Overview- Critic & User
Reviews - Videos &
Screenshots
News- Codes
& FAQs - Gameplay
Controls - Similar
Games
Answers
Bundles
Critic & User Reviews
IGN Review of Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest
Lord of the Rings: Aragorn's Quest is, at least on the Wii and PlayStation 3, what you'd get if you chucked Peter Jackson's trilogy and a copy of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time into a blender. That might be a bit kind to the final product, though, because Aragorn's Quest is less about the puzzle solving and more about the swordplay and fetch questing. It is a surprise that it's actually a quality title, or rather the Wii version is – the PlayStation 3 edition is a rushed and flawed port of a game made for a significantly weaker system. Whichever version you get, the final product is a satisfying through a shortened retelling of key moments in the Lord of the Rings storyline.
If you're a fan of the books and the novels, Warner Bros. throws you a nice little bone by setting Aragorn's Quest after the end of the movie. Here, it's been years after hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee climbed that mountain and tossed the One Ring into the lava. Now, Sam's living the life in Hobbiton with his wife and kids, and with the King Elessar coming to the shire, Sam's feeling a bit nostalgic and decides to tell his children the stories of his exploits with Aragorn and the Fellowship.
If you've never followed the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Aragorn's Quest does a pretty admirable job abridging it all into a game experience that takes about as long to play as it does watching all three movies back to back. The fact that Warner Bros. brought back Sean Astin to reprise his role of Sam for extensive voice-over shows how serious the studio took this project.
Headstrong Games, the studio that worked on such Wii games as The House of the Dead: Overkill and Batallion Wars 2, uses its Wii expertise to produce an action-focused adventure game. With the exception of a few quests that require you to run from one part of the map, pick up and item, and hand deliver it to another part of the map, most of the "quests" in the game are action focused. On Wii, the controls are exclusively motion-based and require thrusts of the remote to perform slashes and stabs depending on which way the Wii remote is swung. The response is surprisingly good, and as long as you slash with a somewhat casual motion the game will immediately pick up the proper attack, even recognizing left to right or right to left with impressive accuracy.
The game does take a bit on the long side to get fun, the first couple of chapters are needlessly plotting with an uncomfortable amount of fetch quests. But the deeper you get the more intense the game becomes, and towards the second half those item fetching quests are a thing of the past. As you progress through the adventure you'll earn more attacks and abilities, even gain access to a horse to gallop along the open plains, solidifying those Ocarina of Time comparisons.
Though there are the occasional escort-style missions of keeping your party alive, most of the action is simple brawling weapon-based combat with the occasional tug on the strings of your bow and arrow. It can get a little repetitive in places but overall it's a satisfying adventure with a good variety of locations to experience. As you fight to finish the core task of each chapter, there are hidden pick-ups to hunt for and side-quests to complete. The game will tell you how much of the extra stuff you left behind after you complete a chapter, which gives you a bit of encouragement to return to those quests once you've completed the game and earned the right to revisit them.
There's even a co-op two player option where a second player can grab a controller set and join in at any time as Gandalf. Since there are item pick-ups that only he can snag, that's plenty of encouragement to get a friend to jump in. Here the camera breaks free of its over-the-shoulder tether to keep both players together in a more third-person perspective.
Aragorn's Quest uses a hybrid cartoony/realistic style that doesn't quite figure out which direction it should go – characters like Gandalf and Gimli the dwarf are exaggerated versions of their movie counterpart, but then you get Legolas, where the developers clearly celebrated its likeness rights by making him look so close to Orlando Bloom it's downright creepy. But there's no denying the quality of the engine that allows for a surprising amount of on-screen action with very little drop in performance, and this becomes evident in the final chapters that are meant to mimic the epic scale of the battles towards the end of Return of the King. The screen absolutely fills with characters, both allies and enemies, something that's not quite the normal fare for a Wii title.
The PlayStation 3 version is a direct port of the Wii version, right down to its visuals – and that's a major shortcoming. While Aragorn's Quest sits comfortably as one of the better Wii title, the upconverting of these visuals to HD standards on PS3 does not do the game any favors. In other words, what's good for Wii is, essentially, bad for PS3. These characters look lifeless and blocky in the higher definition, and what's worse is the display suffers from unacceptable screen tearing all over the place. Everything that's been complimented for on Wii should pretty much be the norm for a PS3 game, but since the PlayStation 3 edition can't pull off what the Wii's doing in high resolution without obvious setbacks…that's a problem.
But the PS3 visuals aren't the only issue. This is one of the first games to support the PlayStation Move and its navigation controller as optional input, which you would assume would make the PS3 Move edition feel as close to the Wii's remote and nunchuk as possible. But where Wii control is admirably responsive, the sword swinging on Move is surprisingly sluggish and inaccurate. There are far more misreads on this controller than on Wii, and after a few minutes of playing this way you'll probably go right back to standard Dual Shock controls which work far better. Surprisingly, the Wii version doesn't support traditional controls via the Classic Controller, so at the very least the PS3 version one-ups the SD console edition in this regard.
