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| Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by FABIO 03/19/2006, 1:19pm PST | ||||
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| I'm going to pound out a one page review on this later.
Here is my Two Towers review, so I'll just compare the two. Advantages over TTT: -More epic battles Remember when you had to slog through a lot of merely okay typical beat 'em up levels and two extremely GAY suicide orc bomber levels to get to the unbelievably kick ass Helm's Deep levels (minus the gay suicide bomber orc Helm's Deep level)? Well there's none of that crap in this game. It hits you right away with the epic stuff and only has about 4 (out of like 12) "trekking" levels. Minas Tirinth, Pellonor Fields, and the Black Gate (holy shit!) where the enemies are so thick that you have to fight your way foward, simply running will get you killed. You play as Gandalf on 3 missions, 4 as the hobbits, and 5 as the fellowship trio as John "Laddie" Rhys-Davis, Ms. Orlando Bloon, and "wash your fucking hair" man. Three of the hobbit levels are gay, the other is pretty fun though. Playing as the hobbits isn't nearly as gay as I thought it would be. I thought the gameplay would be something like "hit X button to whine, hit triangle to say that you never should have left the shire, circle button proclaims how much you miss Hobbit ale and Hobbit tobacco and Hobbit cakes and Hobbit pussy. Still, their levels aren't as good as the other characters. One hobbit level has you fighting giant spiders the entire time. Ugh. -Co-op play is fun. Disadvantages compared to TTT: - They messed with the perfet melee system TTT had. Now you can get away with just hitting the X button 90% of the time. In TTT the X button attack (fast but weak, blocks most frontal attacks) was used to buy time and parlay with an enemy until you had an opening to nail him with a strong attack or special move. Now the fast attacks do damage at the same pace of the strong attacks, but since the weak attacks block (and now hit multiple enemies at once) there's not a single time you'll ever use the strong attacks except to break an enemy's shield. The cool move where you finish off a prone enemy by impaling him is now useless to. I guess in an effort to make the characters different, they made everyone's killing attack go at different speeds. So now it's fast and useful as the hobbits, but worthless for everyone else. The sheer number of enemies always attacking you means that you can't ever afford to pull a killing or strong attack, just wail the X button. The thing is, it still manages to be pretty fun as you carve your way through a sea of enemies, slicing 3 at a time per swing, with the films' climatic choir music blasting. The enemies just don't have any "meat" to them like they did in TTT though. All the combos and special moves are useless. The only abilities worth buying are the ones that increase health and the damage of your regular attack as you keep wailing on that X button. To summarize, they went from the most brilliant mass melee game ever to Golden Axe with higher production values; it's still fun, but not brilliant. -Enemy models I can remember 5 different kinds of Orc/Urukai from TTT, all beautifuly rendered. All I see in RotK are creatures in muddy brown outfits (I couldn't differentiate between orcs and Urukai) and one evil human warrior model. There's some ghosts and spiders too, but they get their own levels so i'm not chalking up any variety points for them. Most levels you'll be fighting the brown baddies and the Jango Fett clones. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are great, but the the clarity of the models and their animations didn't wow me like it did in TTT, maybe because they have to render so many at once? -Secret Level The secret level in TTT: Sarumon's tower that had him summoning waves of orcs to attack you throughout 20 levels of mayham. Every few levels he'd mock you, urging you on toward the top while the climatic choir music played. These levels took al your skill as you darted, parried, and picked your opponents. The secret level in RotK: A graveyard where you fight the muddy brown guys, ghosts, and spiders by htting the X button a lot to no music whatsoever (it's supposed to be SPOOKY!). You fight a few huge trolls only on the last 3 levels. Instead of healing a portion of your health each level like TTT did, a health potion appears on the ground with every level you beat. There's also a thick fog covering the ground (cause it's a SPOOKY graveyard you see) which means it's more difficult than it should be spotting the damn potions and on more than one occaision you're going to accidently run into one and use it during a fight even if you don't want to. No one mocks you on the way to the top, no urge to drive foward. Your reward for making it to the end? The "level complete" screen. Fuck you guys. There's another secret level, but you have to get a bunch of character to maximum level to unlock it. There isn't any trick as broken as replaying Balin's Tomb over and over like in the TTT to wrack up mad experience, so I haven't yet done it (that's why I'm waiting on the long review). There's one slightly less effective method for building experience, but it doesn't work for Sam so it's going to take a year to build him up. -Secret characters Okay, the game has 3 secret characters. Who could they be?!!!!! I was imagining the thrill of playing as Gollum as I lept on peoples' backs and bit their fingers off, the glee of laying waste to everyone as Sarumon, the erection of playing co-op with a friend as Liv Tyler and the blond chick (with multiple costumes!) and purchasing the dyke out ability. So who do the secret characters turn out to be? Faramir, who's exactly the same as Aragorn, and motherfucking Merry & Pippen. That's right, all four fucking hobbits are playable characters in this game, and they're all EXACTLY the same. Fuck you guys. -Last boss GOLLUM?! Fucking Gollum is the last boss? He's invincble to regular attacks and I have to kill him via puzzle fighting? Fuck you guys. Overall: TTT game with all epic battle levels would have rendered all other games unnecessary. As it is, RotK is the kick ass epic battles with a dumbed down combat system. Fun, but |
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