The Lord of the Rings: War in the North arrived in 2011 with a license few studios have ever held. Snowblind Studios could draw on both J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1954 novel and Peter Jackson’s film trilogy — the literary and film rights together. WB Games locked up that combination in 2009, after Vivendi Universal Games and Electronic Arts had spent years holding the rights apart. That is the pitch: a co-op action RPG set in Middle-earth, with the look of the films and the appendices of the books behind it. The result is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and rarely reaches it. It scores 6.6 of 10.
Trailer, via IGN.
Three Heroes at the Prancing Pony
War in the North does not retell the story of the One Ring. It runs a parallel quest alongside it, following three adventurers who occasionally cross the main narrative and never replace it. Eradan is a Ranger. Farin is a Dwarf. Andriel is an Elf. The player picks one at the start of each level and can switch at the end of a level or by loading an earlier save.
Each character has a distinct kit, and that spread is the most thoughtful thing in the game.
- Eradan carries a bow, a two-handed sword, a sword and shield, or two single-handed weapons, with a skill set built around stealth and the ability to follow other Rangers’ tracks to hidden stashes.
- Farin carries heavy two-handed axes, a single-handed weapon and shield, or a crossbow, with melee skills and the ability to spot fissures in walls and rocks and smash them open for money, items and gems.
- Andriel carries a staff and shield or a staff and a single-handed weapon, with the staff doubling as her ranged option, offensive and defensive spellcasting, potion-making from field ingredients, and a special ability to find secret passages marked with hidden elven glyphs.
All three share a light attack, a heavy attack, a roll, a block and a sprint. Critical strikes trigger when a yellow indicator appears over an enemy’s head and the player lands a heavy attack — often a one-hit kill. In single-player, the player can order AI companions to seek out and attack enemies or to hold position. That is a functional co-op skeleton, and it works best when three people are actually playing it.
Agandaûr and the Road to Fornost
The plot opens at the Prancing Pony in Bree. Eradan, Andriel and Farin meet Aragorn and tell him that three days earlier the Dúnedain guard at Sarn Ford was attacked by the Nazgûl, who passed into the Shire. After that raid, the Witch-king of Angmar met a Black Númenórean named Agandaûr, who told him his orcs were forming an army in the ruins of Fornost on Sauron’s command. Aragorn explains that a Hobbit with a “great burden” is on his way to Bree, and that if the enemy takes the object from him it means certain doom for the Free peoples of Middle-earth. He asks the trio to distract the orcs at Fornost.
The voice cast is drawn from the wider animation and games pool rather than the films. Nolan North plays Eradan. Laura Bailey plays Andriel. Fred Tatasciore plays Farin and also Agandaûr. Chris Edgerly plays Aragorn. Eric Lopez plays the Witch-king. John Patrick Lowrie plays Beleram, a Great Eagle the trio rescue from orcs in Fornost, who serves Gwaihir and offers his help. Liam O’Brien plays both Elladan and Elrohir, the sons of Elrond, who suggest the group might be able to destroy Agandaûr rather than merely distract him. Peter Jessop plays Halbarad, the captain the trio report back to at Sarn Ford.
The game’s claim on the material is real. It draws on details grounded in the books and the appendices, and it puts the player in corners of the map the main story never visits. But the characters are invented, and the story is a side errand. The aesthetic leans on the films, with characters bearing the likenesses of their actors, so the game sits in a strange middle place: not the book, not the film, and not quite its own thing either.
A Fight That Runs Parallel
This is not someone else’s fight. This is your own effort to forage a way through the dark, dangerous, and unknown landscape, defending all that is yours.
That is the game’s own framing, and it is the right ambition. A war that hits all corners of the map, fought by people the camera never followed, is a genuinely good idea for a Middle-earth game. The trouble is that the idea is doing more work than the execution.
War in the North is a hack-and-slash action RPG played from a third-person perspective, and it rarely pushes past the conventions of the genre it belongs to. You fight through ruins, you collect loot, you level a character, you repeat. The Fornost sequence sets the pattern: fight to the top of the citadel, face Agandaûr, watch him leap from the roof onto a waiting Fell-beast, and then scatter.
Beleram returns to Gwaihir in the Misty Mountains. Elladan and Elrohir return to Elrond in Rivendell. The trio return to Halbarad at Sarn Ford. Halbarad tells them Aragorn left Bree with four hobbits bound for Rivendell and advises them to follow, which sends the group through the Barrow-downs.
It is a serviceable spine. It is not a memorable one. The three-character structure is the game’s best argument for itself, and it is also the thing that keeps the story thin. Three heroes means three sets of skills and one shared, functional personality.
Eradan, Farin and Andriel are defined by their weapons and their utility — a tracker, a smasher, an alchemist — more than by anything they say or want. The likenesses of film actors on invented characters only underlines the gap. You recognize the world. You do not recognize these people in it.
What the Co-op Actually Delivers
Where War in the North holds up is in the moment-to-moment fighting with other people. The class spread gives a three-player group real roles: Andriel’s spellcasting and potions, Farin’s melee and wall-breaking, Eradan’s stealth and stashes. The critical-strike system gives combat a readable rhythm, and the companion orders mean a solo player is not entirely alone. The fundamentals are competent.
Competent is the ceiling. The game does not build encounters that demand the three classes work in concert, and it does not give the parallel-war premise a payoff that matches its setup. The occasional intersections with the main narrative are the most interesting thing the game has, and they are occasional by design. The story is built to run alongside the famous one, which means it can never take the weight of it. That is a structural problem, not a polish problem, and no amount of orc-killing fixes it.
Feral Interactive and the OS X Port
The 2013 OS X port from Feral Interactive widened the platform list to include Mac, two years after the original PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows release. By then the game’s moment had passed.
Where It Sits in the Line of Tolkien Games
War in the North is the second game built on both Tolkien’s novel and Jackson’s trilogy, following The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II in 2006. That history matters, because it explains what this game is: a product of a licensing arrangement that finally let one studio use everything at once.
Snowblind used that access to make a co-op action RPG with the film’s faces and the book’s margins. It is the most interesting thing about the game, and it is not a gameplay feature.
The 6.6 of 10 reflects a game that is solid in the hand and thin in the memory. The combat works, the classes are distinct, and the co-op is genuine. The story is a side quest dressed as a campaign, and the three heroes never become more than their toolkits. For a license that allowed both the literary and film rights at once, that is a modest return. The premise — a war fought in every corner of the map — deserved a game willing to make that war matter. War in the North settles for making it playable.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
