The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Previews

Snowblind Studios showed off the first mature-rated Lord of the Rings game in history, The Lord of the Rings: War in the North, at E3, and a couple of sites have posted their impressions. IGN.

The battle with the troll that ends the demo would be very different if the camera were pulled back. As it is, the troll looms over our heroes, seems to take up half the screen, and is an ominous opponent. The troll battle plays out pretty much the same as any third-person action role-playing game. The troll has a few different attack types, each with a different method for avoiding, and slowly loses health as players strike with magic, arrows, and battle axes.

The one eye-popping moment in the boss battles comes if one of the characters gets careless and is snatched up by the troll. It’s quite something to see a dwarf knocked to the ground with a troll trying to crush him with his massive foot. Tapping a defensive button repeatedly fends off the impending foot stomp, but that won’t stop the troll from picking up the dwarf and beating the crap out of him. With good use of timing, the dwarf can stab the beast in the eye. With poor timing, the dwarf can lose his head. Oh, the joys of a mature rating.

GameInformer.com.

The combat is definitely more up-close and intense than Snowblind’s previous games, and the enemies come in smaller but much deadlier packs. The conversation between the three developers playing reminded me of an intense raid in an MMO. Surely that was staged to some degree, but from the gameplay alone it seems like you’ll need to be communicating with teammates fairly constantly to succeed.