War of the Ring

Logan Booker welcomes you to the dark side of gaming.

War of the Ring is Liquid's second realtime strategy title - its first, Battle Realms, was a nice entry into the genre, with the game's most standout feature being its attention to detail. Units had a special system in order to improve their capabilities, and each side had its own unique features. The odd thing is, hardly any of these fresh ideas made their way into War of the Ring.
WotR is based on the book (rather than the movie) license, which means Liquid had a lot of content to work with. Despite this, many of the units have an unavoidable Warcraft 3 look, with spells, orcs, trolls and goblins sharing the familiar heritage. Mind you, W3 borrows quite a bit from Battle Realms, so it's up to the gamer to decide who the rip-off is.

Gameplay is standard RTS fair. There are the two sides - 'dark' and 'light' - with the minions of Sauron facing off against the Free Peoples. Your resources are food and ore, which are gathered by workers; and 'fate', which is gained by killing stuff. While food and ore are used to construct buildings and train units, fate is spent on hero abilities and special powers. Heroes can also level-up, but this just increases their fighting capabilities. It's up to the player to customise their heroes to the situation. Combat is dealt in the same manner as Age of Mythology, where one unit's damage type counteracts the other. Variety comes with the way the two sides play, with the dark side favouring a fast-expansion strategy, and the light side a slow build-up. Skirmishes, be they against a human or computer, are still fairly clinical.

One of the most prevalent problems with WotR is that it doesn't take itself seriously. The comic style of the dialog and story (except the mission speeches on the main map, which are done well) detracts from Tolkien's epic world, so the single-player game never sits comfortably beside what you might have envisioned while reading the books. The giant catapult mission, where you're required to repair the dwarf's 'secret weapon' is a good example - it just comes off as silly.

War of the Ring is a solid RTS. What lets it down is the ordinary gameplay (in the long-term) and the fact that it doesn't make more use of Tolkien's material.