Lord of the Rings: The Third Age Reviews

Two more fairly positive reviews for EA’s Lord of the Rings: The Third Age have surfaced on the web. The first is at GameSpot with an overall score of 7.7/10:

Even with all the skill-raising and orc-hewing, the game takes about 25 hours to finish if you rush, and 30 or longer if you want to take your sweet time and gather up skills. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy to get 100-percent quest completion on all the chapters, and there aren’t any extra features unlocked when you beat the game. There is a co-op mode, but it’s poorly implemented; it consists of someone plugging in a second controller and then selecting an option from the in-game menu. Player one controls the movement in adventure mode, and the two players trade off controlling characters in battles. As multiplayer in a turn-based game, it’s just not a whole lot of fun. You’re better off just leaning over your friend’s shoulder and telling him or her which ability to use.

The Lord of the Rings, The Third Age molds Middle-earth into a traditional turn-based frame, and while the results aren’t all that great, the game carries some pretty good features and should appeal to fans of the source material.

And the second is at TeamXbox with an overall score of 8.4/10:

Being a big RPG fan, I was keeping the fingers crossed that The Third Age would deliver first in the gameplay category and second in keeping with the LotR trilogy. Mission accomplished. While there are a few hiccups along the way (primarily in the pacing of the game and it being linear), The Third Age manages to pull off a solid RPG experience for anyone even remotely interested in Tolkien’s famed trilogy. Newbies will be able to easily navigate the various menus and execute battle commands with ease, and RPG vets will find plenty of depth in the amount of weapons and abilities that each character possesses. When most of today’s RPGs tend to be short (Fable, cough), The Third Age has the legs with close to 40 hours of adventuring to take up your time. Certainly not a perfect RPG, but a damn good one to be sure.