The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is a thrilling hack-and-slash action game that lets you relive epic battles from the iconic film trilogy. Hack your way through hordes of orcs, trolls, and other foes as beloved characters like Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf. While somewhat repetitive at times, the game boasts satisfying combat, stunning visuals for its era, and authentic movie sound effects that transport you to Middle-earth. Its co-op mode adds extra replayability and makes it a blast to experience with a friend.

One of the better tie in titles ever made. You have a decent roster to pick from in the film, you have levels capturing the best moments. You have a fun hack and slash button masher style of gameplay that's flashy and cool to pull off long strings of combos. You have good variety in the levels and setpieces, with each character having unique abilities. Finally, you have a solid amount of bonus content with interviews, wave battles, etc.

I was mesmerized as a child the first time I played it. When I had my first job, this was one of the first things I bought! So it's special to me and I love it. It dosent do anything particularly great. But it is nostalgic and awesome the way it is.

Really good. I'm not a big Lord of The Rings guy, not because I don't like it, It's just I've only seen the first one. I know this is the game for the last LOTR movie, but I already knew how it ended so I didn't get spoiled by anything I didn't already know about.

I'm really glad they stuck to the movie pretty much 100%. I played a Spider-man game before this on the Gamecube that was based on the first Tobey Maguire movie, but it had a way different story from the movie which I felt hurt it, I'm glad this one stuck to what it was being made from.

Story was good since it's the same as the movie and book. Not much to say about it, if you've watched the movie or read the book, you will already know what's going.

The Gameplay was surprisingly really smooth. Combat was really nice and had a surprising amount of depth to it. There were a bunch of great characters to play as as well. I only played as the main three since most almost everyone else had to be unlocked. I don't know mutch about this games replay value, but being able to unlock characters can't hurt it.

I want to touch on the combat again. It really was great. It could feel a bit button mashy at times, but you could pull of some sick combos. Parrying was really cool since you didn't have to really do much but press X and it would make you think you were the best sword fighter ever.

The music was good, but again, It is also in the movies, so it's not like the OST is exclusive to the game or anything. Still great though.

I felt the Level design was pretty good, it felt like it was intelligently designed, I don't have many complaints about it. However some things in the levels, not the levels themselves, could be annoying. Sometimes the amount of enemies in front of you is insane, and you have to just smash the X and A button constantly making it a bit annoying. Also, these checkpoints were pretty bad, sometimes there weren't any at all. These are pretty long levels, so losing all that progress can be infuriating at times.

I gotta mention these camera angles, I'm not a fan. They set the game back a bit, and they can really hinder your experience. They don't always suck, but when they do they can mess up some stuff. I've seen worse, but that doesn't mean it's good.

Boss fights were climatic but nothing to special, pretty standard stuff. They were good, but that final Golem boss is just weird. You can't even deal damage to him, you have to get him near the edge to knock him off, and you have to do that like 5 times. It was a decent challenge though, so It was alright.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It gave me an ok but not great first impression, but the next level or two you get pretty into it. Only thing holding it back is stuff like Bad Checkpoints, Difficulty Spikes, to many damn enemies, and those damn Camera angles. But besides those things, The Music, the level design, the Characters, the World, the Story, were all great. I recommend this if you like LOTR and/or just want a fun Action game. It's also co-op so if you want to play with a friend you can do that too.

Score: 3.7/5
Letter Grade: B+