It is possible to even reach situations where all of your characters are low enough on health that a singular blow may kill them, but the enemy has stolen enough health from your characters that it is as if they never received a scratch. Unfortunately, this rigged feel just keeps building and building until it reaches truly ludicrous heights. I am going to keep saying it until either I die or they listen, but between making a short game and making one that feels rigged after a mere few hours' play, making the short game is the smarter choice. This is what those of us who remember the good old days when games had only gameplay to rely upon call rigged. I realise it is hard to program a margin of human error into an artificial intelligence, but this goes way beyond unbalanced. I would be willing to bet generously that if one were to take a couple of hundred hours worth of footage of people playing this game, then edit everything out bar the missed strikes, missed strikes from the player characters would outnumber those of the CPU characters by a factor of at least ten to one. It is not until we get to Rohan, however, that the balance problem really comes out to attack. Early on in the game, it is possible to win the most difficult combats if one keeps their head on right and focuses on strategy. The biggest problem with them, in a nutshell, is balance. But the real evidence that EA Games did not do their homework lies in the battle sequences. Not only is footage from the film all they show, so little is used that one can expect to see each segment, in different edits, at least a dozen times. It would have been nice if this had meant footage that viewers of the films in any form have not seen at least three times already. More interesting to note is the promise of authentic footage from the films to pick up as a bonus during the game. Gone are all the truly interesting aspects of Tolkien's universe, only to be replaced by long, tedious strolls through very linear mazes, or equally tedious battle events, which pop up so frequently during the aforementioned walks that it is a wonder epileptics haven't shown violent reactions. By following the films too closely, it inherits all the mistakes. Therein lies the first mistake of the game. The Third Age's plot, such as it is, revolves around a party of adventurers who follow something of a similar path to the Fellowship depicted in the film trilogy. It is difficult to believe that this is the same company that produced such innovations as California Games. This is not surprising when one considers that the game was made by EA, who have long shown no interest in what happens to the player's sense of enjoyment once they have money. To its credit, the Final Fantasy-style combat structure does manage to engage the player for the first couple of realms, but it all goes downhill in a hurry after that. They killed the Command & Conquer franchise with this attitude, and it looks as if they intend to milk every last drop from The Lord Of The Rings without changing it one little bit. Unfortunately, EA Games has long had the attitude of "who cares if it is good? It has Brand X on it, it will sell!". This is especially sad, given that the game had so much potential to be more. In other words, the game is based around unbalanced play, annoying repetition, an over-reliance on the power of recognition, and little else.
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