LOTR Tactics CSO Size: 418 MB
It must have taken some careful planning and a lot of good luck for the decent people of Middle-earth to overcome the wicked military maneuverings of Sauron's armies. This conflict is abstracted down to a 3D turn-based strategy game in The Lord of the Rings: Tactics, which has a great concept and some good mechanics, but unfortunately, doesn't pull any of it off particularly well.
Lackluster graphics and sound prevent this game from capturing the grandeur or the personality of its source material.
The Lord of the Rings: Tactics lets you play through a single-player campaign from the perspective of either the good guys or the bad guys of Peter Jackson's movie trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novels. A smattering of movie clips is used to introduce the campaigns and their missions, but because these are fairly disjointed and taken from source material that--let's face it--you've probably seen a whole bunch of times by now if you're interested in this game, the presentation of the story doesn't do much to draw you in. The actual plot of the movies serves only to loosely set up most of the game's battles, which will likely seem familiar to you despite them having taken some big-time liberties.
For example, both the Fellowship and Mordor campaigns begin with the fireside ambush by the ring wraiths against Frodo and his protector, Aragorn. The victory conditions of the battle are obviously different depending on which campaign you're playing. If you're playing as Mordor, all you're trying to do is give Aragorn a good beating. You can go ahead and kill Frodo while you're at it (hit him enough and the game confirms "Frodo has been slain!"), but don't worry, Mordor's campaign doesn't end right then and there as you might logically expect. The fact that hero characters on opposite sides are roughly balanced is also somewhat off-putting initially, since it means plump, untrained Sam Gamgee is capable of going toe to toe with Sauron himself. At any rate, this type of stuff, together with the game's decidedly rough-looking menus and somewhat confusing interface, conspires to make The Lord of the Rings: Tactics give a negative impression early on.
Thankfully, the gameplay itself has some interesting nuances, and for better or worse it deviates from the well-traveled formula found in most other strategy/role-playing hybrids. Rather than alternate turns with your opponent, turns are resolved simultaneously, but they're split into a separate movement phase and a combat phase. So during the movement phase, you tell all your units where to move on a gridlike map, and during the combat phase, you tell them whom to attack. When you're done queuing orders for a phase, you hit "go" and the actions are resolved based on the different combatants' statistical ratings (quicker characters act first). It bears mentioning that you'll never control more than a handful of units in a given battle, which keeps things manageable but also means this game doesn't begin to evoke the scale or intensity of the epic fight scenes from the films. On the plus side, you'll get to see most of the major and minor characters from the movies at some point, from the gangly Gollum on up to the massive, fiery balrog.
You'll get to control all the famous Lord of the Rings characters in this turn-based strategy game, but you'll find they're all surprisingly similar.
What adds some depth to the process is your hero characters' increasing assortment of special skills and items, as well as most units' ability to attack both when up close and from long range. The descriptions of the special skills make them sound much fancier than they appear but can be devastating regardless, such as ones that whittle down the enemy's armor and cause subsequent attacks to be far more damaging. Having multiple units focus their ranged attacks on a single target is another good way to quickly dispatch a foe. However, it's possible to prevent units from using their ranged attacks by engaging them in melee combat, which also may prevent them from moving during the next movement phase. Also, if multiple units surround an opponent, it suffers penalties to its armor rating to simulate the disadvantage of such circumstances. But since you don't know exactly what your opponent will do during the next movement phase, there's definitely some guesswork involved either in trying to pin down a defensive opponent or slow an aggressive one.
All this may sound compelling if you're into turn-based combat games, but The Lord of the Rings: Tactics doesn't execute on its design particularly well. The whole game has a sluggish, clunky feel to it, which would be crippling if there were any fast action involved, but instead just drags down the pacing. Turn-based games aren't necessarily meant to be ultrafast-paced or anything, but they shouldn't force you to sit around waiting for the fun stuff to happen. In this game, the rather dull movement phases and various, noticeable pauses during combat can wear on your patience.
Lackluster graphics and sound prevent this game from capturing the grandeur or the personality of its source material.
The Lord of the Rings: Tactics lets you play through a single-player campaign from the perspective of either the good guys or the bad guys of Peter Jackson's movie trilogy based on the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novels. A smattering of movie clips is used to introduce the campaigns and their missions, but because these are fairly disjointed and taken from source material that--let's face it--you've probably seen a whole bunch of times by now if you're interested in this game, the presentation of the story doesn't do much to draw you in. The actual plot of the movies serves only to loosely set up most of the game's battles, which will likely seem familiar to you despite them having taken some big-time liberties.
For example, both the Fellowship and Mordor campaigns begin with the fireside ambush by the ring wraiths against Frodo and his protector, Aragorn. The victory conditions of the battle are obviously different depending on which campaign you're playing. If you're playing as Mordor, all you're trying to do is give Aragorn a good beating. You can go ahead and kill Frodo while you're at it (hit him enough and the game confirms "Frodo has been slain!"), but don't worry, Mordor's campaign doesn't end right then and there as you might logically expect. The fact that hero characters on opposite sides are roughly balanced is also somewhat off-putting initially, since it means plump, untrained Sam Gamgee is capable of going toe to toe with Sauron himself. At any rate, this type of stuff, together with the game's decidedly rough-looking menus and somewhat confusing interface, conspires to make The Lord of the Rings: Tactics give a negative impression early on.
Thankfully, the gameplay itself has some interesting nuances, and for better or worse it deviates from the well-traveled formula found in most other strategy/role-playing hybrids. Rather than alternate turns with your opponent, turns are resolved simultaneously, but they're split into a separate movement phase and a combat phase. So during the movement phase, you tell all your units where to move on a gridlike map, and during the combat phase, you tell them whom to attack. When you're done queuing orders for a phase, you hit "go" and the actions are resolved based on the different combatants' statistical ratings (quicker characters act first). It bears mentioning that you'll never control more than a handful of units in a given battle, which keeps things manageable but also means this game doesn't begin to evoke the scale or intensity of the epic fight scenes from the films. On the plus side, you'll get to see most of the major and minor characters from the movies at some point, from the gangly Gollum on up to the massive, fiery balrog.
You'll get to control all the famous Lord of the Rings characters in this turn-based strategy game, but you'll find they're all surprisingly similar.
What adds some depth to the process is your hero characters' increasing assortment of special skills and items, as well as most units' ability to attack both when up close and from long range. The descriptions of the special skills make them sound much fancier than they appear but can be devastating regardless, such as ones that whittle down the enemy's armor and cause subsequent attacks to be far more damaging. Having multiple units focus their ranged attacks on a single target is another good way to quickly dispatch a foe. However, it's possible to prevent units from using their ranged attacks by engaging them in melee combat, which also may prevent them from moving during the next movement phase. Also, if multiple units surround an opponent, it suffers penalties to its armor rating to simulate the disadvantage of such circumstances. But since you don't know exactly what your opponent will do during the next movement phase, there's definitely some guesswork involved either in trying to pin down a defensive opponent or slow an aggressive one.
All this may sound compelling if you're into turn-based combat games, but The Lord of the Rings: Tactics doesn't execute on its design particularly well. The whole game has a sluggish, clunky feel to it, which would be crippling if there were any fast action involved, but instead just drags down the pacing. Turn-based games aren't necessarily meant to be ultrafast-paced or anything, but they shouldn't force you to sit around waiting for the fun stuff to happen. In this game, the rather dull movement phases and various, noticeable pauses during combat can wear on your patience.
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