They're also dark and samey, as is the beautifully depicted but grimy terrain against which it's so hard to see them, and they dodge about you like mad and en masse while the camera very rarely offers any kind of helpful view. Basically, the characters are best suited to fighting one bad guy at a time, and in considerable detail, a situation which rolls around about as often as a solar eclipse. In real combat situations against agile hordes of goblins, orcs and Uruk-Hai, the mechanics of this game are profoundly annoying. as Aragorn would say, while they may look fair, they feel foul. Technically, they all handle well in their own right - that is to say that if you stand in a clearing and deliver combos to thin air, you will have a good, graceful time - and yet. Aragorn is the best all-rounder, Legolas has the swiftness and his insane arrow-spitting rate (which makes him my favourite), while Gimli is just not fun to play at all. You can brave the onslaught as ranger Aragorn, elven arrowmeister Legolas, or the dwarven axeman and comic relief, Gimli. And whenever you die, there's a slow, atmospheric fade out to the flaming, roaring Eye of Sauron, which might have been great if it weren't also unskippable. I hate action games with unskippable cut-scenes, especially little ones that break up the action just enough to frustrate you. Moments that took an hour in the film to set up emotionally are lobbed about left, right and centre in the FMVs, as if I can still be expected to care, and the gimmick of fading between the live action footage and the game engine only serves to remind of the gulf between the two. The camera has no interest in helping you, it's too busy making sure the game resembles the film at all times. Every cue happens at exactly the same moment every time you play. This is a deeply monotonous and unpleasantly difficult beat-em-up delivered in ultra discrete, unchanging chunks which live in perpetual fear of straying from the invisible path of the precioussss. While they were all mutually back-slapping and waxing lyrical, I was just thinking, 'Yeah, but you all forgot that this is a game for PLAYING.' Everyone from the actors to the filmmakers to the special effects guys to the milkman's girlfriend goes on the record to tell you how cool it was to be involved with the project, how faithful it is to the film, how they were obsessed with doing justice to this and that, and how pleased they are that they've all been made into action figures. This game sets a new record for the inclusion of 'bonus' behind-the-scenes multimedia content as it works up its lather of reverence. The grovelling over-reverence for said ring and the whole Lord Of The Rings saga in general oozes from every pore of The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, the 128-bit hack and slash videogame tie-in for the first two of Peter Jackson's Ring films. It's that freaking ring! It corrupts the hearts of men (we who desire power above all else), and people in thrall of the darn thing are always doing stupid, evil stuff. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (GameCube) reviewīlah blah, you know the drill.
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