War in the North - is this really brutal?

Trailer: Check out the combat gameplay in Lord of the Rings: War in the North. Apparentl;y, it's brutal...

A lot of RPGs place their bets pretty heavily on the strength of their combat - but is that really all there is to a game? The latest Lord of the Rings: War in the North trailer suggests that the brutality of the game's combat is a real selling point, but to our mind that simply begs a couple of questions.

Is combat the be-all-and-end-all of an RPG, and can any game like this really call itself brutal⁽¹⁾?

First up, yes, we agree that fighting and action is important in this kind of thing. But look at Dragon Age - pretty much every trailer is about the exciting combat, but the truth is that's not what the game is about. And if it were... would that even be a good thing? At least Dragon Age is an original property, so its devs can get away with swaying the game however they wish, but putting the focus on action in a Lord of the Rings game is like talking about the car chases in Waiting for Godot.

And then, the brutality thing. The hammer fight in Old Boy - that's brutal. Watching almost any fight in Deadwood - way brutal. But Lord of the Rings? Sure, Peter Jackson delivered a lot of versimilitude in his film versions (Aragorn's draw cut on an Uruk in the extended edition of Fellowship comes to mind), but that still doesn't add up to RPG combat. This is a genre that relies on the fact that combat is not fat, but rather engaging - badguys almost never fall to a single blow, let alone a brutal one. And...

And I'm ranting. Anyhoo... the trailer.