A scene from Midway's Lord of the Rings Online.

A scene from Midway's Lord of the Rings Online.

The long-awaited long-in-the-making LOTR Online (full name: Midway's Lord of the Rings Online: The Shadows of Angmar) is finally out and the big question: can it beat out World of Warcraft?
It's easy to feel over LOTR and a bit apprehensive about an online game that could've been so easily ruined.
Expectations have been high - and the first impressions are that this does have the wow! factor. And if you have ever played WoW, you'll feel at home with only a small learning curve required.
It's a very good looking MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with the lighting, environment and detail all passing the test. In fact, stunning is the word. Water always a good one to check - is awesome with the ripples looking very authentic and shadows and lighting along with a bunch of post-processing effects are astonishing. It feels like you really are in Middle Earth even though the plot varies a great deal.
The framerate on my PC was a bit of a challenge at times but I was impressed by how well it handled with anti-aliasing (you will need this). There's the inevitable lag but that usually happens as more people join or as your PC gets clogged with more cached textures which you can set a limit to.
This is a world you will want to spend hours in and I kept coming back to it over the last few days when ever I had spare time.
You can play from four races: man, elf, dwarf and hobbit and seven different classes including champion and loremaster.
Lost in the Middle Earth world, your play varies from the ordinary tasks of life to more epic scenarios such as a potential war between the elves and dwarves. AS has been the case with other LOTR games so far, the detail is extraordinary. A sign of an exceptional game is that you actually start to care about the people and what happens to them.
This is a huge game worthy of the books and movies that inspired it.

Visually appealing and with a fresh take on the wafting daisy fields and spider hanging, it's likely to have a long life.
MadGamer gives it 9 out of 10.

By Mad Gamer | Email Mad
  1. 2
    comments
  2. Great game.
    08:28AM Tuesday, 05 Jun 2007
    I've been playing this game now since just a few days after the release and I'm very impressed with it. It does play a bit like WoW with far superior graphics.

    Advancing is much more interesting than WoW as you get new unique abilities every level instead of buying higher level abilities of stuff you already have.My only real complaint with the game actually fits Tolkiens world.so I can understand it.but I still miss it. I am primarily a guy who makes Mage cla** characters. They don't exist in LotR online. The closest thing to it is the Hunter, who is more like a Nuker Mage than like the Hunter in WoW.
  3. Jforce.
    08:28AM Tuesday, 05 Jun 2007
    The very problem with WoW and LOTRO is that both deal poorly with the "multiplayer" part of the MMOG moniker. Yes, you can team with others to attack the computer controlled characters, but neither deal well (if at all in the case of LOTRO) with PvP, players versus players.

    Banding together and building a clan/guild/team or whatever is all good and well, but if you run little risk of another group running you down and leaving you in ruins, then where's the real risk, the real thrill?

    WoW and LOTRO are multiplayer games with few risks. It's a shame, because their fantasy settings are the most popular of the different genres, and lend themselves to a serious game in numerous ways.