The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest Review

Aragorn’s Quest could have been a great game but it is not. This game is a classic example of a rushed out product with minimal of quality testing which in the end makes Aragorn’s Quest a less than average game. Let’s talk about some of the brighter parts of the game. The game is based off on the three Lord of the Rings books with the player taking up the role of Aragorn. One of the shining aspects of the game is the way the story unfolds. It is told by Samwise Gamgee to his son, Frodo and his friends in a place called The Shire. As the story will progress, little Frodo Gamgee will have to learn new skills like sword play and the ability to use bow and arrows. One of the other things that I liked about the storytelling is that even if you are not a big fan of the books or are unaware of the previous stories, it does a good job of bridging all the three books. So any fresh player should just delve right in. Overall the presentation of the story is definitely the higher point of the game.

In the game it’s basically you, your followers against a bunch of bad guys.  The game takes a bit of time to really get on, trust me for the few hours I was like, “This is so bland.”, but later on the games does get intense with some party saving sequences and fight’s against huge trolls. As you give more to time to the game you will unlock new weapons and abilities. Most of the game play takes on the foot but there are a few sections where the player can ride a horse to travel more quickly across the plains. The sword play is pretty neat, it is not revolutionary but at least it gets the job done. Later on you will gain access to your bow and arrow, although the combat does get repetitive, there are enough quest to keep coming back for more.  My experience with the PlayStation Move was pretty good with this game. It’s actually one of the first games to support Sony’s motion sensing peripheral. Agreed, there are some tracking and sensing issues, but I think the team at TT Fusion has done a commendable job with Move.

If you think that sword fighting is a ton of fun, than here is some bad news for you. The game is marred by several technical issues. First of all the collision detection system is messy. During many times in my play through, I found myself getting stopped all of a sudden when there is no object in front of me. Another issue is that there is no control over the camera. I found myself getting hit by trolls but I had no idea where they were since the camera is stuck with minimum movement. The sound gets cut off all of a sudden whenever there is transition or when a particular scene ends. This makes me think that there was no proper quality testing done on the game, since these kinds of issues are rare in modern games. The visuals are outdated, especially considering the fact that we have developers doing some amazing animations with the PlayStation 3. Unfortunately the character modeling and animations are flat out bland. The environment does have a bit of comic book look which reminds me a bit of Okami. But these are rare and far between, and in all the graphics are discouraging. The voice acting is pretty good and background score keeps the story moving forward.

As I said before The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn’s Quest is a classic example of a rushed out game which could have been better if it was released 3-6 months later. But unfortunately in the end it’s a dissatisfying adventure which does not bring anything new to the already overcrowded third person genre. But yes, it does a great job of appealing its target audience and some gamers might actually get a move along with it.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.