This is how you adapt a film with absolutely not enough development time while focusing on gameplay that just works. Featuring four distinct characters (I prefer Legolas and Aragorn), The Two Towers renders the two films with shocking devotion to atmosphere and a population density which seems shocking during the Helm's Deep level. It's too easy to cheese the combat, but you get what you get with some complexity and plenty of replayability. I might have to finally play The Return of the King to see if that's the improvement I hear it is.

This game has a lot of faults, mostly in it's structure. If you have never seen the movies before jumping into this game, you will have no idea what the hell is going on. By design, the entire game is just a recreation of setpieces from the movie (with some original ones to make this more of a "game"), which will mean absolutely nothing to people who have never seen these films. However, as someone who grew up with/loves these films and knows them back to front, this did not bother me personally. What DID bother me was the fact that this game only recounts the events of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli and completely excludes every other hero as a playable character, although to be fair Frodo, Sam, & Gollum's and especially Merry & Pippin's story would not translate well to a game of this kind at all except for maybe the final minutes of the film, which from what I understand are being saved for the next game. And as a diehard fan of these films, it was awesome to play as three of the most badass members of the fellowship and complete kick some Uruk-hai ass. And the upgrade system and ability to go back and replay each section as any of the three heroes is an ingenius idea, demanding replayability. Is it repetative? Yes. And the boss fight with Sharku, the Warg rider, is super annoying. But despite these criticisms, for a movie tie-in game, this is better than it has any right to be.

Don't remember much of this game. I was (and still am) a huge Lord of the Rings fan, considering the extended trilogy to be my favorite "11-12 hour movie" of all time.

And so, because of my love of all things LOTR, I took the plunge on testing out the waters on what was once considered one of the most notoriously bad genres of video games: the movie tie-in title. Surprisingly, from what I can remember, this wasn't half bad back then, but it was quickly surpassed by The Return of the King the following year.