me to see a spinoff story line to lotr. it was a little frustrating that the graphics would occasionally bog down when it really shouldn’t have, my computer was more than capable of playing this game. game play was of course a little too linear for me, but that being said i did play it thru a couple times.

I’ve been a fan of Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories since I was 12 but hadn’t played a Tolkien-based game in about 20 years. I knew this game was based on a console hack-and-slasher so I wasn’t expecting much but when it was put on sale recently I bought it anyway. I’m glad I tried it as it’s quite fun to move about in part of Tolkien’s world although I think most of the battles lack the ability to apply much in the way of tactics, at least in solo play because as the only player you have very limited control over your two AI allies. The voice acting is really quite good and some of the cinematic sequences are very enjoyable to watch. I particularly enjoyed the superficial interaction with characters from the books. That interaction is superficial because the three main characters in this game are not part of “the fellowship” nor do they take part in any of the action depicted in the books. Instead, the player gets to experience events that are supposed to be occurring simultaneously but in completely different parts of Middle Earth. This actually works quite well as you feel you are part of the greater story even though you don’t go to Mordor or throw The One Ring into Mount Doom or anything like that. Over a decade ago I spent a lot of hours playing Diablo II; it remains among the most enjoyable games of this type I’ve ever played. WiTN reminds me of Diablo II somewhat in terms of how character stats and skills are chosen when the characters level up. Combat feels a little to me like World of Warcraft, another game I’ve played, although I find the movement and camera controls of WiTN to be inferior. In fact, the camera controls are limited to rotation through two axis; the distance from the POV character is fixed which sometimes makes it hard for me to properly aim melee attacks or to see what’s going on when my POV character is against a wall or surround by large enemies. Still, not too bad and I got used to it eventually. I have a late-2012 Mac Mini and while I have it loaded with 16gb of RAM it is a pretty low-end machine with limited Intel HD 4000 graphics. Even so, I was able to max out all the graphics settings and it was playable although it got a bit slow and stuttery in some sections. Setting all available options to ON and MEDIUM was fine most of the time but jerky in rare places. I eventually settled on most options except shadows OFF and everything at MAXIMUM. Turning off motion blur made the biggest difference to framerate and is not an attractive effect anyway, in my opinion. The game is very pretty at those settings and includes plenty of eye candy. The main difference between min and max settings (with all options ON in both cases) is just the detail on characters and enemies and the detail of distant background objects – something hard to pay attention to during battle – but the cutscenes look the same either way. One thing I initially found confusing was how the three different characters worked in terms of playing each one as the POV character. You can choose to play any one character at a time and the other two characters (the allies) will be controlled by the AI. The AI allies level up at the same time your POV character levels up. The AI upgrades their equipment and chooses their skills and stats. You can give gear to the AI allies and the AI will equip that gear if it’s better than the gear they already have. When you switch to one of the other characters it will have the same level as the character you had been playing but you get to choose all the stat and skill points – plus the new character will not have any of the gear you “gave” to the AI ally character. You can give gear to your other POV characters by leaving that gear in your inventory BUT NOT EQUIPPED, and all non-wearable gear in the inventory is shared among your three playable characters. This is not as complicated as it sounds, although loading characters in and out of the game and then visiting a merchant to save the character state after swapping the gear does take some time because the game loading and saving screens are not very quick. I think it’s probably best to choose one character and stick with it for a single play-through of the entire campaign. There are four modes: Easy, Normal, Heroic, Legendary. You can start at Easy or Normal, then each time you beat the entire campaign you can start over (keeping your characters with all their stats, skills, and gear) at the next higher level. If you beat the game on Legendary you must start subsequent campaigns on Legendary. If you listen to all the dialogue, do all the quests, watch all the cinematics, and break all the breakables it probably takes about 20 hours to play through a campaign if you don’t die somewhere along the way and have to redo a particularly difficult spot multiple times. You can probably play through in 4 hours if you get a little lucky with random quest drops and skip the cinematics and dialogue. If you haven’t completed a campaign yet you can go back to most areas and redo them, although there will be no boss battles and you can’t redo quests although you can get experience for killing the various enemies and find random loot. I think Feral did a great job porting this game to the Mac. I’ve had crashes but only when switching from one desktop to another while playing in windowed mode so I could answer an email or otherwise pause the game and use another application on my computer. The game just runs very nicely and is often beautiful to watch. If you can deal with hack-and-slash console-style battle fighting, either love or can stop yourself from over-using the two big ranged AOE attacks, and love Tolkien’s Middle Earth, it’s worth a look especially at the sale price at which it was recently offered here on the Mac App Store.

