In the several year gap between the two, nothing has changed one iota. Guiding a sluggish and ugly avatar of what we think might be Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn or several other no-marks around a battlefield laying waste to a horde of ugly-looking Orcs is again the order of the day. Rinse and repeat a few more times as the good guys, before playing the same battles as the evil forces of Sauron. This might have been mildly interesting if the two factions each had their own set of unique abilities, but sadly playing as the evildoers is a completely identical (and consistently mind-numbing) experience. The one attempt at variety is in choosing between four types of character class before trudging through the following level, but when half of them are pretty much useless your choices are severely diminished. The Archer class, seemingly a crack shot with a bow and arrow, instead finds himself equipped with arrows that have as much potential for damage as a corn-on-the-cob. Luckily, his special move consists of (wait for it) firing off multiple cobs of said corn at once. The Scout class, meanwhile, fails to convince due to the simple fact that attempting stealth when surrounded by hundreds of people wanting to plant an axe into your forehead is most likely not to yield much success. You can sneak behind people to stab them in the back, one-hit kill style…but what of his few dozen Orcs-in-arms who’ve just watched you? The Warrior and Mage class are your best bets then, their special abilities being…well, you can probably guess.

You could also have probably guessed that this was going to be a terrible game as well, given the less-than-stellar record that games based on film licences tend to have. Amazingly, EA are still surprising us, but for all of the wrong reasons. Who knew that they still had the capacity to deliver such awful, creaky, shoddily-constructed software? Once a seemingly forgotten page in EA’s coloured history, we can only hope that this disgrace to the near-legendary universe that Tolkien crafted is simply an anomaly. We’d assume that fans of Middle-Earth would be the game’s intended market, and we can offer this tip – re-read the books, re-watch the films, resume tapping your foot waiting for the silver screen rendition of The Hobbit, if needs be – just don’t buy this game.

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