The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (PS2)

The graphics are absolutly class, and although the general gameplay was slightly easy it was fun and entertaining all the same. Its also great how you get to play as different characters from the film like Gandalf and Aragorn.

Ok, so its not the all time best game, so what, its fun and entertaining and really thats all that a good game needs to be. If you like Lord of the Rings or just want a fun game to play on then i would recommend this game to you.

That's what I thought anyway. However on playing the game for the SIX hours before I completed it [...] I found that the graphical representations were only just post-playstation one, the game play was "Harry-Potter" meets "Hexen" meets "Roland on the Ropes," which, whilst being high sellers of their time, a combination of the three is, un-surprisingly, well... lame, for want of a worse word.

The story I hear you ask, they can't have messed up the story? Well, yes, actually they can; in fact they might as well have not bothered, I'll admit they kind of half-heartedly followed the book, with the appearance of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs affair but they actually made the game the wrong way round, adapting huge sections of the story just to allow for a few more monotonous, dull and laughable fight scenes whilst skipping over the actual story-line with brief, stilted and very poorly "acted" scripts, jumping around from one conversational piece to another. In fact, most of what the characters said was irrelevant, poorly timed, poorly implemented, and poorly emphasised.

I find it unlikely that anyone who had not read the book would have the slightest clue as to what was going, and those that had read the book would be disappointed with every skipped-narrative, and pathetically tied-in snippet of story-line.

Easy: easy to play, easy to win, and easy to get bored of, the only times I died was due to poor almost tomb raider-esque choreography causing me to miss the irritating cliffs and annoying pit-falls (Roland on the Ropes). Maybe I'm being unfair but surely a dynamic camera is supposed to be used to give the player a better point of view? Not here though oh-no it seems the emphasis was to turn the camera away from enemies, falls, doors or anything else that might be considered useful to notice: I seemed to spend as much time turning the camera around manually as I did actually moving the character around the game.

Good points? Few, but here's a list: The use of shadow and light to produce an eerie ambiance in the "mines of Moria" episode was... adequate.

Um, that's it; in fact disappointingly this game is one of the worst I've played this year I could talk all day about poor Z-Buffering, minor glitches, the fiddly and hard to co-ordinate controls, but I wont, in fact my guess is that after reading this you may think twice about buying this game at its full-price. My advice: If you really really want it, wait until the price drops, if you don't you may well end up kicking yourself very severely in the shins.

I will however give the game 1 star for its Sunday-Afternoon feel. There: who says the British public is withdrawn.

Thanks for reading (If you got this far), Sam.