LoTR: RotK Movie games have no business being this good!

[randycat99]

Anybody playing this game, yet? TT was a knockout, yet RotK manages to knock it even further out of the ballpark. It just defies all reason! It looks great, sounds great, and plays great- just a great epic experience, altogether! They've really outdone themselves with the texture quality here.

I think I like the music from the TT game better, but RotK is still pretty good. I hope whoever has put out these terrific games doesn't stop now that the LotR series is through. They should use this game engine on everything, I swear!...

 

[Wunderchu]

I too am pleasantly surprized at the quality of the RotK game

 

[cthellis42]

I certainly didn't expect much, but those games are fun as hell. And RotK threw it into high-gear, what with the multiplayer and online action, and the just in general looking-better-than-a-game-that-looked-great-anyway.

EA doesn't HAVE to be demon-spawn...

 

[Gollum]

Maybe I expected too much after hearing all the praise for the two games, but I found the time I spent playing ROTK co-op with a friend of mine rather ... uninspiring. It looked good, played decent and captured a fair share of the epic the feeling of the movies (although I almost had to LOL at the pathetic Eowen vs. Witchking ingame cut-scene), but beyond that it didn't really manage to draw me in. Maybe singleplayer is more fun, dunno, didn't really feel like trying yet. Certainly not as bad as most other movie licenses, but I don't quite understand all the praise it recieves either.

 

[London Geezer]

Maybe I expected too much after hearing all the praise for the two games, but I found the time I spent playing ROTK co-op with a friend of mine rather ... uninspiring. It looked good, played decent and captured a fair share of the epic the feeling of the movies (although I almost had to LOL at the pathetic Eowen vs. Witchking ingame cut-scene), but beyond that it didn't really manage to draw me in. Maybe singleplayer is more fun, dunno, didn't really feel like trying yet. Certainly not as bad as most other movie licenses, but I don't quite understand all the praise it recieves either.

Maybe because, errrmmm... look at all the other movie licences and make a comparison in the quality of the games... now THAT's why.

 

[marconelly!]

I've been playing the PS2 version lately and I'm amazed at the amount of stuff it renders without ever slowing down. The cave with the fog is just an amazing level, the enemies look so weird and sparkly, and the fog is the best I've ever seen in the game - better even than is SH2 and SH3, IMO. Effects are done so well that it really feels like playing a movie. Well, almost The only problem that I've noticed is the small amount of texture shimmer that appears on the ground textures sometimes.

 

[randycat99]

I agree about the fog. First time I saw it, I was like wtf?! This ain't no ordinary fog, either. You don't see "fog planes" being intersected as your character passes through it. It's like some kind of particle effect or volumetric fog (if I had to describe it from a laymen's point-of-view).

Yes, there is some texture shimmer on the ground, but the thing that impresses me most is the resolution of the ground textures (and everything in general). They actually look like what they are supposed to be in real life, not a stretched image zoomed in too close. Maybe the detail in these textures is being generated procedurally?

 

[Squeak]

Keep in mind that the game is very linear, and the camera is fixed.
It helps very much if you’re able to predict which textures are coming up next, and you never get close up to them either.

 

[marconelly!]

Still, it's an awesome engine. Way better looking than anything of that kind that I've seen (Chaos Legion, Dynasty Warriors 4)

 

[3dcgi]

I loved both games, but I actually liked the animations in The Two Towers a little better. Multiplayer was a definite improvement though.

 

[randycat99]

I noticed it in a few spots, but the realtime cutscenes seem to have characters with no moving mouths when they speak dialogue. Now would that have been so difficult to animate the mouth? It's not really a big deal given the caliber of the game as a whole, but it does look odd.

I can't stop gushing over the quality of this game, though! Now I know why it took this long for me to find an available copy of it for rental...