Mechanically speaking the game is a step up from Styx: Master of Shadows. There are less bugs and things are much more intuitive. The levels also feel more free to roam around, in a sense, though at the same time less memorable. Where the game really struggles, however, is the story which is a big step down from the previous installment.

There is no real sense of an overarching narrative and characters are dropped without any real warning or meaning. And the end is so sudden and anti-climactic that I was honestly thinking that I must have missed something and that there was a secred "true ending" or something. But no, the game just ends in a very unsatisfying way.

If you loved the stealth aspects of the previous game, but didn't care about the story, then this game is a strong recommendation.

In short:
Great gameplay mechanics
Weak story

I am not a fan of the Lord of the Rings in general, and even find the Peter Jackson films to be rather boring. (I know, I know. But that's a discussion for another day.) But my disinterest in the source material is not why I find this game to be mediocre at best, it's the gameplay.

The first half of the game is just fetch quest after fetch quest, mixed in with a bunch of awkward combat. You can use the ring as Frodo to evade enemies, which drains your purity that can be restored by doing quests. On paper this might sound interesting, but it's very poorly implemented and I found myself only really needing the ability once very early in the game when I got swarmed by wolves. For all other combat the good ol' "hit three times and then jump away from their predictable attack" technique works wonders.

The game does get better towards the second half of the game, but not by much. The game does introduce gameplay as Aragon (who can't jump, making him in some sense worse in combat but he's got a bow and arrow that can be used to kill enemies from a distance where their AI is not good enough for them to figure out what's happening) and Gandalf (who is overpowered as I guess he should, which makes the gameplay rather boring).

Then there are the bosses... Oh man, the bosses. They are among the worst boss fights I have seen in a game, and no boss is worse than the tree boss where you literally have to throw a stone at it for (and this is not an exaggeration) around 75 times and you do this from outside the range of the boss' attacks, making it just dull. To make things worse, the boss doesn't really give you good visual confirmation that you are actually damaging it, so unless you happen to know that you need to repeat the same throwing action many, many times in a row, you would believe that you are doing something wrong.

Being based on the first book the game also just suddenly ends in a very unsatisfactory way against a very anticlimactic fight.

The world looks like an open world at a first glance but is very linear but somehow also very disorienting. Somehow the game manages to make me get lost despite being linear. The end result is a world that both feels empty and yet confusing, which is not a good thing.

The story is not really presented well either, with a lot of scenes being very abrupt. But at least the narrator actually does a good job and is by far my favourite part of the game.

There are much better games on the Playstation 2 out there. So skip this one.