Very rarely today in the games world do we get shadow drops, especially games of big, established IPs. However, that is exactly what happened with The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Legacy Edition, a remaster of the 2011 game by Snowblind Studios. With developer of the remake, Aspyr, teasing more Lord of the Rings ports coming in the future, is War in the North a standout enough title to make it worthwhile?
I’m going on an Adventure!
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North features a story that runs parallel to the story in the books or the movies by Peter Jackson. The game features 3 playable characters, who are tasked by Aragorn to figure out why the forces of Mordor have been gathering at a ruined fort to the north of the Shire. The story will have you travel across Middle Earth, seeing locations from the movies such as Bree and Rivendell. You’ll be able to chat with the majority of the Fellowship, including Gandalf, Gimli, and Frodo.
You have Eradan, a ranger like Aragorn, Farin, a Dwarven tank, and Andriel, an Elven mage from Rivendell. All 3 playable characters can be played either close range melee, or long range, but each class has its pros and cons depending on how you want to play them. In the 2011 release, solo players were locked into one character for their playthrough, however Aspyr has provided a nice update to the game, giving you quick fix buttons to switch to the other characters on the fly. This change was absolutely wonderful; even though I found myself gravitating towards playing the tank throughout the game, there were sections where long range attacks were needed, and I could freely switch to either the ranger or mage to take care of hard to reach enemies.
The story really works as a side story to the movies if you’re invested in the series. Outside of some of the more fantastical elements (more on that later), I could see this game’s story fitting wonderfully into actual canon. My only issue with the story was the main villain – Agandaûr, a sorcerer and right-hand of Sauron. He only shows up at the beginning of the game, and then you fight him in his fortress at the end. He seems really cool in his first appearance, taking flight on a fellbeast and conjuring a lightning storm, and then he does nothing else until the end of the game. They definitely could have built the villain up more, and the game makes you question why Sauron didn’t have Agandaûr go after the Fellowship, with his really good sorcery at his disposal.
Graphics and Performance
For a 15 year old game, the art style has aged pretty well, and it still looks great. Everything looks like it fits in the world that Tolkien created, and the character models based on the movie characters look as good as they could have back in 2011. The game is also upscaled to 4K, and while it visually won’t blow anyone away now, it was perfectly serviceable, and I had no issues with it.
Performance overall was fine. Every once in a while, frames would drop down to the teens, even during portions where there wasn’t much going on. Not sure if this issue was in the original, but it would persist until I either died, or saved and reloaded the game. In most cases, I would purposely die just to reload and be able to retry the current battle with a manageable frame rate. This is something that should not be happening in a remaster of a 15 year old game with minimal improvements. Hopefully Aspyr is aware of this and is able to patch it in the future.
Another issue I constantly ran into was enemies that were out of the playable zone losing their hitboxes and becoming unkillable. There are multiple areas where you will run into archers that are outside of where you are able to get to while progressing. Generally, these enemies can be dispatched with magic, arrows or bolts, but during multiple boss fights after the boss is defeated, they become invincible. Generally, reloading and doing the fight again causes this issue to go away, but you shouldn’t have to reload the game to get the enemy AI to work properly. One fight in particular I had to reload 4 times to get the enemies to walk on a surface where they weren’t rubbing up on the environment. As a one off these issues wouldn’t bother me, but with it constantly happening it starts to become frustrating.
Combat and Difficulty
Combat is the meat and bones of the game, and is overall pretty good. Each character will have a light and heavy melee attack, a long range attack, and a dodge. Each character also has 3 skill trees to unlock new skills to help your character depending on your play style. I started playing as Andriel and really liked how the mage played. Unfortunately, the AI for the other two characters isn’t great, and they would often get downed quickly and leave me to fend off 6+ enemies by myself, to the point where eventually I switched to Farin to tank.
This game is difficult. Much of the game revolves around heading to a new area, and clearing everything out to advance, or holding that position for a certain amount of time. Again, with the friendly AI this can become really challenging, really quickly. The game was likely balanced around co-op for 3 players, but running solo can be especially frustrating.
I had one section in the back half of the game that took me over an hour, where you had to fight a boss with regular enemies constantly spawning, and then a section afterwards where you need to defend the doors, and you have 2 trolls and a bunch of other enemies you have to defeat all together, likely with downed teammates. All this to say is that this is just on the normal difficulty! I can’t imagine how tough hard is. If you’re looking to play this, definitely plan to have a friend or two along for the ride.
Final Verdict
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Legacy Edition has a really strong foundation, with some fundamental issues that really can’t be fixed in a simple remaster. Framerate issues, terrible difficulty spikes and brainless AI definitely took some fun out of the sails while I was playing through the game, but when everything was going smoothly, I was having a wonderful time playing through the well-thought-out levels within the Tolkien universe. It definitely helps that the gameplay is engaging, and it has a wonderful story that can easily work within the canon. Thankfully the game is pretty cheap so it isn’t a huge investment if you and some buddies are interested, but definitely be prepared to struggle if you plan on playing solo.
The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Legacy Edition was reviewed on Xbox Series X. The game is now available for PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 1/2, Xbox Series consoles and PC.
