[Review] The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (PS2)
The first proper movie adaptation... or should I say two half-movie adaptations?
I grew up with the Return of the King game on Xbox. I was always curious about its predecessor, so I’m happy I was able to catch up with it... but boy is it rough. First of all, it’s part of the odd licensing/timing situation where there’s no Fellowship movie game (although there is a Fellowship book game under a different publisher, as per my previous reviews), so almost half the levels in this game depict events from the first movie (presented within the framing device of Aragorn telling stories to Éowyn prior to the battle of Helm’s Deep). And when they get to adapting The Two Towers, the two hobbit-based plotlines are completely dropped!
I understand focusing the game on the more action-heavy thread of the film, it makes sense for a straight-up 3D brawler of this type. It also means they can focus on developing just three playable characters (Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli). But it makes it feel like a heavily-edited highlights package instead of a story, the bridging cutscenes—using footage from the films—doing little to help it feel coherent. Were they ever proud of those cutscenes, fading “seamlessly” between the FMV and the game engine’s models... it’s pretty funny seeing John Rhys-Davies’ face melt into the hideous gremlin that is the Gimli model. I’m sure it was impressive for an early PS2 game, but these graphical styles that aim for realism tend to age the worst.
So this is a beat-em-up style game, with lots of set pieces, cinematic flourishes, and a decent ranged attack. I don’t think it’s balanced too well though. Chaotic enemy spam too easily knocks you down and stunlocks you, and often your light attack is completely useless thanks to shields or enemies able to block, so you just spam strong attack most of the time. Trying to legitimately engage with the game’s mechanics is only for the superhuman, us mortals have to rely on cheesing enemy patterns and the rising attack/finisher strat. Unlike the sequel, this is also strictly a solo experience (with the occasional NPC buddy) so you have to get yourself out of every jam. And with very few checkpoints you’ll likely be playing these levels multiple times, not because you want to try another character but because you die and get sent back.
Between levels you get to unlock new attacks depending on your performance, so the strong get stronger and poor performance is punished by making subsequent stages harder. Sadly there’s no way to replay a stage with the same character if you’ve cleared it (until after you beat the game) so the whole thing is some kind of endurance run. Thankfully there is a difficulty setting and some cheats as a prop, although I was too proud to use them. I did settle on just clearing it once with the best character—Legolas of course, who has the most powerful, fast, and abundant ranged option.
As usual I liked the parts of the game that expanded on the source. You get a couple of levels in burning Rohan villages, giving you a chance to fight Uruk-hai and explode their copious bombs while rescuing civilians. Apart from that it’s just inserting a tonne more orcs to hew in the various film locations. There’s also a lot more trolls to fight than I remember from the films... I didn’t really relish seeing them though as they’re among the most tedious enemies to take down.
At least the game has authenticity going for it. Part of the package is mini-documentaries that show a bit of behind the scenes of the film while establishing the access the game had; they directly referenced miniatures in order to make the game environments match, for example. They also had the film actors reprise their roles (and conduct interviews for these extras); at least the ones that actually appear in the game. Aragorn’s voiceover narration is a bit laconic but apart from that they’re all plum professionals that deliver their new contributions well. In this sense the game feels like a competent companion to the films... pity about the rest of it.
Fans still speak fondly of A Final Unity, but mostly everyone has forgotten Deep Space Nine: Harbinger. You control an original character named Bannick, who is on a journey to meet up with a newly discovered race in the Gamma Quadrant, a region of space reached via a wormhole near the titular Deep Space Nine space station. Suddenly your vessel is attacked, causing it to crash right into Deep Space Nine. While you are safely rescued, the same droids that attacked you focus their sights on the space station. While you are able to fend off their attack, it begins a chain of events that leads to a murdered ambassador from the race you were sent to meet. Once the murder is solved, you set off to destroy the droid factory and hopefully stop any further trouble.
