If you love the books the mostly brainless battle is good enough.

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.

JohnMHammer about The Lord of the Rings: War in the North