I am not gonna say this a bad game cause I haven’t had a chance to play it yet. I downloaded it and I wont startup once I hit play, any suggestions?

I am running this game on MacBook (Gold), the 1.1GHz one. Firstly I ran it with resolution of approx. 2400x1400, whihc is terrible. Then I took a minite to read the README (hah), adjusted resolution to approx. 1200x800. Now it is running great, very sleek. I am now at Chap1, I might tell you guys how the storyline goes after I spend some time on it.

* This game has some embarrassingly, hilariously bad writing and voice-acting. All the dialogue is noble and needlessly long-winded. I think it must have been written by some very earnest D&D players. Every voice actor is clearly an American who has no idea how to do a British accent (with the exception of Radagast, who also has the best dialogue). * This game does not take place in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but in some other fantasy world where almost anybody can learn to cast spectacular magical spells of healing and destruction. The Gandalf of the books can’t do most of the things that Andriel the elf and many evil “sorcerers” can do in this game, like shoot bolts of energy from their staves, project healing, protective bubbles of energy around themselves, and even teleport. This isn’t necessarily a criticism: it’s quite satisfying, not to mention useful, to blow away enemies with magical shockwaves and blast them from a distance. But it’s not Tolkien—this is D&D or Elder Scrolls or even Harry Potter territory. * The graphics are okay. Some of the landscapes look quite nice, but the character animation is pretty crude compared to some contemporary games. * Gameplay also seems a bit crude compared to other games these days. You can’t interact much with the landscape—most of it seems to be just visual decoration. There’s no jumping or ducking behind things, although you can roll during combat. The equipment system is a bit overwhelming at first—there’s a large variety of helmets, shoulder guards, gloves, chest pieces, leggings, boots and greaves, amulets and rings, and of course weapons to choose from, as well as ways of enhancing them with “elf-stones.” I felt like I spent more time figuring out how to equip my character than actually playing, before I found a good set of equipment that I wanted to stick with. * Also, the game lets you switch characters periodically, but when I did so on my first play-through I found myself dying regularly, I think because I hadn’t earned enough money to equip both characters adequately. I started over from the beginning and stuck with one character and did much better. (The other characters do fine if you leave them alone.) So, in summary: the story and the acting are embarrassingly bad, but it’s still fun to play.

I paid $20 for this game and it was well worth it. I was drawn to this game from my previous love of Middle Earth and this game satisfied my need for a new story within Middle Earth. The world feels like the ME of the films and draws upon some content from the books and films. The singleplayer is very fun and a nice time killer. The multiplayer is even more fun! Technically Feral did an amazing job porting the game. I had no problems running it on my late 2014 macbook air and I could run the game on fairly high visual settings too. When it comes to the actual game it felt a little short to me and the game is very much on a straight go here do this basis with little to no freedom. You don’t really get to explore Middle Earth beyond the levels and all the characters felt pretty dry. Overall this game is very fun to play alone or with someone. It’s great for Middle Earth lovers and it’s totally worth the $20!

I throughly enjoyed playing this game and was progressing through the characters - dwarf, ranger and elf until . . . I upgraded to El Capitan. Now I can only hope to open the application once in 20-25 attempts. The first time I attempted to use it after the OS upgrade, it changed my user name to Newstar54 then promptly crashed. I’ve yet to receive a response from Feral or Apple. It would be nice to know if they intend to provide an update to fix the problem. A simple acknowledgement that they are aware of the problem if nothing else.

Crashes on launch, even on a beefy MacBook Pro: MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014), 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB Many of the latest games run smoothly and without issues, so there’s definitely an issue (or two) with this app.

Would have liked to have been able to finish this game, but after Level 5 it could not be played. The game icon would sit happily on the bottom of my Imac screen and nothing would happen, I can’t even close it out without using the Force Quit option. Re-installing the program did not help and I have had no responce to the emails sent to the support team. This is unfortunate because I it is a decent game and would have loved to give it 4-5 stars.