As a videogame experience there are very few surprises in Aragorn's Quest because it follows the movie sequences to a T. Most of the game has this "remember this from the film?" feeling to it. The developers do offer a cool addition in the form of the Hobbit shire to explore, and it is fun – and pretty clever – to play out the training levels as Sam's son as he imagines he's Aragorn wielding a wooden sword and shield.
©2010-09-20, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
If you're a fan of the books and the novels, Warner Bros. throws you a nice little bone by setting Aragorn's Quest after the end of the movie. Here, it's been years after hobbits Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee climbed that mountain and tossed the One Ring into the lava. Now, Sam's living the life in Hobbiton with his wife and kids, and with the King Elessar coming to the shire, Sam's feeling a bit nostalgic and decides to tell his children the stories of his exploits with Aragorn and the Fellowship.
If you've never followed the story of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Aragorn's Quest does a pretty admirable job abridging it all into a game experience that takes about as long to play as it does watching all three movies back to back. The fact that Warner Bros. brought back Sean Astin to reprise his role of Sam for extensive voice-over shows how serious the studio took this project.
Headstrong Games, the studio that worked on such Wii games as The House of the Dead: Overkill and Batallion Wars 2, uses its Wii expertise to produce an action-focused adventure game. With the exception of a few quests that require you to run from one part of the map, pick up and item, and hand deliver it to another part of the map, most of the "quests" in the game are action focused. On Wii, the controls are exclusively motion-based and require thrusts of the remote to perform slashes and stabs depending on which way the Wii remote is swung. The response is surprisingly good, and as long as you slash with a somewhat casual motion the game will immediately pick up the proper attack, even recognizing left to right or right to left with impressive accuracy.
The game does take a bit on the long side to get fun, the first couple of chapters are needlessly plotting with an uncomfortable amount of fetch quests. But the deeper you get the more intense the game becomes, and towards the second half those item fetching quests are a thing of the past. As you progress through the adventure you'll earn more attacks and abilities, even gain access to a horse to gallop along the open plains, solidifying those Ocarina of Time comparisons.
Though there are the occasional escort-style missions of keeping your party alive, most of the action is simple brawling weapon-based combat with the occasional tug on the strings of your bow and arrow. It can get a little repetitive in places but overall it's a satisfying adventure with a good variety of locations to experience. As you fight to finish the core task of each chapter, there are hidden pick-ups to hunt for and side-quests to complete. The game will tell you how much of the extra stuff you left behind after you complete a chapter, which gives you a bit of encouragement to return to those quests once you've completed the game and earned the right to revisit them.
There's even a co-op two player option where a second player can grab a controller set and join in at any time as Gandalf. Since there are item pick-ups that only he can snag, that's plenty of encouragement to get a friend to jump in. Here the camera breaks free of its over-the-shoulder tether to keep both players together in a more third-person perspective.
Aragorn's Quest uses a hybrid cartoony/realistic style that doesn't quite figure out which direction it should go – characters like Gandalf and Gimli the dwarf are exaggerated versions of their movie counterpart, but then you get Legolas, where the developers clearly celebrated its likeness rights by making him look so close to Orlando Bloom it's downright creepy. But there's no denying the quality of the engine that allows for a surprising amount of on-screen action with very little drop in performance, and this becomes evident in the final chapters that are meant to mimic the epic scale of the battles towards the end of Return of the King. The screen absolutely fills with characters, both allies and enemies, something that's not quite the normal fare for a Wii title.
The PlayStation 3 version is a direct port of the Wii version, right down to its visuals – and that's a major shortcoming. While Aragorn's Quest sits comfortably as one of the better Wii title, the upconverting of these visuals to HD standards on PS3 does not do the game any favors. In other words, what's good for Wii is, essentially, bad for PS3. These characters look lifeless and blocky in the higher definition, and what's worse is the display suffers from unacceptable screen tearing all over the place. Everything that's been complimented for on Wii should pretty much be the norm for a PS3 game, but since the PlayStation 3 edition can't pull off what the Wii's doing in high resolution without obvious setbacks…that's a problem.
But the PS3 visuals aren't the only issue. This is one of the first games to support the PlayStation Move and its navigation controller as optional input, which you would assume would make the PS3 Move edition feel as close to the Wii's remote and nunchuk as possible. But where Wii control is admirably responsive, the sword swinging on Move is surprisingly sluggish and inaccurate. There are far more misreads on this controller than on Wii, and after a few minutes of playing this way you'll probably go right back to standard Dual Shock controls which work far better. Surprisingly, the Wii version doesn't support traditional controls via the Classic Controller, so at the very least the PS3 version one-ups the SD console edition in this regard.
As a videogame experience there are very few surprises in Aragorn's Quest because it follows the movie sequences to a T. Most of the game has this "remember this from the film?" feeling to it. The developers do offer a cool addition in the form of the Hobbit shire to explore, and it is fun – and pretty clever – to play out the training levels as Sam's son as he imagines he's Aragorn wielding a wooden sword and shield.
©2010-09-20, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved