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The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of AngmarReviewed by
Lawrence Cicchetti
The game play has the typical style of any MMORPG, in other words walk, fight, slash, special attack, loot, and turn in your quest. But as a twist you have to try and avoid certain places or monsters otherwise you get dread, which is a system that Turbine added to stray from the norm. The hope/dread system works like so: 1 hope means you have 101% total health, +1% health regeneration, and receive 99% damage, on the other hand 1 dread means 99% total health, -1% health regeneration, and receive 101% damage. As an extra bit of fun and grinding you get what’s called deeds. The deeds are like quests on a longer scale. Deeds require you to do things like discover all of the farms in the shire, or kill 50 wolves in Bree. The deeds reward you with titles. Some deeds reward you with virtues; these are like stat bonuses that you can equip at your local bard. One thing I found in this game that I don’t see too much in online games is a plot line. You, as the hero, must stop the witch king from making his assault on middle earth. If you remember the movies or read the books, then you know that the witch king is the leader of the ring wraiths. He has his arm in Angmar which is in Eriador, the country that the shire is in. You go through the different parts in the book and go through instances that play a major role in the story that all end in a cut scene. The instances are about things like the ring wraiths trying to create another war between elves and dwarves. The environment in LOTRO is huge. Rather than regions serving 10 levels at a time, they service 20 levels at a time. Of course with a level cap of 50 there aren’t too many regions, but there are updates coming out that will expand the playing area because right now the only place you can explore is Eriador, but in June there will be a patch that goes down to the sea. The level of detail put into the game is amazing; it looks like a console game put on an HDTV. But if your machine can’t handle it, you can tone it down a bit in the options menu. The game has a lot of features that are unique. For one thing you can write your own music. When you get to level 5 you can learn instrument use from your trainer and buy an instrument depending on which you can use from a bard. Another feature is traits. You get them from deeds, or class quests. The types of traits are virtues, class, race, and legendary. They cost money to equip: virtues cost 1 silver and 50 copper, class traits cost 16 silver, race traits cost 60 silver, and legendary traits cost about 115 silver to equip. The classes and races have a very small number. There are 4 races (man, elf, dwarf, and hobbit) and 7 classes (guardian, champion, captain, burglar, minstrel, hunter, lore-master), which means there are 20 combinations. The guardian is your tanking class, champion is damage per second, captain is a buffer class with a pet, burglar is an enemy debuffing class, minstrel is the healing class, hunters are used for ranged combat, and lore-masters are crowd control and have a pet.
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Developer:
Turbine
Overall the game is really easy to get into and doesn’t have an absence of tasks to be done. The storyline makes it really fun to keep playing and it helps itself along with the involvement of high profile monsters like ring wraiths and trolls. Plus you can see things that they didn’t include in the movies and see more of a book based middle earth. It’s not just a game for the fans of the movies or books, anyone would really enjoy LOTRO.
