About damn time - Lord of the Rings Online Game Review.

Lord Of the Rings Online - Keith's Game Review

It time for the massive LOTRO game review!! You can also read up on other smart ass game reviews with such games as World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Eve Online, and Sword of the New World. (I couldn't find all my old links hah)

Every game has its strong points, Warhammer has an awesome variety of PvP options, more than any MMO I feel. WoW has the overall user friendly game on their side – such as anyone can truly just pick the game up without ever reading anything. However Lord of the Rings Online has its own field completely dominated, content.

I was never into the hole Lord of the Rings trilogy, sure the movies were cool, but I never went “OMG I cant wait till this comes out!”, I never even read the books, tried to though. However since I started playing I come to find that LOTRO isn’t even focusing around the “rings” mainly. I found out that the developers wanted to focus more on the book. So everything you didn’t see in the movies, you’ll see in the MMO. You meet actually every character in the book, with additional stories. And I’ll say this now… I rarely will ever read a quest; it’s safe to say I will always just skip to the bottom where it gets to the point… However, I will actually read the quest in Lord of the Rings, they’re enjoyable, have character, and are original. Even the map layouts are close replicas from the book. Think about it, developers were pretty much handed pure, premade gold of an epic story. So they had more time to make one hell of a badass PvE game, from content to the detail.

So I’m a sucker for detail, and a game like this is a huge turn on. That’s right, “Bow-Chicka-Bow-WoW” kind of turn on. When I say the graphics are good, I’m talking about “holy crap, is that a shadow from a leaf I see from a mile away” kind of good. Obviously MMO detail can’t be as crazy as “Gears of War” (yet). It would bog the hell out of your internet, and computer trying to process your information with everyone else’s, so you can see it all on time. However this game made everything equally beautiful. Not like games such as Guild Wars, where they make the armor nice, and crank the shiny effect to a million on the environment settings (besides its crazy low on content). Or games like WoW where even someone with a 486 could play, (I all ready went on my WoW rant, so I’m not gonna to touch that n00b fest). Hell LOTRO even makes fishing look badass.

Player housing is another genius idea, and I give it only one more expansion after “The Witch King” until WoW takes the idea and starts player housing. So in LOTRO you basically get rare drops off animals/bosses/during events etc.. These rare items are trophies you can put in your house, or some are the animal you killed, so you get it stuffed (a wolf trophy in our friends house, Jen the Hobbit is poking it). You can even get armor to hang on the walls from bosses you’ve killed. There are even Fellowship (Guild) houses you can buy which are massive, and every race has its own house style, I believe there are 3 different size house’s and the 4^th being a guild house.

Now if you’re into roll playing, this game is easily the best to do it in. From the environment settings to the mass amount of emotes you can do for simple simple actions. Not to include the advanced music playing system withing LOTRO!! playing your favorite songs on whatever instrument in game. LOTRO-ABC.com so far I've found seem to be the best one.

I'm going to keep it simple and end it there, with the tons of pictures I've taken since in game. Were also playing with a RL friend of ours, Bill. Who also owns a lifetime account. More MMO's need to adapt the lifetime account idea. Its genious and cheap. Especially if your one of those people who have been playing WoW for almost 4 years now, and are about to hit a grand $ in total payments to Blizzard.

Cheers mates!