The Lord of the Rings: War in the North Preview and Footage
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Snowblind has access to both the Lord of the Rings movie and book properties here, and they use them well -- it's definitely a game in and of the universe that Tolkien created, but I didn't see any misuse of the most famous characters. There are orcs to fight that look very much like those in the Peter Jackson movies, and that makes some of the heaviest attacks a little more exciting, as if you're avenging for all of that trouble they caused during the trilogy.
But the best Tolkien-esque inclusion in the demo was Beleram, a giant eagle that could be called down periodically. Every once in a while the waves of enemies would contain a larger creature to take down, and with a simple keypress, we could bring down Beleram, who'd capture our foe in his talons and spectacularly rip them apart.
If there's a glaring issue with War in the North, it's probably repetition -- while there were a few different types of enemies we faced, there wasn't a lot of difference in the way we dealt with them; it was mostly slash, kills, rinse and repeat. Especially when fighting wave after wave of enemies, the encounters came across as just fighting more of the same thing rather than pacing up to a big climax.
In case you want to judge by yourself, you may want to get a better look at gameplay, and GameSpot offers a gameplay demo with Snowblind's producer Ruth Tomandl, who talks a bit about the story set-up, how they're trying to encourage players to work together, the eagle mechanic, the differences between single-player and co-op and the differences between characters among other things.
