http://images.ea.com/eagames/official/lotr_tta/screenshots/screenshots/800×600/Snapshot_11.jpg

If this game is anything like the first one, I’ll play it start to finish. I really think they made my PS2 do things (graphically) it was never meant to do. My question is when do we get to confront the freakin’ balrog?

Also, BTW, the Black Gate level is pretty hard but it’s fun. Good luck!

Well Steve, believe it ot not you’ve convinced me to give it another try.

Nice squirrel.

I thought the level design was usually pretty well laid out. Perhaps things were easier since I played most of the game with a friend, but the levels did seem to start out easy and slowly ramp up to a high difficulty. There’s also a difficulty setting which you can change, I think I usually kept it on normal; you can move it to an easier setting if you’re having problems. When you pause the game you can read a hint which is pretty helpful at telling you exactly what you need to do.

The cameras didn’t seem to be a problem for me. The cameras did a decent job, especially when you’re moving along a tight path and need to shoot arrows at someone or hit someone. Things got a little small during cooperative play when one player was on one side of the screen the other player was on the other side, so there had to be a little bit of communcation while moving around.

The cutscenes didn’t bother me, either. After you die the first time you can skip the long cutscence when restarting the level. I don’t recall any other cutscenes really annoying me.

The Oliphant level was pretty bad until I realized you had to move to certain areas to reach what you needed to kill. IIRC this was the only part where I really got stuck and frustrated.

This certainly isn’t an A+ game, but it’s rental-quality. It’s definitely worth checking out of you’re a Lord of the Rings fan.

Hey, who put that picture of a squirrel in my post!

My wife and I starting this and found it very annoying. There are so many enemies swarming you that you can’t even see your character half the time. They don’t give you the time or space to effectively use and develop your special moves so you usually resort to mad button punching. The teamwork strategy is basically “you take the potion, you’re hurt more than me”

I found the level design infuriating especially with regards to the camera angles. The worst example of this was the level where you’re supposed to kill the Oliphants using some catapults on top of a ridge. You can’t hit the Oliphants that are far away, but there’s no way down off the ridge! Then you check the internet and discover that you need to move forward where a spear with a flag in it is sticking in the ground next to the third catapult from the right and then a path down will be revealed. How about a better camera angle so I can see the path or barring that a nice fat blinking arrow pointing down?

The cutscenes though nicely presented are too long and you can’t skip some of them. So during that hard level that you keep dying on you get a full minute of down time before you can jump back in. Why not force us to watch the first time and then let us skip it?

Maybe it’s because we had just finished Baldur’s Gate:Dark Alliance which has some semblance of teamwork strategy. Maybe if we got past the first few levels the game would get better. Maybe it’s cosmically impossible for me to agree with Steve on anything, but I thought this game sucked. Any other opinion’s? Did you find the first few levels annoying, Steve?