The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Preview

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Written by BuckGB on May 5th, 2011

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With each of the three co-op players inhabiting a very different race - human, elf or dwarf - the game promises to be all about teamwork, utilising each race's abilities to compliment the others. Sadly, with novices at the controls of the demo, the difficulty had to be tuned to brain-numbingly easy. Unsurprisingly, as a result none of the cross-race techniques were on show. Instead the three players simply waded into battle, hammering the melee attack buttons repeatedly to bring down foes that should have taken careful consideration to dispose. Snow Trolls fell under a flurry of spammy mashes, while a squad of Uruk Hai proved no more deadly than a trio of drunken hobbits.

We weren't the only ones to notice this, with the developer overseeing the demo continually reminding us that the final game will ratchet up the difficulty, brutally punishing such simple approaches. There won't be an incredibly complex combo system, but with each race having a sizable skill tree there's still plenty of room for experimentation, especially when the different race skills can be combined for new results.

What did impress was the intuitive paper doll inventory system, always important in an RPG, as well as the attractive rendering of everybody's favourite fantasy universe. The snowy mountaintop passes through which the demo traversed were very easy on the eye, (if a little enclosed), while the orcs and other enemies were adorned in armour so detailed that it would take several of Tolkein's chapters to describe them in such precision. Animations were a little hit and miss though, with blows often missing their targets entirely yet still registering, while enemies would sometimes get stuck on characters and continue to run on the spot.

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