The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

There's a reason why this tie in to the lotr franchise is an outlier to the other two tie in the trilogy had, that's because those games were fun beat em up style games whereas this is a tedious story driven game made to be more accurate to the book this is based on.

If you thought the book was bloated with every microscopic detail you can imagine, at least it didn't bore you with events such as Frodo giving the deed to his house away or him planning bilbos birthday party among other non-events this game goes over. It takes well over an hour before our hero leaves the shire, not that the game improves as we get to experience other book accurate titbits that the film wisely glanced over such as our initial party being poisoned by mushrooms and Tom f**king Bombadil. Whereas the other games have you controlling the likes of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, here were mostly in control of Frodo and will only briefly control as Aragorn and Gandalf as the story progresses, although I tend to drop this game long before I make it to the prancing pony due to how boring the gameplay is. If you can believe it, Frodo controls the best out of the three characters, or at the very least he has the widest move set as Aragorn has stale combat sections whilst Gandalf can only do half the actions our main lead can. I guess the presentation is decent, the graphics look nice for an early Xbox game even if there's a ton of unused space in each level which was admittedly an issue with games of its time. The music is nice, although it seems to be ripped straight from the film for the most part so that was going to be hard to mess up. The voice acting is decent, bringing to life accurate dialogue from the book which is of course well written even decades after it first came out (my issues with the book mainly come from Tolkien’s refusal to get to the point of each scene even if said scenes were well written.)

I guess if you like the bloated over descriptions the book was susceptible to, you may like this game as the gameplay is beyond basic and the story is VERY faithful to its source material. Everyone else is better off skipping this for the sequels which are far more action packed.