Round One - Fight!ĮA has taken great pains over the combat in The Third Age. The game even plays a posturing sequence at the end of combat.
Then you hit your first battle (when you're trotting along, the Eye of Sauron appears and grows in the top left of the screen to show whether or not you're in an area likely to involve fighting). Your character in the real-time section is now bearing a shield, and very nice he looks too. You find a chest, and open it using A to find a shield.
A map in the top right hand corner tells you where you're going (like FF. The Third Age looks amazing, as you'd expect. You move off together, although only Berethor is shown in the adventure section. Get used to the "like Final Fantasy" bit. A woman who casts water spells appears, a warrior elf called Idrial. A cut-scene explodes, as in Final Fantasy, into a turn-based combat sequence with character order at the top right of the screen.
We're off.īerethor is a warrior of Gondor. It starts with footage from the movie and a crash course in Middle Earth - the waning of the elves, the rise of men, the cutting of the ring from Sauron's hand by Isildur, the finding of the ring by Smeagol, the starting of the third age, the formation of the Fellowship, and so on - and then shows the main character standing in a wood. As could have easily been predicted.įrom the outset The Third Age is slick and involving. There was never any doubt the publishing giant would handle the subject matter with ease, but could it produce an RPG capable of pleasing the crowd and the hardcore alike? EA has never made a game like this before.
The Third Age is the first EA LOTR title to be released since The Return of the King, a console RPG in the tradition of Final Fantasy ( very in the tradition as it transpires), and as such has been the subject of wry interest. The obvious next step was role-playing and strategy. The fair-weather action fans have had their fill. The games were huge successes, and rightly so.īut the films are no more, and now EA has to eke whatever it can from the remains of the day. Everyone wants to be Ian McKellan in a huge beard with a death wish, don't they? It turned out they did. The Two Towers and The Return of the King were shining examples of the handling of film licenses, if not the brightest instances, showing a commitment to the property's assets and the mirroring of the movies themselves in taking a full action stance. It would be impossible to argue that EA had done a bad job of its partnership with New Line and the Lord of the Rings films so far.
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