The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (PC)

Characters you start with are Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. There are also three unlockables available when you have completed all the missions. As you kill enemies you gain experience points for your character, which can then be exchanged for new abilities or upgrades, these are usually combo attacks that you can use to kill enemies quicker.

One thing that did strike me as strange was that the game despite having only fifteen levels came on three disks. This is explained by the fact that the game contains exclusive interviews with cast members which must take up a lot of space. It should also be mentioned that one or two of the levels are rather short. In particular the first level at Helm's deep.

This game contains 15 highly interactive levels, 12 of these I thought were excellent, 2 of them were good, and one level which was consequently the last level of the main missions was slightly boring. The level which I thought was boring is called the crack of doom and basically you have to push gollum off the edge of the platform, this in itself isn't so hard except that you have to do it six times. The two levels that I would rate good were in themselves excellent levels the problem with them being they were exceptionally hard and you find yourself replaying them many times until they start to become annoying (Incidentally there aren't many check points so your patience with a level is often tested to the limit.) My favourite level was Cirith Ungol where you play as Sam and have to battle your way through the tower to find Frodo.

The only other thing that should be mentioned is the camera which seems to end up looking from odd angles and seems to never look in certain directions, probably implemented so that the game designers didn't need to design walls or scenery for certain parts of the levels. Altogether a game well worth buying.

However after this amount of time you start to realise the failings of this game.

If you are after a true RPG don't bother. The upgrades you achieve for your character come in the form of "combo" moves which are reminiscent of Tekken style games, however given the 3D nature of the game, it is often very difficult to pull off these moves.

Additionally, there is no way to save the game in the midst of a level. As the levels are quite big, it's really annoying having to go back to the start of the level when you restart the game.

This could have been a truly amazing game on the PC, but it seems to be a straight conversion from a console. Hinting at the joypad connection, the mouse is pretty redundant in this game and I quickly ditched it for keyboard only.

If you are thinking of purchasing this game, my personal advice would be to wait a few weeks and pick up a pre-owned copy, as there will definitely be a glut of second hand games available when people like me give up and try to recoup their losses.